Andrew and Rob started off as two golfing buddies and aspiring entrepreneurs with a mutual love for marketing. After several rounds of golf (and drinks, I’d presume) they came up with the genius idea to join their startups to form an all-in-one digital marketing agency out of a basement. Eventually they graduated to a garage, and finally they landed in a “big boy” office in the hippie-filled city of Denver, Colorado. Inspiring, right? Today this group of beard-wearing mountain men (a few of whom are pictured below) forms that 11-man agency, Buhv Designs. They also just happen to be a WordStream customer.
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Buhv Designs offers a variety of services focusing on digital marketing offerings for small and medium-sized businesses. “Our team is focused on helping businesses own their markets through local SEO, paid search, content marketing, and clean & elegant design,” says Robert Lane, Partner and Owner of Buhv Designs. (From their website’s design, it was instantly clear that they have great taste.) “We have been adding new services like crazy over the past 18 months, and we consider ourselves an ‘end-to-end digital marketing agency.’”
This might seem like a dream come true, but it’s clear that Buhv Designs faces two major challenges. The first is being a startup with limited bandwidth and resources, and the second is being an agency in itself presents a laundry list of challenges – the main being making clients happy whilst growing the client base and offerings. Luckily, their team is diverse and extremely talented. “Our employees must all be a ‘jack of all trades,’ and be able to jump from web design and CSS to writing ad copy and implementing location extensions,” says Rob.
What’s important to a business model such as this? Time and money, duh, therefore Robert turned to WordStream to help speed up and improve their PPC efforts for their growing client base. “WordStream is one of the best decisions we’ve made in terms of time management and efficiency.”
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Without further ado, let’s dive into the four ways WordStream has improved Buhv Designs’ PPC life.
#1: WordStream’s Tools have Drastically Improved Efficiency
Efficient: achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense. (source: Google search).
Translation: getting more s%$! done faster.
If an agency isn’t efficient then forget it. They’re not going to achieve results fast enough to please their clients, and they’re not going to have time to take on new clients. Game over. Of course with 11 employees, achieving efficiency for each client can seem impossible. Luckily, Rob reported that WordStream’s set of tools has allowed their agency to drastically cut the time spent on paid search while achieving better results, aka EFFICIENCY at its finest.
“WordStream has made our team more efficient and saves us several hours per week,” says Rob. “In real world dollars, we’ve easily covered our subscription costs each month with the money we’ve saved on man hours.”
One of Buhv Designs’ favorite tools? The 20 Minute PPC work week by far. “It’s incredible,” says Rob. “Not only has it made our team more efficient, but it actually works.”
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#2: Buhv Designs’ Clients Are Achieving Real RESULTS!
This is the key right here. If agencies can’t produce results, clients will notice, churn, and the business will suffer (and likely fail). A huge part of agency life is retention. Of course, Buhv Designs doesn’t have this problem. They excel at what they do, and WordStream has only added to their reputation by improving their paid search results for clients. “Our biggest win has been for our clients doing well in PPC,” says Rob. “I cannot tell you how quickly and easily we reduced their overall spend while simultaneously increasing their quality scores. When we show that type of drastic increase in ROI, clients tend to stick around.”
Rob told the story of a construction company who was truly struggling with paid search before working with Buhv Designs and WordStream. Their campaigns were a mess, and they didn’t know how to write ads or target mobile searchers. Buhv Designs worked with them to revamp their entire strategy, and in combination with WordStream tools they were able to increase lead flow by 25% and lower cost per acquisition by almost 50%! “These types of results have become very common since starting with WordStream,” says Rob.
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#3: WordStream Has Helped Buhv Designs Acquire More Clients
As an agency if your client base isn’t growing at a reasonable rate then your company is doomed. Buhv Designs has been able to use WordStream Advisor as a tool to bring on more clients. “From a business development perspective, being able to offer WordStream’s successful and proven PPC management has turned out to be a nice lever to help finalize contracts for our services,” says Rob. “The addition of call tracking has been a HUGE win for legal clients as well.”
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#4: WordStream Provides Resources and REAL People to Help Achieve Success
Rob and his team don’t have time to mess around. Luckily, WordStream’s support team and training resources have ensured that they don’t! “The training materials within the site were so descriptive and helpful that our PPC newbies are able to jump in feet first and navigate WordStream with little to no help,” says Rob. “That said our dedicated CS rep, Rebecca Alvarez-Heck, has been phenomenal. I’ve never had to wait for help from your team. She’s always there when we’ve needed her.”
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About the Author:
Margot is a Content Marketing Specialist at WordStream with a background in PPC, SEM, content and digital marketing. Margot is passionate about writing and is also a regular contributor to socialmediatoday.com. She enjoys running and eating ice cream during her free time (not simultaneous although that would be impressive). Follow her on:
Twitter: @ChappyMargot
Google+: +Margot da Cunha
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/margotdacunha