Marcus Richards
Snowball Creations is a paid ads agency specialising in working with both B2B and B2C sustainable, ethical, and purpose-driven brands.
Snowballing sales for brands making the world better!
Tell us about yourself?
After a degree in marketing I moved into old school media sales for companies like Wowcher and Travelzoo. I then wanted a bigger challenge so started eco companion, and eco tour operator which grew to a team of over 10 and for which I raised investment.
I then started helping others with marketing alongside the tourism business. This turned out to be my true passion/talent and it’s now my sole focus with my agency I co founded with Oliver Farmiloe, Snowball Creations.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Niche down! For the first few years we tried to do it all…Content marketing, email marketing, paid ads, automated messaging for lead generation, the list goes on!
But as a relatively small team, we spread ourselves too thin and ultimately the quality of our work could of been better had we niched down sooner.
Over the last 2 years we’ve narrowed down to only managing paid ads, as we felt not only was that what we are best at, but it’s also the method that was moving the needle and delivering a return for our clients.
What problem does your business solve?
In short, we help companies grow their sales conversions or get new leads! We help brand’s build a reliable and scalable revenue generating machine with paid ads through Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook and Instagram.
Often business owners will come to us wanting to scale. They want to grow their business and revenue, and they recognise that paid advertising is one the the best ways to do that!
They might have been burned by a bad agency in the past that over promised and under delivered, or maybe they’ve tried running paid advertising before themselves with little traction. Either way, they’ve wasted money and not seen results.
We want to be a different kind of agency, that is completely transparent about the unpredictable nature of PPC, and the varying results between different industries, websites, products etc.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
When we started the agency, we had a lot of discussions about the kind of agency we DIDN’T want to be, and also the kind of businesses we wanted to help grow.
We didn’t want to be yet another marketing agency that talks a big talk but doesn’t care about their clients and doesn’t deliver results.
We didn’t want to work with any business that came to us. From the start, we wanted to work exclusively with positive impact businesses making the world better.
We set up the agency to use our digital marketing skills to scale the positive impact of the businesses we help.
What is your magic sauce?
One obvious thing that sets us appart from other marketing agencies is that we specialise in positive impact, ethical businesses. It’s our passion and knowledge in those areas that really helps us nail the ad copy and creatives in order to deliver a strong return on investment for our clients.
We know how to balance the selfish Vs the selfless in the marketing messaging for our clients. By this I mean balancing the message of why a customer might buy your product/service (the selfish benefits to them e.g. it’s cheaper, it lasts longer), and the selfless reason they are different (For example you’re more sustainable than your competitors).
One other thing that set’s us appart is our use of external consultants for each of our channels. So we have an outside consultant who’s an expert in Google ads, another for facebook, and another for LinkedIn.
This mean’s we have an impartial non-biased party who can second guess all of our strategy decisions for clients.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Over the next 5 years I want to scale the agency up to be a high 7 figure business.
Scale more and more positive impact brands to increase the impact they create.
I want our team to learn how to effectively run paid ads on newer channels that are coming into maturity like TikTok, Pinterest etc.
We want to continue to help our clients grow!
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
We started as an instagram growth agency, focused on helping people grow followers quickly through an automation tool we developed ourselves. After a few months of continuous sales and growth, literally overnight instagram released an update making our work impossible.
We had to adapt into a completely different business, more of a traditional agency model, and learn a completely new set of digital marketing skills to deliver.
It taught us to be far less dependant on big outside tech for our income, and to diversify!
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
If you’re an ambitious business, young or established, and you want to scale your sales, drop me an email at [email protected] and let’s have a chat abut what we can do for you!
