I am launching my own marketing agency

Simone Marchili -

I have been consulting with B2B companies and startups for a few years. I love it. It has allowed me to learn stuff that I wouldn't be able to learn in a full-time job, and it has exposed me to amazing founders and operators - how they think, how they make decisions, what kind of work they value. I have enjoyed it so much that I have steadily increased my workload.

But one thing about marketing consultants has always bothered me: the hourly rate.

Freelancers and marketing agencies tend to bill by the hour. Sometimes, when the scope of work is not clear, it makes perfect sense. But after the initial trial period, the scope becomes clearer and the job-to-be-done is well defined. So why billing by the hour? Doesn't it make it unnecessarily expensive? Why do I, the client, need to worry about how many hours a specific project is taking? As a client, I only care that the job be done. I do not care about how long it takes.

This has bothered me since September 2021. I had just joined Defigo as Marketing Director and I noticed that we were paying between $8k-$12k every single month for entry-level marketing services. I am talking about some LinkedIn posts, some light design work, some help with ads and sales enablement material. Nothing fancy, nothing out of the ordinary.

Sure, they were using a junior consultant and they were making her work on all sorts of different tasks (I know...material for another story), but her price was low. And yet Defigo was bleeding money.

Why are agencies so expensive?

I have a theory. Hourly billing misaligns incentives.

It incentivizes agencies to work more on a task, not less. Completing a task is not the goal. The goal is to work on a task enough that they can capture the largest possible amount of money out of their client's marketing budget.

I was fed up. I felt we weren't getting anything done. Despite paying more than a full-time senior marketer, we were not getting any tangible results, because we were not moving the needle.

"There must be a better way"

I was obsessed with this, and I believe I have finally found the answer.

The better way is a low, flat, predictable monthly fee.

The client pays X amount of dollars per month, and the agency provides Y amount of marketing services.

This way, clients only care about the deliverables. They don't have to ask themselves "how many hours have I used this month?". The burden is on the agency to focus on the deliverables and how long it takes to get the job done.

In turn, agencies have a predictable income, and they can use it to plan the best allocation of resources ahead of time. They can plan recruiting ahead of time. They can plan strategic pivots. They can plan investments in a specific area or marketing function. Everything becomes streamlined.

So what gives?

I looked around for solutions, and I couldn't find any.

Design Joy, a design agency, was the first example I came across of an agency that found a good way to structure a monthly subscription. For a flat monthly fee, clients can submit design request (one at a time) and get them delivered after 24 hours.

That was it. No other agencies were offering a flat fee for more cohesive marketing work. At that point, I decided to build the agency I would have loved to work with.

So now I'm launching Fixmade, a marketing agency serving small but ambitious B2B companies and startups.

What services Fixmade provides

In marketing, the thing that excites me the most is at the intersection of:

  • content marketing,
  • performance marketing,
  • social media.

I talk about this stuff all the time, here on this website, on LinkedIn, and on Threads. And in my career, I have observed dozens of B2B companies struggle with at least one of them.

I have seen companies roll out super boring, copycat content made for SEO and Google rather than for their customers. I have seen B2B companies advertise on TikTok, "because that's where everyone is" (my thoughts on this are here). I have seen companies allocate most of their marketing budget to ads, thinking that they have a lead generation problem. They don't.

The problem is that only 5% of buyers are in-market for a specific solution at any given time. The other 95% is simply not ready to buy. And yet companies hammer them with ads, trying to get them to fill out their Hubspot contact form. What a waste of money.

The solution is simple: marketing teams should produce great content and distribute it online to educate their customers, so that when their customers are ready they will fill out that Hubspot contact form and talk to sales.

Companies can do this themselves, or we do it for them for less than the cost of an in-house marketer:

  • we research and produce great content;
  • we remix the content in different formats: blogs, videos, customer testimonials, webinars, interview series, infographics, etc.
  • we distribute the content, mainly on our social media. LinkedIn is usually the place to be,
  • we grow our clients' audience. We help both companies and their employees be active on LinkedIn and grow their network. We hear this all the time: founders want their team to be more active on LinkedIn, but they fail. We can help.
  • we build trust and authority online, by educating our clients' ICP and helping them succeed at their job.
  • we help our clients stay top-of-mind with a tailor-made ad strategy, so when their ICPs are ready to buy, our clients will be the obvious choice.

The solution is simple but not easy, and in fact very few B2B companies do it right.

Can companies do it themselves?

They sure can.

The companies that are willing to do it usually enjoy a higher quality pipeline, lower acquisition costs and shorter sales cycles. That's the power of educating customers.

In order to pull this off, they usually need to have a clear LinkedIn go-to-market strategy, they need to build a strong content marketing function, and they need a solid advertising layer that works to strengthen awareness and authority.

It is very doable and very effective. It just costs money. Companies need to hire marketers and need to allocate extra budget for recruiting, onboarding, benefits and payroll taxes.

We at Fixmade can do this for less than hiring an in-house marketer. And we offer no commitment and a 45-day money-back guarantee.

I say "we" because I am not alone in this. Each of these areas (content marketing, LinkedIn marketing, performance marketing) demand subject-matter experts. Fixmade is a team of proven, experienced marketers that B2B companies couldn't afford to hire in-house.

Now, they can.

I am interested. What should I do?

First of all, thank you so much for your interest. We usually hop on a call to learn more about your customers, your product and what you want to achieve.

You can head over to www.fixmade.com or you can contact me here.

If we believe we are a good fit, we can get to work within 7 days.

Learn more at www.fixmade.com.