[Video] A Day in the Life - Inbound Consultant Rob Samuels

In this video, Spencer sits down with one of our consultants Rob Samuels. Rob talks about his day-to-day role as a consultant, as well as common challenges he and his clients encounter, and his top B2B inbound marketing tips. 

If you'd like to know more about the roles within an inbound marketing agency, you can find it in our blog - Your Guide to Choosing an Inbound Marketing Agency.

See our transcription of the full video below:

Rob:

I'm Rob Samuels - I'm an inbound consultant at Axon Garside. My role here is, I'm essentially the focal point of the clients that I manage. So my role is to come up with a strategy. I'll try and understand what the business is trying to achieve, and then come up with a series of goals at our end. My role really is to see that through - to manage the team to deliver those results.  

Spencer:

So what does a typical day look like for you, then? When you start at 9am, what happens?

Rob:

Well, a typical day for me is pretty varied here, which one of the reasons why I really love this job - it differs so much. One day it can be really heavy data analysis. So I could be spending all day really digging deep into HubSpot, getting under the bonnet, really trying to understand the data and what it's telling me about how the websites or the marketing strategies that I've put into place are working.

Other days I'm sitting down with some of the guys here, and we're working out how to implement a certain thing to try and get the result we need. So sometimes I can be sitting down with our PPC expert, for example, and try to really understand what's going on with the PPC strategy.

We're coming up with a new approach for one of our clients at the moment, for example, using YouTube, which I've never done before - so that's new for me. Then later, I could be sitting down with our videographer to go through video. I could be sitting down with our graphic designer to go through that, and the same with SEO and conversion.

There's so many different elements in this job, it's all about bringing that together and trying to make it work as one cohesive unit to achieve our overall goal.

Spencer:

So you like the novelty of the job. In a way, I guess every day can be different?

Rob:

Yeah, I really do. I've always been one of those people that gets bored easily. I like the fact that there's variety - that's really important to me.

Spencer:

You touched on the kind of technology that you use, but what sort of technology do you use to get results for your clients?

Rob:

Obviously, we're a HubSpot Diamond Partner, so HubSpot is at the centre of everything we do in terms of technology. But we have a wide range of tools that we use as well.

In terms of tools that we use on an everyday basis, we use tools like Ahrefs to understand our SEO, as well as the Google suite of products, which are really useful to us, for anything from PPC management to actually sitting front of a Google Doc or Slide.

Spencer:

If you could have if you could create your own piece of tech that would make your job easier, what would be in this theoretical software or package that you could just like click and make your job 10 times easier? What would that be?

Rob:

If it could come up with goals for me, then I could just go home and have a nice sit down!

In all honesty, it's difficult one because HubSpot does so much of what I need it to do. It might sound corporate, but it just really does. I've used other back-end systems that are not as good - HubSpot genuinely does what I need it to do. In all honesty, the kind of thing I'd want most at the moment isn't tech, it's just being able to come into the office every day and working closer with with colleagues and clients to be completely honest, which isn't something tech can solve, unfortunately.

Spencer:

So what do you think are the advantages of, say, choosing an inbound marketing agency, rather than doing it in house or picking like a more agile freelancer who can help you? 

Rob: 

I think the key benefit of using an agency is that you get lots of different expertise.

So we work with a lot of clients who do have in-house capability, and that helps us because then we can tap into their knowledge and they can tap into ours. Working with us they get to work with a broad team of people and specialists who have lots of different skill sets. You're able to get that level of knowledge from various pieces of the business.

For example, I could be working with a client when something else comes up previously that I'd never worked on, so I can refer to someone else in-house here has that capability. And that's a great resource that's ready to use.

Spencer:

So you'd say that you think you couldn't do your job as well if you didn't have as many experts surrounding you?

Rob:

I mean, I am fantastic at what I do obviously. No, seriously, without a doubt there's such an incredible level of knowledge and expertise here. It's great - brilliant results for me to jump into, and to use those people to deliver what we want for the client is brilliant.

Spencer:

And with your role, do you collaborate with everyone?

Rob:

Yes. my role is essentially to decide how to achieve what the business wants to do, when clients want to, and I then facilitate that. So that means that on a daily basis, I'm speaking with different people here about how to achieve that. It's great - I get to get to work alongside loads of people with different skill sets.

Spencer:

And what would the highlight of your day be?

Rob:

I really like doing end-of-quarter analysis and leading sessions. For example, we do a discovery workshop, so it's quite an intense process - it's a good 4 to 6 hours, a proper day's worth of work and I love leading that. Maybe that's because I'm an egomaniac - I like being the centre of attention - who knows?

But I love having the chance to really explore data, to understand what it's telling me and try and connect the dots. To work out not just a narrative, but what the story actually tells us and what we can genuinely do to improve results from that, and then feeding that back to the client - sitting in front of people and presenting it. I really love doing that.

Spencer:

What common faults do you see quite regularly with with clients that they could probably handle themselves but are routinely passed on to agency like us?

Rob:

I think, honestly, a common thing is just that many pieces of the puzzle are there, but just not connected.

So you'll get a website for the first time and they might have some really good ebooks that are just dated and you can't access them. There's no visibility of them on the site, they don't have call to actions - there's even sites that do have those things in place. They might have good CTAs, good landing pages - the conversion stuff is there, but the site's not making the most of it or they're buried somewhere so that it's really hard to access them.

Or there might be other things, for example, in the back-end there's capability in HubSpot to collect progressive data. So you can have forms that initially asks, for example, first name, last name, etc. Then you can collect more data as you go down. It's things like that - where there's these capabilities, and this is great stuff, but they're not quite connecting the dots. I think that's a common thing. 

Spencer:

Do you have any more common challenges that you see regularly? 

Rob:

I think a common one is that often clients don't always have the visibility over the data that they want.

So they'll be able to see a lot of it and there's just so much data. If you don't have a good idea of where to start, it can be a bit overwhelming, to be honest. You kind of go in, and it's just graphs everywhere - you have dashboards, and there's loads of reports, you can add custom reports and all sorts, and it feels like, "Oh no, there's so much there".

I think that's something that that I see quite a lot, where people know that there's all this data, but don't always know how to get the best out of it or how to interpret it properly. So that's something that I enjoy doing, I guess it's part of my job I really like and as part of our process, at the end of each inbound quarter, we have a big sit down. This is a meeting where I go through the reporting inside the system and pull apart all of those useful data points and go through them.

We also use dashboards as well, we encourage clients to set those up so they can understand what to report on and what are the key metrics are that we need to know. I've had clients say to me, "I don't know what 'good' should look like - what does 'good' actually look like for me?" So I can try and help them understand that and say; "Well, as a marketer, I want to see traffic increase and conversions increase, but your Managing Director or Sales Director might not care about that kind of stuff, they're more interested in looking at leads that we actually got from this".

So it's a way to present that data, and understand all of that in a way that can help them within their jobs, to help show the value of marketing, and if I can help to do that, then that's great. 

Spencer:

Do you have any top tips that you would give, either for marketers, or for companies that need a helping hand and a push in the right direction?

Rob:

All too often I see people planning marketing activities without a real sense of what they're trying to achieve - just at a high level. So often, it's not because of a lack of planning or knowledge. If anything, it's because there's perhaps too much thought about really specific individual goals, such as "I want to achieve X and Y, and haven't really thought much about what the business is trying to achieve overall". You need to decide the one thing you're actually trying to do and define what in HubSpot speak they call a SMART goal.

This is statements such as, "I want to achieve X measurable thing within Y period of time". In this kind of approach, it does help to just strip it all back, take it right back down to the skeleton and just say, "What am I actually trying to achieve here?" and build your activities around that. When you have a budget, you're always going to have to prioritise certain activities over others. So if you boil it down to "what I actually need to do is deliver more leads", and you look at your website and think that the traffic's amazing but it's just not converting - then you're wasting your time trying to bring traffic in with like PPC or blogs, for example.

In this case, you'd be better off spending the time getting some gated assets and doing some really good stuff to help convert people, or vice versa if your problem is the other way around. It's just about really understanding what you're trying to achieve a core level, so that you can match your activities to that.

I think a lot of the time, people don't always do that. That's probably my top tip.

Spencer:

That's a good one. There's a lot of content about that on our website as well.

Thanks for your time, Rob.

Thanks to Rob for joining me and talking about his day-to-day life.