When growth stalls, whose job is it to fix it? For a lot of e-commerce businesses, marketing is split across three or four agencies that each own a slice: paid with one team, SEO with another, development somewhere else again. Everyone reports on their own patch, so the business in the middle becomes the integration layer, and the marketing manager spends their time refereeing suppliers instead of running marketing.
There are three broad ways to bring in a marketing partner, and the right one depends on where your growth is stuck.
Each has its place. This piece makes the case for the first: one team handling everything.
The fragmented model puts the cost of coordination on the client. Each agency is measured on its own slice, so when conversion stalls, everyone can fairly say they did their bit.
Beth Moore, Door4’s head of client services, has watched it happen more times than she can count.
When multiple agencies each believe they are doing their part — the SEO agency is increasing rankings, the PPC team is driving more people to the site — but users are dropping off at checkout, something needs to be done. Yet each agency could argue they are playing their part. Nobody owns the gap in between.
Beth Moore, Head of Client Services, Door4
That gap is where growth leaks away. Briefs pass between teams, developers wait on specs, everyone waits on sign-off, and the moment a number dips a blame culture sets in.
The customer journey stopped being linear a long time ago. Someone researches on a phone, compares on a laptop, and buys weeks later off an ad they half-remember, so no channel can be judged alone. Boards want the line drawn from spend to revenue, and the teams that test, learn and ship in days pull away from those stuck in monthly reviews.
A full-service partner owns the whole funnel, from acquisition through conversion to technical delivery, with strategy and execution in the same place. The team that writes the plan is the team accountable for making it work.
Leon Calverley, Door4’s founder, goes back to the root of the word, the sense in which “agency refers to having free will – understanding the surroundings – and having the capability to act, to effect change”. Working with a full-service partner, he says, “means that the commissioning organisation is able to focus on its own business – what it does best, and where its subject matter expertise lies – leaving decisions around marketing to those embedded with deep understanding of what will work best.”
Sean Dwyer, Door4’s managing director, is wary of the label itself.
Sean Dwyer, Managing Director, Door4
No agency is master of everything, and a good one knows when to hand a job off rather than protect its own billings.
Leon Calverley, Founder, Door4
Door4 takes ownership of the entire customer journey, acquisition, conversion and technical delivery, as one accountable team working to a single commercial objective. The work runs in three connected stages.
Reach covers acquisition across SEO, paid search, paid social and content, with channels built to work together rather than compete for credit. Convert turns visitors into customers through CRO, landing page testing and UX. Scale is the architecture and performance work that keeps the site fast and stable as volumes grow. Everything runs to one commercial objective on a 90-day plan, with regular reviews rather than siloed activity.
One team carries the KPIs and owns the root cause when performance dips instead of passing it round the table.
Beth Moore has seen how quickly the alternative unravels. “It is easy for an acquisition team to point out something is broken on the website or feed but they cannot see it through to fix it,” she says. A technical team can make the repair, but if traffic isn’t sent to it the win never lands. A single partner can do both, fixing the issue while keeping the acquisition picture in view.
Sean Dwyer has been on the other side of this. On several projects, Door4 wrote the technical briefs while a separate agency handled the build, and delivery dragged, not through any fault of the developers but because ideas, briefs and budgets all take time to move between firms. On work like Defib Warehouse, Door4 took delivery in-house to move faster and protect the client’s return.
For Beth Moore, this is what a real partnership is for. “A partner should build a true relationship with a business to understand the ins and outs, to truly be able to have an impact that makes a difference. Without having strategy and execution under one roof, there is no one owning the overarching strategy and therefore the results,” she says.
Done well, that ownership turns marketing spend into something that compounds rather than leaks. A partner that sees the whole system looks for what’s actually broken rather than what’s presenting as broken, and the budget works harder because the measurement is clean, the channels pull together, and the people who found the problem are the ones who fix it.
Full-service fits businesses with a complex technology stack, a growth plateau across more than one channel, or a need to balance brand with performance. A focused acquisition or technical partner is the smarter call when the objective is narrow: a sound site with a paid search problem, or strong rankings on a platform that can’t scale.
More often than not the signal comes from inside the business, and Beth Moore’s says: “If they are tired of having to follow up with different teams and agencies and not getting anywhere, that is the signal it is time to change,” she says. The other tells are technical debt no agency will claim, budget rising without revenue, or a team spending more time managing agencies than shaping strategy.
If you spend more of your week chasing agencies than growing the business, the model is the problem. You can see how Door4’s full-service partnership works here.
Thanks to Leon Calverley, Founder at Door4; Sean Dwyer, Managing Director at Door4; and Beth Moore, Head of Client Services at Door4, for their contributions.
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When multiple agencies each believe they are doing their part — the SEO agency is increasing rankings, the PPC team is driving more people to the site — but users are dropping off at checkout, something needs to be done. Yet each agency could argue they are playing their part. Nobody owns the gap in between.
Full service is a loaded phrase – I prefer us to think of ourselves as an integrated partner, that can solve a lot of problems really well – but not all problems averagely.
It’s fundamental to understand what is likely to have a positive impact – and be able to deploy, test and learn. We’ve seen countless examples over the years where clients outsource thinking to the left-hand, and doing to the right-hand. We’ve often come in to fix this. Not having the capabilities in-house, in effect, means having no central nervous system.