Either the cobbler’s children have no shoes or their shoes look terrible.
Like uncomfortable crocs, these poor children would be better off barefoot.
That’s the classic issue with marketing agencies. They provide marketing services for their clients, but can’t get results when trying to do the same for themselves.
In a way, we become our worst client.
Why is this? Why can’t we be our own best case study? After all, agencies like Refine Labs are growing a lot and very quickly using the methods they use for their clients.
Are they just better marketers than us? What do they know that we don’t?
I’m glad you asked! Let’s dive into some of the things that differentiate Chris Walker’s Refine Labs from most agencies.
- Their Story
I talked about some of these elements in the last issue with my OMG Commerce story, but it’s a little different with Refine Labs.
Chris Walker started his agency after gaining deep experience marketing in B2B companies.
He saw what was being done by in-house teams and by agencies, but he also saw how buyers behaved as he got to be on site with many of the companies his employer targeted.
Chris would go into the break rooms while on site and he didn’t see the employees downloading white papers, reading ebooks, or watching webinars (the go-to methods for B2B marketing).
Instead, he saw them scrolling through Facebook, reading what their peers were sharing on LinkedIn, engaging on Twitter, and listening to podcasts.
After running some very unconventional (for B2B marketing) tests and seeing success, Chris came up against heavy resistance because of the low risk thresholds of most B2B leadership teams and started his own agency to align marketing with the way buyers buy.
He found some brave souls and quickly began to get astonishing results as he built communities, created ungated content, targeted business professionals with Facebook ads, and other wild methods of generating demand.
All the while, he was doing the same for his own agency.
He created an astounding amount of content, posting on LinkedIn and other platforms consistently with industry-shaking content that challenged the norm.
Every time someone had him on their podcast, he asked for a recording and posted it on his podcast as well.
He had consistent live chats with a community of B2B marketers on which he would answer questions and tackle tough topics that helped the attendees solve problems in their work.
His results speak for themselves.
Since starting in 2019, they have grown to over 100 employees and over $22.5M in revenue.
2. The Lessons
So here’s a breakdown of some of the more important elements of the Refine Labs Story.
a. Focus your marketing on one type of business and UNDERSTAND THEM
OMG Commerce narrowed their focus to eCommerce businesses running Google and Amazon ads.
Refine Labs chose B2B businesses who were tired of getting thousands of leads every month and closing 0.1%. They made a statement similar to Apple, with a “we’re the rebels” bent to his content, and he made a very clear enemy of the typical B2B marketing model.
The thing is, having experience on a B2B marketing team, Walker understood the struggles they deal with every day.
He knew the frustration of getting pressure from leadership to generate numbers that keep the shareholders happy without actually influencing revenue in any significant way.
He knew how sales was always complaining about lead quality and how focusing on quality decreased volume and got complaints of “not enough leads”.
So when he got on the social platforms his target market (B2B Marketers) were on every day to blast their common enemy, he was speaking their language and building very strong trust and emotional connections.
They knew he understood them and their problems, so they trusted him when he was telling them the answers (especially when he backed it up with case studies and success stories).
b. Align your marketing to the market’s journey and behavior, not how others tell you to market to them.
As mentioned in the story above, everyone in B2B was driving traffic to gated white paper downloads, pushing webinars, and selling ebooks. From my experience, they were also spending millions on ads to get marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for $1k+ per lead.
The whole idea was to offer information in exchange for an email address. This would prove the interest of the person and provide contact information with which the marketers could send emails and stay in front of their “warm lead”.
The problems started arising when information became commoditized and easy to find without subjecting yourself to a bunch of emails you didn’t want.
Scrolling through social media posts was often more informative than the horrible, low-quality ebooks companies were putting together (often glorified pitch-fests with no real information).
Podcasts and YouTube videos started containing veritable master classes, for free and on demand, so scheduled webinars from unknown companies had very little appeal.
Buyers in B2B companies were talking to their peers about content they learned for free and getting recommendations from colleagues. Marketers couldn’t top that level of trust…
but they could become one of the peers.
c. Spend more time with your market & actually talk to them
One of the things that set Chris Walker apart early on was his deep understanding of his target market. He cultivated this understanding by going to visit his clients and customers, observing them as they worked and socialized, and even holding in-depth interviews with them.
He later started a community for his target market centered around live calls on which he and the community would discuss modern trends in marketing. Chris, being an expert on these topics, would educate his market and facilitate the conversation.
All of this time spent with and around his target market made it easy to position himself as an expert in the field and to gain the trust of his market as he held frequent conversations with them.
See, the difference between this approach and a blog, podcast, or organic YouTube channel (all of which are good, by the way) is the word conversation.
See, conversations involve more than one person. One party speaks while the others listen.
If you educate your market, you can set yourself up as an expert and gain their trust.
If you let them educate you at the same time, you can develop a relationship with them and gain their loyalty.
d. Leverage your team’s reach, voice, & expertise
One other thing that Refine Labs did (and is still doing) well is to hire smart people and let them be smart in public.
Chris isn’t a lone wolf for Refine Labs on social media. His team members are encouraged (and probably expected) to post high-quality, informative posts on LinkedIn and to grow their personal networks.
Gary Vaynerchuk says every business should become a media business, but he built a team to create content from what he says and does. He is the face and the ultimate source of all the content, which then gets repurposed and distributed to several channels.
That’s a solid way of doing things if you’re an expert-led business.
But what if you’re an expert-led business that hires experts to help provide amazing service?
Why be one expert creating media to educate your market when you can be a whole team of experts creating media to educate your market from several different angles with different voices that resonate with people differently and showcase the brilliance of your whole team vs just one person?
Refine Labs even started another podcast, after reaching 10k+ subscribers on their first podcast, and then a third podcast. The first focuses on how B2B companies can drive revenue with great marketing. It is largely run by Chris and his expertise.
The second podcast focuses on the Refine Labs team and how they recruit and retain top-talent. A pretty smart move as a marketing tool to recruit said talent. This podcast showcases the expertise of the team, but it also serves to demonstrate the kind of people and culture Refine Labs wants to work with and to generate demand among similar talent.
The third podcast is all about interviewing great companies to learn what they’re doing right. This allows them to hold interviews with current clients (basically live case studies) and also to speak with prospects or companies their prospects respect so they can be even more deeply entrenched in their market.
Through all of this content, created by Chris and the rest of his team, they cover a ton of ground across many different channels and can educate their market about how marketing is done right and how Refine Labs is different.
This huge concerted effort positions Refine Labs a leader in B2B marketing, which serves to attract both great prospects and great talent, each of which attracts more of the other (a positive flywheel effect).
e. Differentiate yourself, educate for free, charge a lot to implement
Now for something less overwhelming. Let’s face it; the thought of building a media empire and running communities is stress-inducing.
Maybe you already post a bit on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
Something you can do immediately that will get you some quick results is to shift your perspective from attracting the market to solving their problems.
You’re in marketing, right? So the problem you solve is helping businesses make more money.
So tell your market how they can make more money!
Nobody cares what awards your agency won. Nobody cares about your leadership tips. Nobody cares about the Google Ads auction scamming except other Google Ads managers.
You want some results from your content? Give someone the exact model they need to make more money today.
Post a breakdown of the best ad you ever ran for your best client and explain the thought behind it, how you set the targeting, and anything else readers need to run it for themselves.
If you want, you can do what I did to get you to sign up for this and describe the ad and the results it got (and the niche so people know if it’s for them), then offer to send them the images, targeting breakdown, and copy if they DM you (it feeds the algorithm and increases your reach).
However, you can get tons of reach and feedback if you put it in a Google Doc with Viewer permissions for anyone with the link, then just toss the link in the post with the breakdown as the copy.
I did that with a free client onboarding process I created (support docs and all) and it crushed. It’s the first post I’ve ever made that generated unsolicited leads for me.
The caveat, though, is that you can’t just target every small business and throw out generic marketing content.
That kind of thing is so commoditized that you’ll never resonate with anyone and you’ll have trouble solving problems for anyone.
If a B2C ecommerce marketer reads Chris Walker’s content, they’ll probably walk away without much value (and probably offended, to be honest).
Even the B2B marketing leaders that hold to the usual marketing methods of their industry walk away offended and not really gaining anything.
The ones that embrace the ideas and are in a position to act on them, though, eat it up like ravenous wolves. Plus, the arguments from his controversial stance fuels the algorithm to push his reach through the roof.
So if you can find a way to stand out (niche down, take and defend a controversial stance, take a creative approach to marketing, etc), the education you provide for your market will be much more likely to resonate.
By resonate, of course, I mean they’ll actually care enough to read it and want to read more from you.
Then, when you’ve created content they want to read because it’s valuable to them and helps them solve their problems, it’s much more likely to be effective in generating leads for you.
Because if you can get them results by just sharing social posts, videos, podcasts, or emails (wink), imagine what you can do for them if you devote all the resources of you and your team to providing them with a done for you (DFY) service!
That’s another thing Refine Labs did really well.
As they gained more and more lead flow (mostly from the podcast, with other channels being supplementary), they took on the clients for whom they could most readily get big wins (see the last issue of this newsletter) and they very steadily increased their rates.
Their current monthly retainers, 4 years after starting their agency, start at $27,000/mo.
Looking at the wayback machine, they were starting at $12k/mo in October of 2020 and had already increased their starting rate to $15k/mo by January of 2021. By April 2021, they were at $18k/mo and May of 2021 saw the leap to $25k/mo.
In May of 2022, they had actually increased to $31.5k/mo as their starting point, but increasing their team and their capacity may have led to an expansion of the prospects they were willing to take on (hence the dip to $27k/mo as the starting point).
They also currently have some coaching and consulting offers that bring in $18k-$60k/yr, which is comparable to what many PPC agencies get from their clients, but these are the “you’re not big enough to work with us, so here’s a roadmap to get you there” clients.
So the benefits of standing out and marketing themselves well are clear.
Gloves Off
Last week I said I wasn’t going to pull any punches today. I finished writing this entire issue and realized that I never actually had a “gloves off” moment.
So here it is:
We just talked about what works and why, but didn’t spend much time talking about what doesn’t work and why.
If you’re the typical marketing agency owner, the reason you’re struggling to grow your agency is that you don’t understand marketing.
You might understand how to drive traffic with a platform like Google Ads or Meta, but the reason you can get results for your clients isn’t that you’re a great marketer.
It’s that they have a good offer that the market wants and you can get that offer in front of more people than they can on their own.
That’s not to say what you do doesn’t take skill and that you’re not better at it than 95-99% of the world.
It’s just that anyone can drive traffic to something people want and make money selling it. That’s kind of the point of last week’s issue.
The way to win with a marketing agency is to find companies that have great offers/products/services and help them share it with more people.
So if you can’t market your agency well, you have at least one of these two problems:
- What you’re offering isn’t what your market wants or needs
- You’re no different than a freelancer on Fiverr
So if you want to grow your agency, you’ve got to solve both of these problems.
You can solve the first by recognizing that, unless you craft offers (this can include lead magnets that start a relationship with the target market to build enough trust to sell the core offer) or have control over the market being served by your clients, your job is to drive traffic.
You then need to identify a niche (that has a great offer) that you understand well enough to drive really good traffic with really resonant copy and creative.
If you create the websites, landing pages, or funnels too, all the better. Then you’d be in charge of traffic AND messaging. That’s two pieces of the conversion puzzle and much more valuable.
People who have businesses with great offers don’t want and need traffic. Getting traffic is easy. They want and need someone to get them more revenue faster than they could do it themselves.
If you understand that having a great offer then getting and educating a bunch of attention is what generates more revenue faster, then you can sell them on the outcomes they want instead of pitching them ad management.
The second issue, being no different than a Fiverr freelancer, is solved by selling outcomes instead of services, but it’s also solved by building relationships with your market and becoming known, liked, and trusted in association to a specific problem and that problem’s solution (i.e. building a brand).
These are the things Refine Labs are doing that you’re not (or maybe you are, so props, keep it up).
Summary
It seems that the whole “focus, understand, align, converse, expand & leverage, differentiate, educate, & charge a lot” model is pretty solid.
It also helps to be serving a market that has a lot of money by helping them make even more. That’s a big part I didn’t talk about in my breakdown. If you’re serving startups or college students or something, don’t expect to replicate Chris Walker’s numbers.
At the end of the day, though, if you want to market your own agency, a simplified starting point would be the following:
1. Pick a specific niche with a specific problem
2. Create content that tells them how to solve that problem
3. Share that content with as much of your niche as you can reach
4. Offer to implement the solution faster and/or better than they could do it themselves
As I’ve said in my LinkedIn posts recently: there is no secret sauce that separates the successful marketers from the ones that struggle.
The difference can be boiled down to the amount of attention they can gain and the level of trust they develop with that attention in relation to solving a specific problem.
As long as you also make it widely known that you can solve said problem faster and better in exchange for money, the trust you’ve gained will bring you very warm leads.
Next week is going to focus on a topic we briefly discussed in today’s edition: Hiring Great Help. A ton of agencies complain to me about not being able to find good help, but then I can turn around and get them a great fit in the first week. We’re gonna find out what they’re all doing wrong.
If you know of someone who may benefit from this newsletter, please don’t hesitate to send them to https://kinglyconsulting.com/newsletter so they can start receiving them.
Also, you can now catch up on past issues you may have missed by visiting https://kinglyconsulting.com/archive/
All the best,
-Ryan Baker
Founder, Kingly Consulting