Carrie Rose runs Rise at Seven, the Search-First creative agency from the UK that’s taking over America.
Listen on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
In this episode we discuss:
- Business is just business
- Positioning for fast fashion
- Saying no to new business
- Using values in your agency
- The Rise at Seven story
- The role of data in decision making
- Strategy v tactics
- Dealing with haters
Carrie Rose
Carrie co-founded Rise at Seven in June 2019 having worked in SEO for over 10 years and won multiple awards for her creative campaigns and digital PR executions. Carrie spotted an opportunity and a gap to make creative work for search.
Not only that but Carrie vlogs her journey building a global agency in public over on YouTube.
Achievements:
- Forbes 30 Under 30 – Media & Marketing Europe
- PR Week 30 under 30
- Campaign Magazine 30 under 30
- Rising star – content marketing association Mark Hanson award – UK Social Media Awards
Carrie is a leader in the industry, regularly attending conferences and speaking internationally.
Find Carrie on LinkedIn.
Strategy Masterclass with Seth Godin
I’m doing a series of strategy masterclasses with Seth Godin in 2025. If you use code Eximo (capital E) then you’ll be able to grab a ticket for £195 instead of the full rate of £265.
You get to work with Seth, who will be joining remotely from his NYC studio, with me in the room and the team from Horrible Brands to help out with brand strategy. These events have been put together by the Event Queen Treena Clarke. Tickets available from here.
Strategy Sessions Host – Andi Jarvis
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on LinkedIn or Instagram.
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Episode Transcription
This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.
[01:00:00.550] – Andi J
Carrie Rose. What one thing do you wish you’d have known 10 years ago?
[01:00:06.460] – Andi J
A lot of it’s really personal. But the things I wish I knew, I guess, was that business is just business. And I think I went into this whole journey with friends and feeling like I was building something with friends. Then you’re realising on both sides of the coin, I guess, my side and theirs, that it is just business. And I think often I’ve taken things very personal, and I think that’s been the thing that’s held me back because I’ve taken maybe decisions personally, business impact personally, all that stuff. And I think really stripping personal and business has been the biggest challenge. So I think that’s one of the things. So I didn’t know how to be honest about that, I guess. No.
[01:00:48.030] – Andi J
It’s a hard lesson because a lot of the time, we spend so much time at work. Oh, my God. We spend, in theory, eight hours a day. When you’re building a new agency or when you’re young in an agency, you’re probably spending 10, 12, 14 hours. So your whole life is that agency.
[01:01:05.030] – Carrie R
Oh, it was my identity. Yeah. Like, Carrie Rose become Rise at Seven and Rise Seven become Carrie Rose. And that was my issue. But I guess that’s the thing I realised 18 months ago. And I was like, no, Carrie Rose is not that. So if Rise at Seven was on a bad day, Carrie Rose had a bad day. And I mean, it really impacted me. So I needed to realise who I was. Remember that fun, bubbly, a little bit cheeky, a little bit rebellious girl, super friendly with all her friends and all that stuff. Who is that separate to the business? So yeah, definitely. That’s the biggest thing.
[01:01:38.240] – Andi J
Brilliant. What a start. Thank you.
[01:01:41.350] – Andi J
Hey, up, and welcome to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. I am the host of the show, and I want to thank you for joining me listening to the strategy sessions. But you’re not here to listen to me. You’re here to listen to Carrie Rose. Carrie just started there with a really strong intro. What did she wish to have known 10 years ago? Well, that it’s just business. Really interesting take. There’s a lot happened in Rise at Seven over the last few years, which is the agency that she runs, and she talks a bit about that at the beginning, but also as the story develops as well. So it’s really interesting to hear how they’ve grown into, let’s be honest, a bit of a monster that they are now. They’ve done a lot in the UK, they’re landing in America, doing all sorts of big things and big moves. They’ve gone from not existing to turning over millions and millions in revenue. She talks about what that figure is as well during the So check it out. Have a listen. It’s a phenomenal story of what they’ve done and how they grew, some of the mistakes that they made, some of the criticism that she’s got, and also what the plans are for the future.
[01:02:43.150] – Andi J
Really enjoyed doing this. Now, what you might notice as well, especially if you’re watching the video, is there’s something a bit weird going on. I was speaking at a conference that Carrie was speaking at. With about 30 seconds prep, I decided to kidnap her into what looks like a Cold War bunker and interview her for the podcast. It wasn’t a Cold War bunker. And apologies to anyone at Ulster University who heard me referring to the room as that, but it was very much concrete, hard surfaces, bit echoing in the audio. But when Carrie is in town, you’ve just got to grab her. So I grabbed her. We did a A 45 minute podcast. I think the results are fantastic, even if the video is a little bit blue Peter and there’s a camera stuck up here and you see what we did there. Forget about that. Listen to what Carrie has to say. However, before you go, I need to tell you about another marketing legend, and that’s Andi Jar… No, that’s not me. That’s Seth Gordie. Seth, I interviewed at the big marketing meetup in Belfast last week when I’m recording this anyway. And we also announced that we’re going to do some strategy master glasses together.
[01:03:47.250] – Andi J
Andi and Seth. What this proves is that you don’t need a single hair on your head if you want to be a great marketer. Okay, maybe it doesn’t prove that. But thanks to Treena Clark, who runs the Big Marketing Meetup, there are going be four chances to work on your business strategy with Seth Godin next year, 2025 in Ireland. They’re going to be in Belfast, they’re going to be in Dublin, and they’re going to be in Derry. I’m going to be there. I’m going to be helping keep things moving. Seth is going to be on the big screen dialling in from New York where his office is, and he’s going to work with a small group of people. You can be there and work through how you develop your strategy for your business. As I said, I’m going to be there as well. I’m also going to do a presentation on strategy, which is going to be the lessons I’ve learned from hosting this podcast. And there’s also going to be Aiden and Chris from Horrible Brands there talking about brand strategy and helping you develop that as well. So if you want to come along to that, you’ll find a link in the show notes.
[01:04:41.200] – Andi J
You need to know the code eximo, E-X-I-M-O. That’s the name of my marketing strategy consultancy. And it begins with a capital E, E-X-I-M-O. It’s all in the show notes. If you put that code in, you will get your ticket cheaper. They’ll only be £195. So there’s a discount code for strategy sessions lists. There you go. Seth Godin, Andi Jarvis, Horrible Brands. What more would you want? If you got a strategy that needs developing, you’re in Ireland or you can get to Ireland, there’s boats, planes, trains to get you there, come along to that. If you got any questions, my details are below. Reach out, get in touch. Happy to talk about what the options are and hopefully see you all there. Right. Intro to carry, tick. Promotion of the Seth Godin masterclasses, tick. Time to shut up and let’s get back to talking to Carrie in the Cold War bunker in Belfast somewhere, tick.
[01:05:37.450] – Andi J
Here we go. Carrie Rose. Thank you very much for joining me on the strategy sessions. Tell me a little bit then. I’ll tell the audience a little bit about Rise at Seven, your company, and just the very brief version of events that’s taking you from not existing five or six years ago to being where you are now. Give us a three-minute history of the company.
[01:05:59.630] – Carrie R
So Rise at Seven is an agency in the marketing space, specifically around search, PR, social. We started five years ago. I founded it with a guy called Stephen Kemright. During those five years, we’ve been working with massive brands, everything from Monzo, Capital One, one of the biggest banks in the world, Klarna, Pretty Little Thing, Revolution Beauty. Essentially, we’ve scaled the business across not just UK, but Europe and the US. We are specialising at the minute Search First Creative, really. We started as an SEO agency and now Search First Creative. But really, it started because I’ve worked in agencies all my life, and I saw a massive gap between… Seo was always the person at the table that had quite a big budget with a least say. There was the geeks in a nice way. I’m one of those, the geeks in the corner that put the keywords in the content, and it didn’t really have the value that it deserved. I think brand and PR and social media and advertising, really, above the line stuff. They had more say around that table. And I think somebody needed to bridge that gap between brand and SEO.
[01:07:08.700] – Carrie R
So that’s why I write the zone with them.
[01:07:11.020] – Andi J
So in five years, in terms of… Give us a sense of scale of the company. So headcount, for example. Yeah. You went from two of you on day one.
[01:07:20.380] – Carrie R
Oh, my God. So it was crazy. So from day one, year one was actually the fastest growth. So year one, we grew to about, I think off the top of my head, About 22 staff. And bearing in mind, in year one, we expected to have about five or six staff. That’s what we forecasted. We expected to do about 300, 400, a revenue, but we actually did 1.5 mil in our year one. And just to give context, Social Chain did 1.4 million in their first year. You know how they had super fast growth? We basically was the exact same. Then we went from 22 people at 1.5 mill to 3.8. Then we went to 5.5 mill, and then we went to seven mill. We dropped back down to 5.5 last year. I went for a management buy-out, expanded the business to America. As you can imagine, it was very busy and very distracted. And then this year, we are literally about to close off at about 7.5. So I’ve basically got it back up and above. So that’s the growth, I guess, in the last five, six years.
[01:08:23.600] – Andi J
It’s an incredible journey. And I don’t want to get too much into the operations because I want to talk more about Search First Creative. But just briefly on the operations, generally speaking, you say that every time something doubles, you have to break everything and reinvent all your processes.
[01:08:37.060] – Carrie R
Oh my God, yeah.
[01:08:37.480] – Andi J
But you must have doubled every two months in the first couple of years. So how did you manage to scale new people in In new processes, delivering client work, when everything has to change every two or three months?
[01:08:50.760] – Carrie R
I don’t think that’s a bad thing, though, because I think right now, the marketing industry, especially, requires you to be nimble and you have to change. Like, literally in the last six months, the Google algorithm are updating constantly, and we have to change the way we look at SEO. I think by building a business where the culture is all about change, every three months we’re changing our people, our process, just scale it the way we was, it created such They change culture, which is allowing us to grow even more. I think that’s what’s needed right now in modern businesses. But I guess how we did it, it was chaos. I’ll admit it was busy. It was exactly what you hear about Rise of Seven. That was all true. It was the hardest of my life. And for some people, they loved it. I’ve got people that join me at day one, and they’re with me today as directors because they’ve been through that growth. Sorry. All right. I’ll fill it. I think, admittedly, some people join the journey, loving the hype, loving the fast pace, but didn’t actually know what it means to join a scaling startup.
[01:09:57.250] – Carrie R
Startup life isn’t for everybody. I look at tech startups now that are growing really, really fast, and I’m like, I know how it feels. I know what it’s like to scale at speed in that way.
[01:10:08.210] – Andi J
For me, I loved it. Everything you did was at a million miles an hour as well. So we first met in Dublin at a conference, and I always tell people, you’re the only person I’ve ever seen do a 45-minute presentation in 20 minutes. You stood up, and I’d never met you before. I was hosting it, and you just went… My name is Carrie Ross, and right at the similar… And I was just sat there in the front row going, Shit. And you just never stopped for 20 minutes.
[01:10:35.390] – Carrie R
I feel like that is me in general. It was me. And I feel as if everything had to be fast. And I think speed is an advantage in business, right? They talk about early mover advantages and things like that. I do think that’s the case with Rise. I think we were the first to do a lot of things. And that speed to market, speed to press, speed to TikTok, speed to whatever it is, I think is definitely one of our advantages and why we win. But I think speed also kills. It can kill culture. It can kill your profits. It can kill process. So I think you had to weigh up what was important at the time. And I guess one of the things someone told me once, so do you know, go agency? Yes. Yeah. So Harry and Aaron, they just sold that for, by the way, like… Stacks. Stacks of millions. And I met up with them, two young guys building this amazing business. And I said, what’s the one piece of advice you would give me? And they said, focus on sales because everything else will fall into place. Because if you have money, money buys you time.
[01:11:34.470] – Carrie R
It buys you people. It buys you process. It buys you tools and all these things. And what most businesses haven’t got is money. So just focus on sales, everything else will fall into place. So I guess the first four, three years, I guess, of rise, it was all about sales. Focus on sales because everything else will fall into place. And all of a sudden, year five, I’m growing sustainably, everything’s fall into place. So I think it was a harsh reality, but it was probably the best advice I’ve been given.
[01:11:59.570] – Andi J
We’re here today at a conference in Belfast, and part of my conference presentation was about positioning and making sure you simplify it and get that message out time and time again. I saw a quote you said years ago, just after you started, and I’m going to butcher it. I’m going to get it wrong. But you said something along the lines of, if you want to be an agency that works with HSBC, you have to dress like HSBC, go to the events that look like-Is it if you remember this? I do because it was a genius bit of position. And it was this set of, if you want to do this, you want to do this, you want to do this. And then the trade-off at the end was, we want to work with misguided. It might not be misguided, but it was a fast fashion brand. So it was just very… And in terms of how you positioned, it was just clear. We didn’t have to get into marketing fundamentals. We went, if we want to do that, we can look like that. We want to look like them and say it’s the thing.
[01:12:49.880] – Carrie R
So exactly it.
[01:12:51.720] – Andi J
How did that come about? Because there was a clarity to that. And do you still have that clarity as you’ve grown? Because that’s hard to keep.
[01:12:57.840] – Carrie R
Yeah, I’m going to tell you exactly how that came I remember the moment. I’ve just got shivers sinking about, actually, because you’re also sending me on a bit of a wavelength of you reflect. I’m like, Okay, I made some smart decisions. What were they? Essentially, I really wanted to work with misguided pretty little thing. That’s not because I was a massive fan of the brand or anything like that. It’s because I think there’s actually something special. We probably get a lot of shit for this, but there’s something special in the operations of fast fashion. They see a trend, they react to it quite fast, they can get a product out the door. I don’t agree with some of the ways of working. We don’t actually work with these brands anymore. But what I liked is how brands wanted to be faster than ever before. They wanted to keep up with the consumer, understand the market, and be at the heart of culture. I guess if I could understand how fast fashion works. I could then build fast banking. I could build fast tech. I could build fast entertainment, fast sports. I think I could turn that into any brand that I like.
[01:13:56.920] – Carrie R
I guess when I’m working with, by the way, I now work with Capital One, one of the biggest banks in the world, but it’s because they’re learning how to be faster. Because I guess right now, the biggest business problems people have, especially in marketing, is they’re not fast, they’re not nimble, they’re very stuck in their ways, they’re very old fashioned, they’re not part of culture anymore. So I guess if we can learn how these Gen Z culture-first brands do it, then I can apply that to any business. And that’s why people come to rise.
[01:14:25.130] – Andi J
And I think one of the problems I see is that people want to start doing all the segments, doing banking and this. Now, you started with, This is what we want to do. Now, you’ve grown into doing banking and all sorts of stuff, but you start in niche and built from success and money, as opposed to trying to be everything to everyone.
[01:14:42.080] – Carrie R
Because people know what’s come to rise for. They’re like, We We need an agency. It’s not because they want SEO or PR or social. The actual problem they have is we need an agency that’s going to challenge us, that’s going to improve the way we work. We need to be in culture, not trying to fucking tap into it. And we need to live and breathe our future customer and audience. Well, the brand or agency you’re going to think of is Drive At Seven. If you want to stay talking to the same audience that are probably dying with the brand, then you’re going to go to a different agency.I think it’s…I’m going to talk to me.
[01:15:15.120] – Andi J
Yeah. I’m going to talk to all people.
[01:15:17.760] – Carrie R
Boomers. One of the things I realised about, actually, I’m not going to say the name, but it was a large department store in the UK. They came to us with a really healthy budget once. I remember thinking, wow, I really would love to work with them, blah, blah. But we actually declined it and turned it down because when we actually figured out what they want, it weren’t actually what we gave. They wanted our services. We could give that service. But what we gave is speed. That feeling of you’re trending 24/7, being at the heart of people and culture and stuff like that. And I’m like, You don’t want that, then we’re not the right… We won’t do our best work. Does that make sense? Yeah.
[01:15:54.400] – Andi J
No, it’s brilliant. And I think there’s a lot of lessons here that people can unpick out of this in terms of messaging and positioning. But that’s a really crucial one at the end, saying no. Because you start to deploy time, effort, energy. And this just isn’t an agency thing, but you start throwing people money and time into a client relationship. And it goes to shit because they’re the wrong fit client. That destroys the morale of everyone on that team. It sucks in management time. It’s all the other stuff that you could be doing with your time that focuses on trying to keep that client and that budget. And saying no early, or if you have said yes, knowing to kill that relationship is so important, but also incredibly difficult because there’s a big pound sign at the beginning of it.
[01:16:36.540] – Carrie R
What could we do with that money?
[01:16:38.630] – Andi J
And money plays an alluring tune, doesn’t it? You’re like, Oh, I like the sound of that. How many zeros on that budget? Wow. But learning to say no to that is incredible, isn’t it?
[01:16:49.780] – Carrie R
It’s a superpower. I think values. Business values often people think it’s for their staff and culture written on the walls in their intro packs and things like that. But I think your values should be everything. So essentially what I’ve just told you of me being understanding fast fashion and how you apply that to digital brands in the future, I pulled it down to four values, and it was sharp as a tack. And sharp means you move at speed. Enthusiastic as hell. Enthusiasm doesn’t need to be high energy. You just need to want to constantly grow and want to learn about new cultures and what’s going on in the space. Then the third one was expert in your field. Again, you don’t need to be an expert. You have to back it with data. So everything you do is back with data. Then the fourth one is proud to be us. And that’s all about sharing what you know. So these four values is everything that I look for in my staff or in my clients. So if they aren’t sharp as a tack, if they’re not experts in their field or want to be the next expert and they’re not backing things with data, then they’re probably not for us.
[01:17:48.080] – Carrie R
So I think people underestimate the power of values. And that’s a big reason why I said no to that Department store because I knew we’re not a right fit. I think it’s just like a relationship. If you’re going to find a marriage or husband or anything like that, if it doesn’t match, it’s not going to work out. And I think people underestimate business in that way.
[01:18:04.390] – Andi J
I’m just going to have to apologise to my wife here because I might actually try and find myself a relationship like that, though. Somebody who comes and pays me hundreds of thousands. Can I have a retainer? I could do the relationship. Put me on a retainer, be great. Sorry, Kat. It’s fine. She won’t be listening. Anyway, so moving on. Talk a little bit about the ops, but I want to get deep into how you position the agency, which is Search First Creative. You’re not an SEO agency?
[01:18:31.870] – Carrie R
Yes. So funny enough, we actually launched as an SEO agency. Actually, I’m going to rewind a little bit. Okay. So we launched as an SEO agency. But everybody called us online a digital PR agency. I’m going to tell you why. So I’ve worked in SEO all my life. If you break down an SEO retainer, so when I was at Branded 3, typical retainer was about 10 to 12 grand a year, a month, something like that. And if I broke that down into services, about, I don’t know, 20% of it Actually went into technical SEO. About 30, 40% of it went into, or probably 30% when it’s content, the rest of it was links. So digital PR actually took up the most of SEO budget. And I thought, okay, in business, there’s things called land products and expand products. So what are you going to land a client with, and then how are you going to expand them? And I thought a lot of agencies try to be everything. They try to just be, oh, we do digital PR, and we do SEO, and we do content, and we do social. By the way, we’re a fully integrated agency.
[01:19:25.820] – Carrie R
They tried to do everything so much, so fast. What actually I was like, if I land them and expand them in the next three years, that’s how I’m going to scale this business. I need to be famous at one thing, and then I’ll expand the rest. So yes, we was an SEO agency, but we were famous for digital PR. It generated about three to four mil revenue, I guess, in the first two years. And then we expanded out SEO content. And then over the last probably 18 months, he’s been strategy and social. So I guess I moved away from calling ourselves an SEO agency to Search First Creative. And it’s because if you lined Rise at Seven Up with 10 other SEO agencies, we would have stood out, but we just didn’t describe ourselves. Our proposition didn’t stand out in that way. But we stood out in the way we did things, our behaviours, our opinions, our case studies, and all that stuff. I thought, we need to… Have you heard the concept of the Purple Cow in advertising? Yeah.
[01:20:21.230] – Andi J
Seth Godin, wasn’t it? Purple Cow? Previously of this parish.
[01:20:25.020] – Carrie R
Yeah. So Seth Godin, Purple Cow concept is if you drive past a a field every single day and you see cows in a field, you’re not going to pull up and stop and go, oh, look, there’s cows. But if all of a sudden you drive past that field and you see a purple cow in that field, you’re going to pull up and go, oh, my God, there’s a cow. And I guess the concept of that is being different, standing out. And I guess if you line up an SEO agency, 10 SEO agencies, and all of a sudden one of them calls themselves, no, we’re a search first creative agency. What I’ve got is their attention. So I guess if I’m one out of 10, I’ve got 10 % of their share in their brain. Whereas if I call myself a search-first creative agency and everyone else is a SEO agency, I’ve just sold 50%, because what the brain does, it bookets everybody that looks like this over here and everything that looks like this over here, and I’ve just sold 50% of their share. That was the strategy.
[01:21:15.390] – Andi J
So we’ll probably see a number of Search First or Search Second creative agencies launching soon.
[01:21:19.860] – Carrie R
Oh, it’s happened. I’ve seen people actually call themselves a Creative First Search Agency, and I was like, That’s funny.
[01:21:26.620] – Andi J
I love it.
[01:21:28.070] – Carrie R
Flattery is the most sincere. I think what you call yourself isn’t the important part, but I guess now what we’re trying to dominate is search and social. It’s like, if anyone thinks about a search and social agency, they’re going to think about Rise.
[01:21:40.640] – Andi J
So I told you this yesterday that we’re in 2024. So 10, 11 years ago, I joined an agency, the Tomorrow Lab as they were at the time. It was a search agency. And my first thing to do, Barry Adams was there. My first thing as the account manager lead on that side of things was to bring social in as a service that we did. We started a search and… Search and Social. Search and Social. It’s easy for me to say. I know, right? Search and Social.
[01:22:06.250] – Carrie R
Thank you.
[01:22:07.030] – Andi J
Agency, way before you did it. Now, I’m not going to sit here and blow a smoke at me. I was the first. We sold those services because we could deliver them. We tried and we looked to see if there was a crossover we could do between… It was Facebook, a lot of Twitter at the time. Instagram was just coming up because I’m really old. But we tried to see, could we influence social with search? Probably not because a lot of it wasn’t indexed. Occasionally, some tweets would get indexed, but not much. Could we do it the other way around? No. We just two services that we sold. That was it. And then roll forward and it was like, Search and Start. Oh, my God, it works. We were there, but we genuinely had no idea. Genuine, we had no idea. So why does Search and Social work now when it probably didn’t 10 years ago?
[01:22:50.430] – Carrie R
This is inspired by my mum. Right. My mum said something once, and I’ll tell you the story, and you’ll see where it fits. So my mum told me once, If you can’t beat them, join them. And I’ll tell you where it fits. So it was probably about two years ago, we were working with a particular client, and we were ranking position one for most of their terms. It was the highest visibility we’ve ever been. But their traffic and revenue from organic was down. I was like, Why? We’re at position one, what’s going on? So I guess there’s a couple of new features going on on Google that was probably stealing a few clicks, but we’re at the top possible position. Maybe actually the share of Google clicks has declined. So we looked into it from a search volume point of view. And long story short, we saw a 28% decline in people going to Google to search for the thing that they sold. So despite ranking the highest we’ve ever been, the demand wasn’t there.Managing decline at that stage.Yeah. And it weren’t that demand for what they sold was down, because actually the market overall demand was high.
[01:23:44.640] – Carrie R
It was just that people was going somewhere else. They was going to TikTok, YouTube, blah, blah, blah, to look and explore that topic. And I remember at the time, with people going to TikTok, I remember thinking, Oh, shit, maybe actually we need to diversify and divert our attention away from Google and go to a different channel. And I remember thinking Google was battling with YouTube and Amazon and TikTok around where people was going in terms of searching and things like that. I thought everyone thought Google was going to die. I remember your SEO dead. I remember remembering to that quote what my mum said, If you can’t beat them, join them. I thought, Google is not going to try to beat these. Google is going to join them. Google is going to start pulling that into their feed. Google is going to start creating a better answer for the user by pulling Amazon into the feed and pulling TikTok videos and YouTube into the serve because Because essentially, they’re going to try their best to keep users onto their platform. I made a statement about it about 18 months ago at Brighton SEO, and I got a bit of hate about it.
[01:24:38.700] – Carrie R
It’s a load of shit. It’s not going to happen. Google is not dead. This is not what’s going to happen. And long as for sure, it has. So I think the concept of search and social is really this… Google is not going to try to beat them. They’re just going to join them. And I think we needed to join search and search together because I think the user journey and the way people are searching and buying now is completely interchangeable.
[01:24:59.980] – Andi J
And if you think as an example of how user behaviour changes, I don’t have any inside knowledge, but I wonder if TripAdvisor is having a bit of a struggle at the minute. So TripAdvisor-Is my client. Is your client? Okay. I can tell you some information about this. Excellent. Now, hopefully, you can share some because when-Because it’s exactly it. 10, 15 years ago, you went to TripAdvisor to find the best pizza in Milan and this, that, and the other. And given my advancing years, I still go on to Google and search for things. But I’ve noticed… And I also ask people, I’ll send them, Oh, Gary, I know you’ve been to Milan I don’t think there’s, certainly, any recommendations. When I send those messages out, I get more TikToks back when I do links to Google. And it’s an age profile thing. If I ask people over 40, they send me links to the web, to websites, sometimes to Instagram. But if I ask anyone under 25 to 35, I just get TikToks back. And you’re like, oh, have they got a website? I don’t fucking know. So I wonder if TripAdvisor is seeing that in their declining search form.
[01:25:57.620] – Andi J
I always assumed they had, but I had no stats on it.
[01:26:00.960] – Carrie R
Yeah, TripAdvisor, one of the biggest, obviously, websites going. They have something called geo. And geo is things to do, Chicago, things to do, New York, things to do, London, things like that, or cafés in London, etc. So their geo terms was massively declining. They came to us because of that. What the hell is going on? Where are people going and how do we capture it? And the answer was TikTok. Youtube, actually, and Instagram do play a massive role in it, and it really depends on the intent and stuff like that. But yeah, we won them in… Did you see the campaign that we did? And we talked about last night where we stood outside Google with a big sign saying, TikTok is a search engine. And we got 5,000 comments saying, TikTok is not a search engine. A search engine is defined in this way, blah, blah, blah. We did that to create noise. We knew we was going to create debate, but that’s what I wanted to do, because I knew that there’s some people in the audience that are going to see us creating this, and they’re going to turn and come to us because they agree with what we say.
[01:26:56.920] – Carrie R
And some people are going to go the other way. And that’s okay, because what I’ve just done is done really good qualifying in and out. And I qualified TripAdvisor. Tripadvisor saw that campaign. They got in touch with me. They said, We believe what you believe in. That TikTok is a search engine. We think we’re losing to them. What the fric do we do about it? And I won them as a client. It’s one of my biggest clients. There you go. So you’ve got to qualify yourself in and out in that way.
[01:27:18.920] – Andi J
And this goes back to the messaging and back to the segmentation and targeting position and understanding who you’re for, because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with not being for a whole bunch of people. And if If those people don’t like you, that doesn’t matter. If those people don’t care what you have to say, it doesn’t matter. If they disagree with everything you got to say, it does not matter.
[01:27:37.300] – Carrie R
If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one. Yeah. A hundred %. And I think I needed to… So if you break down iconic brands. So one of the most iconic brands we know, Kim Kardashian, right? She has a hugely iconic brand. And iconic brands don’t live and survive without haters. You have to have haters. And that’s ultimately what a lot of brands You have to accept. You have to have people that go against the grain. So take KFC. Kfc, I don’t know if you see a lot of it on social media. A lot of people hated their chips. So their fries wasn’t as good as McDonald’s. They had a lot of haters. That’s why people went to McDonald’s because of their fries. But they played on it because actually, to be an iconic brand, you have to have haters. And that’s a marketing strategy in itself. But that’s how KFC is becoming. If you’re going to position yourselves as McDonald’s competitor, you have to position yourselves as McDonald’s competitor.I.
[01:28:28.690] – Andi J
Mean, Marmite even My mate really lean into that.They do. People, they love the fact that people say, It’s my mate. It works.
[01:28:36.060] – Carrie R
Massively. So I’m okay having haters. I’m okay with people not agreeing with what I agree with, but I am trying to find the people that do agree with me. And I’m lucky that My latest social media director, he quit his job and joined Minds of Heaven because he believed in what we believed in. He saw social media. I’ve worked in search all my life. He’s worked in search all his life. He also saw the power of social and search merging. People thought He was crazy, quitting his job and joining a SEO agency, a search agency. But he’s like, I believe what you believe in.
[01:29:05.910] – Andi J
So what do you do in terms of a client comes to you now and they’ve got a problem, whether it’s TripAdvisor or anybody else, and you’re search-first creative. But how do you go about tackling a problem for them? Is it really customer-first, then search-first creative? How do you go about tackling that problem? Or is it, how do we just do search and social? What’s the process when they come in and go, sales are down, carry. What are you going to do?
[01:29:33.040] – Carrie R
There’s two ways we do it. There’s usually a search demand problem. So how many people are searching for what we sell? So looking at the brand and the product search, or there’s a discovery problem. So when people are searching, so say energy drinks. If people are looking for a new energy drink, how much do we even come up as a brand? And I bet you quite not a lot. If you look at Red Bull, if you search for an energy drink, they’re not that discoverable. But when you look at branded search, a product search, massive. So usually it’s either a demand problem or discovery problem. And we work out that to start with. And then if it’s a discovery problem, which is a high % chance because people do invest in brand and demand and things like that, we look at, Okay, well, where are people going to search for your product and how much discovery do we want to try to gain? What platforms? What are the volumes? What content do we need to create? That thing. So I think although right now we call ourselves a Search First Creative Agency, we do everything creative for search.
[01:30:27.250] – Carrie R
But really, the bulk of what we do is content marketing. Yeah. Does that make sense? The bulk of it is content marketing because content marketing creates demand, and it captures it as well. It captures it.
[01:30:37.110] – Andi J
I find interesting. Obviously, if you listen to this, watching this, you didn’t see my presentation this morning, but I’ll tell you- Half of it. I loved it. I’ll tell you briefly about it. The very first thing I said is that when you’re doing strategy, the first thing you have to do is work out what problem you’re solving. Yeah. And it’s amazing because the clients don’t… They tell you the thing that’s causing them grief, but that’s not necessarily the problem you need to solve. And what you do is… So I love that. That’s what we do first. We understand what the problem is because sales are down or we’re making less from organic. That is a problem. But you’ve actually got to understand what problem it is that you need to solve. There might be six problems. Try and solve six.
[01:31:16.650] – Carrie R
You make a mess of them. There was a key part of your presentation that it’s all about who are your audience, where they spend their time. But there was one that actually I think is more important than ever is why. Why would they choose you over somebody else? I don’t necessarily think Rise the 7 answers that question. I don’t think we create brands that are like, this is why you would come to Red Bull versus Monster. That is a big brand advertising problem. So I think what we’ve done is really market ourselves off. Okay, if you want to build your why, you would go to them. But if you want to build your discovery, once you’ve known your why, you come to us.
[01:31:49.210] – Andi J
And that’s often about finding the bit that works for customers and reflect it back. But in bigger brands, that’s being done as part of a brand project and listening and listening.
[01:31:58.570] – Carrie R
I think there’s too many agencies trying to do everything. And too many agencies go into this fully integrated stuff. I remember, so I’ve just hired my head of marketing. And whilst he was on his three-month, what do you call it? When you leave. We was obviously chatting on WhatsApp a lot. And one of the questions he asked is, Cami, we’re expanding our services. Do you think that’s a problem? Do you think we’re turning into a fully integrated agency? And I said, no, because I said, we don’t do social, by the way. What? I thought we did. I thought we did do social. I went, no, we do search for social. Very specific. I said, We try to create more discovery brands on social. There’s two ways of finding brands on social. When you’re laying in bed, double chin, bit bored, and you’re watching videos, you find a viral video and you discover them. Or you’re searching because you’re searching for best cafés in Lincoln or whatever it is. So essentially, we need to be very specific. You come to us for search first social, search first PR, search first creativity. So, yeah, I think we’ve been very strict, and And I’ve been very strict, and I’ve hung my hat on that proposition, and I believe it’s one of the best things I’ve done.
[01:33:04.250] – Andi J
And keeping tight to that. It’s a different role to setting it, isn’t it? But staying in that because there’s a lot of push to add new And add new services. And add new services. And weirdly, it’s actually it’s something that bothers me a little bit is knowing when to expand and when to stay, because I know for a certain, if I’d have been consulting with Amazon in the early days, my advice would have been, Stay and be a bookstore. I’ve been the best bookstore online, and you will be known for that and nothing else. It’d have been terrible advice. But actually, when does that stop being good advice and start being bad advice? Because for Amazon, it would have been terrible advice. Look what they’ve gone on and done. But for so many companies, staying that narrow and that focused is often the best thing to do. A hundred %. So what things are you looking at? When do you think we need to stop being a bookstore and start selling everything else? Or we absolutely need? What are the questions going through your head or the metrics that are making you think, no, we’re not going to do that service.
[01:34:01.800] – Andi J
We’re going to stay away from that?
[01:34:03.250] – Carrie R
I always just go back to the demand and discovery thing. If it’s not going to create search demand or… Because we’re creating search demand. We do influencer work. We do influencers, we do billboards, we do… But it’s all back to, does it drive search demand? Our billboards has search for Parkdeen Resorts. It’s about generating search demand. It’s not just a billboard that’s trying to sell a latest deal for £80,000. It’s whatever However. So I guess it’s all about sticking to that proposition. There’s been many times where brands have come to us because they want to do a video shoot. Yeah, we do video, but we do it for discovery. We create content to be more discoverable, not because we’re a production agency. So I think, yeah, it’s so important, so, so important to stick to your guns. I actually hired, I’m going to be honest, I hired a brand girl recently. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out, and it was a mutual decision. And I think in reality, she was trying to bring something into our proposition. She liked She was like, Oh, but also we could do this. We could be an advertising agency. I said, Yeah, but then I’m not different.
[01:35:05.130] – Carrie R
Then I’m not having my purple cow.
[01:35:07.160] – Andi J
Yeah. And you’re also fighting against a very big long established, global reach. Yeah.
[01:35:13.300] – Carrie R
And anyone that’s listening to this What I’m not telling you to do is go start Search For A Scrape Agency. Don’t rebrand to that. There’s many other ways to do it. Yeah.
[01:35:21.910] – Andi J
There’s no point being a pound shop rise at seven.
[01:35:24.790] – Carrie R
Yeah. Because you will fail there. And I’ve seen many people do it. Go and find that proposition that you literally hang your hat on and that is different. Nobody else is talking in this way. And one of the things as well, especially around search, is I remember when we started, you could either fight the data battle or the creativity battle. And data is very expensive to fight, by the way. I’ve got bigger data than you. Our data is more accurate than yours. You need all these tools for data, blah, blah, blah. Whereas creativity is subjective. I was like, if there was a battle, I could fight it. It’s creativity. I went down, searched for creative agency and really fought the creative battle for that reason.
[01:36:02.790] – Andi J
I’m not against data. I love data. It’s really important. I’m guy into all the best decisions. But I think there’s a point that’s happened in the last five years where people, maybe even 10 years, where people have assumed that there’s a guaranteed success if we just had more data. It doesn’t exist. There’s an amount of data you need to be comfortable that your decision is robust. And after that, it’s just decreasing. You’re just gathering more and confusing yourself. A hundred %. Knowing where that point is is really difficult. But are we comfortable we have enough to make this decision? Yes. Well, then let’s just move on. Having more data is not better. It’s like being rich. Some people say, Oh, money brings its own problems. But there’s a point, right? If you’ve got absolutely nothing, once you get over that threshold and between that threshold, as long as you’re enough, you’re fine.
[01:36:51.260] – Carrie R
Do you know what? People say you have to be 100 % sure in order to make a decision, right? And 100 % sure is because it’s back to your data. That’s the best way to spend our money. I always be You’ve got to be 50% sure. Sometimes you got to take a risk.
[01:37:02.710] – Andi J
I’ve never been 100% sure.
[01:37:03.790] – Carrie R
No, you got to be 50%, because actually, if you’re 50%, I think too many marketers or too many business owners spend too much time figuring out why you shouldn’t do something rather than why you And for me, I’m like, well, I’ve just had enough evidence I should do this, 50%, fuck it, go for it. And half the time it work, half the time it won’t. But you’re not wasting time and energy because that’s where you spend your budget is wasting time and energy.
[01:37:28.730] – Andi J
I spent a lot of We spend a lot of time with clients trying to explain that strategy isn’t guaranteed results. We were like, we’ll come up with the right strategy, and then we’ll win. We’re like, no. Strategy means we will look at the options and we will decide which option to get behind, and we’ll execute relentlessly, and hopefully, we’ll win.
[01:37:46.350] – Carrie R
I love that word, relentlessly.
[01:37:48.060] – Andi J
Hopefully is the important one. It’s like, I can’t guarantee we’re going to win. I can guarantee we will do these things right, but I can’t guarantee we’re going to win because we could do all of this and then find that Amazon now sells the thing that we’re trying to push. And all of a sudden, they can do it cheaper and quicker, and it’s free delivery in prime. Yeah. But we didn’t factor that into our plans. So it’s not a guarantee. Strategy is not that. It’s about getting comfortable making that decision. Yeah.
[01:38:12.060] – Carrie R
One thing I love about strategy, I don’t even know where I saw this. I don’t even know where I saw this. I don’t even know if I saw it on LinkedIn or on TikTok. I remember it being a video, and someone basically said that if I was given the task to save the world, to save the world was ending, and I was given the task to save it, and no one knew why the world was ending, I would spend 90% of my time, so say if I had 24 hours, I’d spend 90% of those 24 hours finding out why the frick is the world ending, what’s going on, and then 10% actually fixing it. Because if I did it the wrong way around, 90% of my time fixing it, and then 10 % finding out what is actually going on would all be fucked. The world would end. I think the tactics become easy if you know the problem, if you know the why. I think that’s what are not enough marketers. I think that’s the biggest issue right now, by the way, in marketing. I think too many people are trying to battle the bottom line.
[01:39:02.690] – Carrie R
They’re like, Where’s my conversions? What are the tactics we’re doing to get as much sales and conversions in the door as possible? But actually, they’re not spending enough time on energy strategy.
[01:39:12.270] – Andi J
So the analogy I use is strategy is where you’re going. Tactics is how you’re going to get there. So if I say we’re going to Milan, that’s our strategy. Our tactic is how we’re going to get a taxi from here at the airport. We’ll fly from Belfast to Milan, then we’ll get the Metro into the city centre. We have a pizza in that restaurant. That’s what Then we’ve achieved our objective. If we didn’t have a strategy, we could get a taxi to the airport, jump on a flight, and we end up in Budapest. We’re going to have a lovely time in Budapest. We’re going to eat. We’re going to… So what did you do this weekend? We did the thing. But it’s not that nobody went to Milan and did the thing we needed you to do. You’ve been busy, you’ve had some success, you’ve sold some more products, not sold enough off to the right people at the right margin, which you didn’t have a strategy. But if you just have strategy, you go, We’re going to go to Milan, and then 24 hours later, we’re still sat here. Why? Because we have no tactics.
[01:40:02.960] – Andi J
So you can’t have one without the other because nothing works. You need both to get where you’re going.
[01:40:07.980] – Carrie R
I’m not massively big on history, but if you watch war films, you learn a lot about strategy there, because in order to win a war, you have to be very strategic. The tactics is the men on the front line, right? But actually, the strategy of how you’re going to win the war is the important part. And I think that’s where war films come really into play.
[01:40:25.470] – Andi J
I mean, listen, I’m going to get really boring. In fact, I’m not going to do, but most strategy came It started as a military discipline. Yeah, it’s exactly it. End of the First World War, a lot of generals and majors from the US went into industry at places like Ford, General Motors. They brought that command and control strategy, which worked really well. I call it deliberate strategy. It works really well for those massive businesses. It since evolved a little bit of more emergent strategy and that’s intuitive for smaller businesses. But yeah, it all came from there. You watch the old stuff and even back to Roman battles or whatever, all the same stuff. Brilliant. Anyway, enough history lessons. Right. I have kidnapped you into a little room, and I’ve had you here long. I’ve said half an hour, probably 45 minutes. So my last question to you or to every guest is always, what resource would you recommend to someone? Why would you point, whether it’s a book, a podcast, a video, what would you recommend people watching this, listening to this, go and have a listen to or go and have a read of?
[01:41:24.310] – Carrie R
Do you know what I would say? Everybody has their top people that they follow on Twitter, right? Yeah. Go and pull a list of who they’re following. Because people who are building big stuff, their tactic, and by the way, I’ve done this, is they don’t follow Tania from their high school or Sharon from down the road. They’ve unfollowed them, by the way. The only people they follow is people that are going to improve their life, improve their knowledge, and better their skills. So I think my best advice is don’t go follow Steven Bartler. Go and follow who Steven Bartler follows. Go have a look at what they’re saying because he’s growing for a reason because he’s surround himself with people and consuming content in his feed every single day. So that’s what I do. If you look at my… I’m trying to get my Instagram followers down in a way, but my Twitter feed is very small because I only follow people that are going to help me grow.
[01:42:16.760] – Andi J
There you go. That’s an interesting… No one’s come up with that before. You get a lot of books recommended often. Yeah, I thought I could say the same thing. Really easy way to go about it. If I were on Twitter anymore. But still. Or LinkedIn. You can do it from anywhere. I like the idea. Yeah. Very much. Carrie Rose. Thank you for your time. Thank you.