Digital Marketing Agencies: How To Recruit and Retain Top Performers in the Digital Marketing Industry

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m very excited to hopefully share some very helpful information with everyone.

So, I went to community college, and I wanted to transfer to a good university. Like most high school students, I don’t think I was that focused, and I basically wrote an ebook. I had transferred from community college to NYU stern, and I wrote a book about that process and ended up selling quite a few copies online, but it was because I was driving traffic to that website. That’s what got me going while I was in college. So, I actually started out a little bit early, got going with driving traffic, and realized there’s a whole industry to SEO and guest posts. I was just hooked on the idea that I could reach the entire world, and that’s really what got me started. I was doing it on the side between school and working a little bit for about a year or two. And then, by 2013, nine years ago is when I started Perfect Click. We opened our first office at the time it was in Suffolk, New York, and then we had a small office in Wickliffe Lake, where we were there for a while, and then we expanded out to Parsippany. And Parsippany has been a great move for us.

Sure. So, Parsippany is just about 25 miles outside of New York City. It has one of the largest concentrations of Fortune 500 companies in New Jersey. I highly recommend it, and I’ll actually talk about that today about why Parsippany was just so important in terms of getting here and for location.

So, I think, like any agency owner, some of the first problems you have is getting customers. I was already driving traffic to a website that I owned, and I think that’s going to do things for you. We were real in terms of an agency because we actually own websites that have hundreds of thousands of page views, and we’re really more of a media company in some sense, and then we take that, and we brought that to the private sector. So, we really have processes that nobody else has. And so I was able to learn on my own merits. So, I think that was a big difference because once we had those websites that were driving traffic, we could scale that out. But I was able to make mistakes. And I think that’s the toughest part, learning all the skills that you need to eventually bring that to market. And then, just like everybody else, you gotta make sure that you build the right relationships with the right clients and that you’re over-delivering on everything that you promised.

Yeah, that’s really tough, especially when you’re small, you don’t have a big budget. It’s really hard to convince people that this is going to be a big company one day or that what really just, you know, we’re doing more than just trying to rank and drive traffic. We’re trying to impact people’s lives. And so, I think the biggest challenge when you’re small is to find the right people at the end to have less. Because I think what happens is a lot of agencies will try to hire a lot of people quickly, and you’re not set up for all the processes and the infrastructure that’s required. And that took a long time for me to learn to bring in the right people.

So, going back a little bit. From 2013 to 2015, we did a lot of subcontracting and a lot of outsourcing, and you can go really fast that way. That’s a good way to go really fast. But you can’t control the quality nearly as much. And so you’re going to struggle if you really don’t have all those core competencies, the most important processes to your business in-house. And so what we did was we said, all right, well, we’re going to do without subcontracting and okay, outsourcing, and we’re just going to do it all in-house. And people who are doing it in the US and Canada are at a slight disadvantage because the costs are higher. But so that’s where we have to be, you know, four times as productive, four times as innovative, and we our quality just has to be top-notch because the truth is that quality is sin, and now it’s more transparent than ever.

I got to be honest, and it’s very difficult. There is no silver bullet to do it. You have to interview. You have to hire. I think I was very lucky in the beginning to find a few key people that I really worked well with.

I don’t think agencies realize that with one or two really great people that you work well with, you can grow, and you can do a lot more than you ever imagine. You see that a lot of startups have two good partners. And so we were lucky enough we had a few people, particularly one person who was with us for four years, early on from 2015- 2019. He did a great job, and we worked really well together. So, I would say in the beginning, when you’re going from one employee to five employees or a team of one as a sole entrepreneur to just 1 to 2, and then that 1 to 5 or 2 to 5, those are big jumps. So, this person is going to really impact. And when you’re a smaller company, every hire matters more.

And so when you’re finding that one person is a big deal and then when you get to like 2 to 5 like our office with five desks and then we had ten desks. It really takes time to find that one person, and you have to spend the time to find that person that’s right for you because they have to be able to complement what you’re working with. And as we go along in this and it’s the values that you start to shape. Because those people are going to determine who you need to be, which becomes your company.

So, in the beginning, you don’t know who you are. You’re one or two people. And you find different things that set you apart. I grew up in a household where my parents worked very hard. I watched them work extremely hard, and to me, that was normal. So, my standard of work ethic was just tremendous looking back now, and so I emulated that. I aligned with people who also had a very strong work ethic which I think is not speaking for everyone but has fallen and maybe a little bit out of style too.

I think that was the first big thing that I found, maybe in that first couple of years people appreciated hard work. And to me, there was nothing better than working harder with someone. When you’re working together, and you work well with somebody, I think that’s one of the best feelings you can get that people might be looking for sometimes. Many companies are delivering happiness and doing that, but where does that come from? And if we can work hard at something and achieve something and serve others, I think that’s where we started to get the beginning of what our culture was.

Yeah. Working hard, having good values, high integrity, and then constant improvement are four pillars. Then there are a lot of things that go into those. We could definitely talk about some of that. We could talk about how we could filter for some of that as well.

So, we post on most of the traditional job platforms, and we have a very good filtering process to find people that align with our core values. We’re very content first as an agency, and I believe most agencies should be content first or social or ad-driven. But if you’re going to have an organic SEO approach, I think everything starts with understanding the brand and creating really good content. So, the first thing we went out for, and I think most people are looking for, is writers. That was the first thing that made sense to me. The truth is, there are a lot of writers out there that want to write, but they may not want to write within the marketing or for somebody else. And so there are quite a few ways to filter for that. We’ll talk about that soon. The point of this is that. You want to look for writers, digital marketers, and anybody who’s in communications, public relations. You can really scale that out from just writing to there are a lot of different ways to attract people into content. And if you can filter skills of writing, you can actually teach people a lot.

The first thing we look for is content.

If you’re a small agency and you can find the right talent, it’s worth paying for. I think you should even overpay. That’s the one thing that, over the years, you can overpay. We could talk about some of the issues you can face sometimes. A lot of times, what you’ll find is the talent that is available to a smaller agency may not have the experience necessary to warrant that kind of pay grade. And so if you can have a very honest and realistic conversation about, well, this is where your experience is, these are the skills and things that we’re looking for, and we would like to train you. There’s a certain point where finances only make enough of a difference. Right. Most people are looking for belonging. They want to have a home.

And so I think if you can show that you have real relationships, that you have their interests at heart, and that you’re willing to train them and invest deeply, I think that will have a much bigger impact.

Right.

You know, the relationships I’ve built are probably the most rewarding experience. I think I’ve learned the meaning of “You’re not a true leader until you’re developing leaders.” And I think that’s really where you want to be, is where you can eventually just make sure that you have leaders on your team, and that’s really what you’re looking for. What is hard work? Hard work is just an indicator of character. It’s just a barometer of your work ethic, and it says a lot about who you are. So, if you’re working with other people, there probably have a very high level of character, but then there’s a difference too, in terms of being a leader, having somebody work with you and then training them, giving them the skills, but then also the freedom to make sure that they’re growing and helping the team.

Well, there are a lot of things that we do. There are a lot of things you can do too. I think you brought up a good point, if you can find people that are sometimes in college, you will learn more than somebody who’s already graduated and knows it all. And I’ve had a great experience with people who have kind of grown with us, and they value the training and the knowledge that we’ve shared. And you know what? If they go somewhere else, I’m happy for them because if that’s what they want, they can go ahead. But we have a process where we can pretty much teach people how to be a true professional, how to write content at a very, very high level. Giving feedback on the content is very difficult because there are so many things that can go wrong, and you can say, Oh, this is all wrong. And then that’s a very hard thing to take. So, you can improve processes with the right questions, the right leadership, and the right feedback that all come through. Now that plays into retention because that’s what will create the windmill. So, usually, retention might be a problem of your onboarding, your feedback, and what people are experiencing as they come through that process. Because that’s something that, as an agency owner, you can fix. If something is not fixed, then you have to identify these things relatively quickly. So, if somebody inherently isn’t going to work hard or comes 90 days in, learns what they’re supposed to do but will not continuously improve or challenge themselves and grow. They are not a cultural fit, and that’s a very big thing to distinguish. So, you have to be able to make that judgment call as quickly as possible because the truth is, one person in your company can change the culture, especially if you’re a team of seven. We talked about going from 1 to 2, 2 to 5, which is one of the biggest stretches to forming that culture. We’re looking for that 5 to 10 range where it’s easier to go from 5 to 10 or even 10 to 15 than it is to go from 1 to 5. It’s so much easier.

It’s much easier to go from 5 to 10 employees than 2 to 5. You have to have so many cultural processes to do that. So, we’re at a good point where we can really bring on talent if we would like to do that. But it takes work to get to that point. I think making the distinction between is this a cultural issue or is this a process, that is going to make a difference for an agency owner because you can pick what people are experiencing, but you can’t always fix the culture. Now, I could give you quite a few things that we do to reinforce our culture or to teach that.

Sure. So, just remind me, we will have to return to the retention piece of what we do on the back end. Let me give you some of the things that we do, though, for culture. One thing we do is that every morning at 9:00, we have about 20 min morning meetings, and we talk just to touch base on what’s happening. If somebody is working remotely that day or if we’re all in the office, we’ll talk and kind of just touch it. I think that’s done a big thing for our culture because, in that morning meeting, we’re setting priorities. There’s full transparency across the company, like what am I doing today? What’s Brendan doing today? What’s Alison doing today? Everybody knows what’s going on and what are the top priorities for the company. Then what else we also do is tell a story of something motivational or about our culture every morning. For example, yesterday, I was at an event for a $500 million residential client. They’re doing a huge project, and something happened at the event and so my story for the day was how I messed up, and that was just very honest. This is what I learned from failure. This is the experience I’ve gained and how we need to continuously use failure to keep improving and something like that. We do this right at the end of the meeting. We’ll do winds of one thing that, you know, really jumped out at somebody to us at the company that happened yesterday. These are the things that we want to be doing. This is the kind of culture we want to have. This is who we aspire to be. And I think in a world that maybe doesn’t think hard work is cool or doesn’t think that doing more or taking on more responsibility is a good thing, then you are missing out on the meaning.

So, the morning meetings are a big thing.

And doing the hardest thing you can find is where all the opportunities are. Everybody wants an easy post. You know, I get a lot of people who want to work for us, and they want to work on social media. You’re going to get that a lot when you’re filtering through your candidates. They just want to work on and post on social media.

But exactly, why not go for the thing that’s really difficult? I’ll give this to the agency owners out there. At some point in your growth, you will be labeled an SEO company. And the only way to break that is to offer other services. And so, to our point about taking on really difficult projects and tasks that nobody even really wants to do, I found that has unlocked great opportunities. Then you can find ways to merge that with some of the fun stuff because nobody’s going to want exactly what they do every day. You shouldn’t like it that much because it’s good at anything that’s new. But if you continue to work at really difficult things. What was really difficult for you 90 days ago was probably not so bad right now. And if you look back six months, what was difficult to you then is probably not difficult now. So yeah, going after what’s really difficult doesn’t seem like it’s a great thing, but it’s the best way to go.

I’m glad you brought that up. I think before benefits, you have to have a path for people. I think you have to let them know. You have to understand where they would like to be, and you have to understand where you would like them to be. So, this way, you might have somebody who’s really talented and is really working. You have to stay ahead of them and say, this is where I’d like to see you. This is what I’d like you to do, and that communication gets lost. I’ve been guilty of that, and what I strongly recommend to all the agencies out there is doing a monthly check-in. If you get your monthly check-in where you’re hitting on many of the goals, what’s working, what’s not working well, and what are the goals that we have? What are some of the priorities? What’s going on in the business? I’ve actually learned so much from those monthly check-ins. More than giving information, I’ve learned about what we need to do, and some of the best ideas that have made a very significant impact on our fulfillment, on our customer experience, on our content has come from those, and it’s not come from me, it’s come from our team. And as a follow-up, you don’t want to do too many one-on-one meetings lessons sometimes. But what I recommend doing is some sort of written form where you can follow up on those goals because it continues that conversation from that meeting, that monthly meeting of what you’re working on, and it helps everybody stay focused on what’s really important. So, I think that level of communication allows for a few things to happen. One, it allows you to let yourself know what’s wanted because everybody wants something different. Some people care more about benefits. Some people care more about compensation. Some people care more about responsibility and what is the work that they’re doing. You can listen to that, and you can gain a lot of feedback because I can tell you right now all this benefit works for us, but it might not work for your team. So, the process to figure that out instead. And so keeping that dialogue open lets you find out what your team needs, and also, it lets you give a path for this is what you’re doing now. I could see a few of these things you’re doing next month or the month after that. Just keep this in the back of your mind. I need help with this or that. That’s a really helpful tool that anybody can use.

Sure. I’d like to hit on a few points with this one. We’ll talk about the interview process in terms of red flags. I think that’s a good thing. I’ll give you some really good info there. Then I’d like to tell you about how do you gauge that? Do you give somebody a week to figure it out? Do you give them two weeks? Do you give them 90 days to six months? And how do you handle the firing or termination? When you’re in different situations? Because I’ve definitely been there. So, first off, during the interview process, you have to have an assessment. I think I’ve wasted hundreds of hours not having an assessment because you can interview, you can talk, and you can figure out everything. There’s a great culture fit. But when it comes to doing some work, it doesn’t happen. So, we actually do a quick 15-minute assessment just to see how somebody can connect ideas and write.

Before we even go through a screening phone call, I really recommend doing an assessment because now you know you’re at a base level of quality or grammatical understanding or skill set of where somebody is at. So, once you screened, that will save a lot of the capability issue if somebody has the required skills to do the job and so doing an assessment as that.

Yes, it does. It really does, and it’s very helpful. So, if you do an assessment, then you can do a quick call, and if you do a quick call, the questions you ask initially are very important because you can filter the culture very quickly. For example, one of the things that set us apart is we find out a lot of data, we can drive a lot of traffic, and we can grow a business that we align with, but we also work very hard. So, if somebody doesn’t work hard, they will probably self-select out. I don’t have to let them go or terminate the position. They’ll probably self-select out. So, what we would ask is just, well, what’s the hardest job you’ve done so far? What they’ve done, and what challenges are there that they’ve experienced? So, you want to ask questions that are relevant to your culture. If you’re a more data-driven agency, you might want to ask about the insights that they can pull from specific data. For us specifically, it was more about what you have worked hard at? What have you struggled with? What are the new challenges that you’ve taken, and ask about how they improved at it? Then people will tell you what they’ve worked hardest at, and it’s very interesting to hear that sometimes because there’s a pretty large range of what they view as hard work and what might be hard work for somebody else.

It’s the same thing we’ve learned with some of the feedback. You know, instead of just telling what should be done, how can we ask questions? So, people are learning that process. But we could maybe talk about that in another piece. In the interview, for self-selecting out, how do you know that you have one, whether it’s one week, two weeks or six months? I’ve been on both ends of that. I’ve given you a week or two to figure it out. I’ve given a month, I’ve given 90 days, or I’ve given longer. And what I want is for you need to have really honest conversations. And if you give somebody a really honest conversation about why something isn’t working out, you can set goals and then talk about what goals are important and why those aren’t being met. So, I don’t think there needs to be a hard stop. I’ve noticed overall. I can tell within two weeks to a month whether somebody is going to work out or not. But I’ve given people a much longer time, and to be honest with you, it depends on your position. As a smaller agency, you probably don’t have the luxury of doing that. You have to be quick.

Yeah. And that’s an interesting one, and I’ve heard that, too. To be honest with you, I’ve actually evolved from that. Because to me, we’ve had people who have worked for 3 to 6 months who maybe I knew may not work out. I think if you’re in a position as an agency where you are large enough to invest in people, there are relationships that can be built, and you can learn from everyone. What it does is it forces you to improve your process, and so the more you do that, you might find more success keeping people for longer and finding that there’s an appreciation level that can be found with that. So, I actually have pulled back from the hire slow, fire fast. I will fire when it’s an integrity issue, like with content, any kind of plagiarism or if there’s some problem with the team or integrity, for instance. But if somebody is improving and hitting their goals, and they want to be there, and there’s a culture fit, and you believe in that person, why wouldn’t you make that investment? So, I think it’s definitely worth it. If you have the means, it may not always work out for you financially, and many times, it has not worked out for us financially. But I think it’s the right thing to do, and I think if you do that, the times that it does work out, you will not only have gained a team member, a friend but somebody who is part of the family. And those are the best people who are really with you. And that’s the kind of agency I think everyone would want to have.

I’m really glad you asked that.

Going off of these check-ins. So, you have a dialog with them, of what they need and what you where you’re going as a company. And I think you hear a lot of big company executives talk about having a vision, having a big goal, which is where you’re servicing. But I think finding meaning in what you’re doing and finding challenges and staying challenged is important. The other things that we’ve done are opened up new positions and new roles to facilitate that growth and to make sure you’re not doing the same thing. Nobody wants to do that, and I personally don’t even want to do the same thing, even at a six-month set. You have some people who come out of school and expect everything to happen in a few weeks, and some people understand that things really happen on a six months to one-year basis. We have on a semiannual basis to talk about some of those things. And so, what we’ve done is we’ve increased responsibilities, but then also other opportunities to partner with the business. So, one thing we do differently is we also have a profit share. We do a profit share which goes up to 41K with 41K matched, and then an additional profit share distribution to everybody in the company based off of like their salary in hours and things like that. Having a profit share is a huge thing because I think it gives ownership, right?

Yeah, that’s good. The other thing we do is an annual bonus at the end of the year, which is just proportional to what we’re doing. That’s fine. But the other big thing that we introduced that helped us if I could tell a quick story, we worked with merchant partners or I.T. partners, and people who maybe don’t do a lot of SEO or websites or digital marketing don’t do CRM stuff as we do. So, what we do is we partner with them, and eventually, it got to the point where we even had some clients that would refer us to some real deals that we would not be able to solicit on our own. So, we basically said we’re going to open up a referral program, and what would be the best way to have a referral program? Right. If I can have a 50-50 split with you, I think that would be the best deal ever.

That would be amazing. So, you get into the profit share, and all of that, it gets messy. So, what we figured out is we would give it the 10% gross recurring, which is essentially equivalent to 30 to 50% profit off of clients that you bring in, and if it’s a website, it’s a one-time thing. But usually, the people we do websites with will actually do marketing and SEO with us. But some of the larger contracts that we brought in are recurring to you as long as you’re with the company. So, you talk about having a profit share and then having some other incentive to bring. And then we have partners, so we took that partner model, and we brought that in-house. That’s a really big thing, and we’re proud of it as well.

Yeah, it was the profit share.

We do have some bonuses and stuff like that. I would say there are a lot of things that we do just in terms of celebrating culture. I think that’s the number one thing because if you really align with that culture and you believe in who you’re working with, why would you leave? That’s why those hockey teams will invest in younger talent because when you’re with a team and you have a family, you’re not going to leave just because somebody offers you $2 more. You’re in it, and you have the responsibility, and you’re becoming a leader, or you are a leader, and there’s more that you can do. So, I think there’s a lot of opportunity that we can provide, and that fixes retention from the first hiring point to the onboarding to like somebody who’s really knocking it out of the park and is a part of the family.

Anything else?

So I guess, just the big takeaway is to make your company accessible to everyone. I think if you can brand yourself so that people know what you do, but they’re not working for you because of the big number or something that’s like just flashy, but because of the culture that you built and who you actually are, I think that’s different for everyone. I think sometimes we’re at a disadvantage in being hard-working, high-integrity, and constantly improving the company. But that’s okay because that’s who we are.

And what works for your business then just keep open lines of communication, and don’t be afraid to believe in people and have faith that you’re making that investment and even if it doesn’t always work out. Just have faith that you’re still doing the right thing.

Awesome. You can definitely follow me on Twitter at Chad Agrawal, and you guys can connect with us at Perfect Clicks on Facebook. You’re welcome to email me directly at chad@perfectclicks.com. I’m open to partnering with any agencies or anything like that.

We do all in-house, and we have websites that we own with over 6000 blog posts that drive hundreds of thousands of page views. And a lot of agencies we’ve written for Neil Patel, Jfrog, like many big-names in the industries, and if you ever need content or any services, we’re happy to partner.

Yes, of course, I’m on LinkedIn.

Awesome. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks.