Okay, check this out — we got a new filming setup.

Today I’m going to take you through our process from the customer’s perspective from start to finish.

I feel like there’s a lot of mystery around this in the agency space. Like: what actually happens? What do you actually need to do to not only get started, but actually get to the point where you’re getting results?

So we’re going to go through it.

First of all, it’s always going to start with a discovery call, which you can book in with myself by clicking somewhere above this video. It should say “book an appointment,” and we can get that arranged.

This is where we’ll basically go over your goals, whether we genuinely think that we can help you, what you’ve potentially tried in the past that hasn’t worked to your liking, and what you’re doing right now.

A lot of people are coming to us at the moment where they’re already advertising — maybe even they’re getting deals — but they’re not happy with the average order value that they’re achieving from that advertising.

And before speaking with us, they might feel that that is from Facebook — that the leads coming from Facebook don’t have the budget. And then after speaking with us, they realize that that is very much not the case.

That call only takes about a half hour.

From that, you’ll get a full proposal and follow-up call.

We never pressure anyone to go ahead on the first call. We want to make sure you’ve weighed up your options. In fact, we would quite like for you to speak to other people so that you can see the real unique selling points and benefits of our service as opposed to theirs — and obviously hear their benefits as well.

You’ll get that through so you can review and compare that.

Then you’re going to get invited to your WhatsApp group. This is how we do all of our client communication.

You can see that there’s absolutely loads — and that’s just one screenshot — and that was when we invited Sam, our new media buyer, who’s going to be helping Joe manage the campaigns, into the chat.

See, they’re super active, and that’s where the vast majority of our communication happens.

We use Slack as our internal communication tool, but we found that asking you guys to use another software like that — that you just have to log into to speak to us — is just pointless.

We want to make sure that there is as little friction as possible to us having a conversation and getting an update on how you’re finding the campaigns.

Maybe there’s an update within the business — we want you to be able to just fire a message through to us via WhatsApp, which we found is the easiest for most people to have that message heard.

We’ve heard of a lot of agencies that are using things like Trello boards and you have to submit a customer support ticket in order to actually feedback or ask for something to be done.

We find that although this approach is potentially relatively unscalable — because it does mean that we’re managing 30+ WhatsApp chats — what we’ve found is that people really appreciate it, and that it does mean that we’re kind of going the extra mile.

Making sure that we actually do chat, and quite often with these chats, we won’t always be speaking about the results or about the campaigns. We’ll be speaking about personal things that are happening — maybe someone’s got a kid on the way — all of that kind of stuff.

And I like to think that it’s one of the reasons we’re able to build such good relationships with our clients, because we’re just always kind of chatting.

Then you’re going to have your onboarding call with Joe and the team.

That’s everyone’s energy there having their onboarding call — all four of them there listening to what we had to say.

On that call, we’re going to re-clarify your goals and all of that kind of thing. We’re going to talk through the next steps, the timelines for the campaign, and also just start knocking off some of those setup tasks.

We used to ask people to do Facebook access and stuff as a task — which is going to be in this section where you get your little kind of task board with us, to do some of the basic things we need you to do.

But what we found is on that first onboarding call, quite often we can just knock off a lot of that access, and it’s very painless in comparison.

Once you’ve done that, you’re then going to get through your shoot brief.

So Charlotte, our performance creative specialist, is going to create this shoot brief for you.

You can see on there we’ve got the agenda for the day — timestamped to the minute — where it’s blurred, that was all the addresses and some minor details on the sites that we’re attending.

And then you’re also going to get your pre-shoot checklist.

So we’ve done 60–70 shoots at this point, and there are a number of things — again you can see are blurred out right now — that we’ve noticed you need to do or check in advance of a shoot to make sure that you just get the best out of it possible.

Really basic stuff: making sure that the vans are clean, making sure that we’ve got access to garages that we need access to for the sites — things like that that are easy to forget when there’s just a hundred things that you’re trying to consider.

After that, you’re going to be completing your filming day.

So this is New Gen on their second filming day with us.

You can see we’ve got a number of different people on camera here, number of different sites.

We typically go to six sites — I’d say that’s probably the average.

For your first shoot, we normally go to an office, then to an in-progress site so we can get lots of lovely B-roll of stuff actually happening, and then we go to as many as humanly possible completed installation sites.

So sites you’ve actually got monitoring on and can see how the system’s performing.

The most we’ve ever done is nine — which is why it’s super important that we get that agenda absolutely locked in and nailed, so that we can make sure you get the most out of the day, even factoring in travel time and stuff like that.

Then at the end, I will definitely get you to do one of these goofy poses for Solar on Steroids.

At that point it’s about waiting for your first ad to be ready for review.

Typically we’ll do one ad first and we’ll send that to you, and then you can review the style — like music choices, the caption style, the font, the branding, the logo animation — all of that kind of thing, just the look and feel, before we edit all of the other ads.

Because we want to make sure you’re super happy, and we want you to throw so many critiques and amendments to us on the style, because once we’ve nailed it, we’re going to roll it out on all the other ads.

So it makes no sense for us creating 10 ads and then you going, “Oh, well, I don’t like the way that that looks,” because then we’ve got to roll it out across all 10 ads.

So you get your first ad through.

Once you’re all happy with that — and a note on that: we use a platform that allows you to really easily leave feedback. You literally click one link and you’ll be able to add a comment onto the video there, which is super useful.

Then it’s going to be a case of launching your campaigns.

This is just a screenshot of literally within a couple days of a campaign launching — basically Steo saying he’s got an immense amount of sales experience and basically saying that we match that velocity, that speed.

And the quality has been amazing.

I think they’ve already booked like 10 surveys and they launched last week. Pretty cool.

So once you’ve launched the campaigns, it’s all about actually working the leads and starting to sell them.

But we also check in twice per week.

We check in once on a Monday and once on a Friday.

Now don’t think that means that you can’t reach us if it’s not Monday or Friday — you can message the chat whenever. We typically get back to people within like an hour, especially now we’ve got Charlotte onboard as well, who is taking up some of the roles of customer success manager, which is fantastic.

Weekends, we still respond all the time — but we have the structured check-ins every Monday and every Friday.

The Monday one is the more detailed one, which goes through a lot of the performance for the month and the week so far.

So you can see really quite a lot of detail here. This isn’t just like “how’s it going guys.”

This is talking about how the cost per lead is tracking over time, comparison versus the previous period.

For example, this client: £17 cost per lead for that week, which is pretty insane, with 14 of the leads actually coming in in one day.

And this is from an account that’s spending 2.3K a month. 14 leads in one day is pretty impressive.

So yeah, it’s about having that constant touchpoint and ensuring that you guys know we’re on top of things and know what we’re doing to either improve or sustain the results.

Then it’s your monthly, much more detailed performance review.

This is led by Joe.

This is where he has the chance to really nerd out and go really in-depth on how the ad accounts are actually looking, how they’re performing.

So this client, you can see: last 30 days, 28 cost per lead — but that had actually gone up 16% since the previous month.

Main thing for that was because we decreased the ad spend and reduced the area that they were advertising, simply because we’d already booked up their two surveyors for a full month.

So it was kind of pointless — they were kind of cherry-picking the surveys to go to.

So we reduced the area. That’s going to have a slightly negative impact on cost per lead, but when you’re already getting leads for £28 of that quality, it doesn’t really matter.

So yeah — lots of different things that you can discuss, and that’s where those more strategic conversations actually happen.

The WhatsApp is more of a check-in. This is where we actually make decisions that are pretty critical to your campaign and the actions we’re taking within it.

Then it’s about preparing for your next filming day.

We like to shoot as regularly as possible, and this ensures that you avoid creative fatigue — which is basically where your ads perform really well, but kind of tail off over time as lots of people have seen them.

So this is Chris and myself on our second shooting day for Kimble Solar — really fun day — and Chris is just amazing on camera, which always makes it super, super easy.

Main advantage: you can double down on what really worked the first time or the second time, and you can test new angles and show off new systems.

Ideally the ones that we’ve actually generated from the ads themselves.

So it’s constantly that kind of recycle approach and you’re always getting that fresh content.

So fingers crossed that little breakdown has given you a clearer insight into what would actually happen should you go ahead with us, and how we manage everything from start to finish.

Because I get on a lot of discovery calls and there’s a lot of people that are actually quite apprehensive, especially if they haven’t used an advertising agency before.

They think: “Oh, am I even going to be able to do the stuff that they expect of me?”

But really, the setup tasks here — our stuff can be done in like an hour, hour and a half. It’s actually not that much of your time either.

That’s the other concern: difficulty and time.

With us, essentially your time is going to be:

• Getting your discovery call

• Reviewing the proposal

• Having a 1-hour onboarding call (or 45 minutes)

• Doing your tasks (about an hour to an hour and a half, if that)

• Reviewing your shoot brief (we do all of that for you)

The one thing is: you will have to arrange all of the sites — so that does take a little bit of time and logistics.

Then actually spending the full day filming, doing your goofy pose, and then obviously managing the leads and doing your performance review and stuff.

But when you look at it all broken down like that, it’s actually not that much.

So even if you’re a super busy business owner that is scaling hard and fast, actively hiring and doing all this stuff — this is something that we can run pretty much for you in silo, and you won’t necessarily need to be micromanaging us or doing lots of tasks yourself in order to get this to work.

It’s actually relatively hands-off.

So yeah, if that was of interest and you want to get started, your first port of call is going to be that discovery call.

Have a look at my availability. You should be able to see a link at the top of this post — book an appointment — and we’ll get that conversation in, chat about your goals, and see if we could help you.

But hopefully that video was useful.

And let me know if you like this cool little setup. Not sure it’s as clear as just doing it with the screen broadcast, but it’s pretty cool — so I might just keep doing it anyway.

But yeah — let me know. Cool.