Web Dev, Design & SEO Staff Augmentation for Consulting Firm
- Custom Software Development IT Staff Augmentation Search Engine Optimization
- $200,000 to $999,999
- Jan. 2016 - Ongoing
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 4.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
“Their flexibility is what I find most valuable.”
- Advertising & marketing
- Atlanta, Georgia
- 1-10 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
Paradox Marketing provides staff augmentation services for a consulting firm. They do digital marketing, SEO, web development, design, optimization, migration, technical remediation, and software integration.
Paradox Marketing has enabled the company to offer a range of services to end clients and boost their rate of retention. They excel at project management by following documented, repeatable processes. Detail-oriented, collaborative, and well-organized, the team can accommodate any project.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the founder and CEO of SMB Advisors. We are a consulting firm that leverages the internet and specializes in sales, marketing, and branding strategies.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with Paradox Marketing?
They’re filling a talent gap, which allows me to provide services. They provide human resources with expertise that my current full-time employees do not have.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
The nature of my business is offering rented marketing departments for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs) owners, and Paradox Marketing allows me to offer all of these different skill sets. They’re essentially hired employees who assist with a wide range of offerings on our website.
Paradox Marketing provides full stack web development and web design. They also do SEO research and strategy. This includes on-page website optimization, content optimization, and technical remediations for page speed and 404 errors. They handle the technical integration of sales and marketing software. This includes getting third-party email systems and real estate listing services to integrate with a CRM or CMS through software like Zapier.
I give them documentation and specs of my requests. We’ve been working together for so long that Joshua (CEO) is oftentimes my second set of eyes on client challenges. Paradox Marketing mainly does insular landing pages or testimonial pages. I don’t use them for creative vision in cases where clients want an entire branding project or logo redo; rather, the creative inspiration is already there, and they act as an extension for doing specific designs.
Based on the ultimate growth and expansion that our clients are looking for, we do a lot of projects migrating from Wix and Squarespace to WordPress. WordPress gives us the flexibility to create client portals, log-in areas, e-commerce, and integrations. We use marketing software like Ontraport and HubSpot. However, we’re somewhat technology-agnostic, and Paradox Marketing is flexible in terms of technology. WordPress would be their recommendation, but solving for any technology is a talent of theirs — we’ve never come across a technology that they couldn’t tackle.
If we have a recommendation that would be too much disruption for the organization, Paradox will tell us about it. Right now, we’re working with a client that has Keap (FKA Infusionsoft), which isn’t something that we typically recommend. However, being sensitive to the client, we wouldn’t recommend replacing it just because we don’t work with Keap.
What is the team composition?
Joshua is my quasi project manager in some cases. We have a relationship where he can almost white-label as an extension of myself and as project manager. Jennifer (Operations Manager) acts as a junior project manager. I assign one developer assigned per project and 1–2 people for SEO. I can have more than one project going with them at a time.
Joshua has specialized team members for content, design, and development. On an average project, there can be 4–8 people from his team whose roles include senior project manager, junior project manager, and project-specific specialists like SEO, content research, or web development.
How did you come to work with Paradox Marketing?
I met Joshua through a mutual friend at a HubSpot inbound marketing conference in Boston.
How much have you invested with them?
The cost so far is around $150,000–$200,000. The average cost per year is $40,000 or higher.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with Paradox in January or February 2016, and I don’t see it ending.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
Both Paradox Marketing and my team subscribe to the mantra that the answer is yes, and we will figure it out. The first client that Paradox Marketing worked with for me is still a client of mine. Our rate of retention is so high that cancellations surprise us.
I refer to Joshua as my common-law partner — I tell him that this is the longest relationship I’ve ever been in.
How did Paradox Marketing perform from a project management standpoint?
They’re well-organized and detail-oriented when it comes to the intricacies and steps of what they do. Joshua has a strong commitment to documented, repeatable processes, whether those are inside Asana or just navigating our projects together. From a high level and all the way to the details of web development, everything is managed quite meticulously in their custom project management setup.
Joshua and I have Zoom calls anywhere from 1–5 times a week. We use Facebook Messenger, email, and other channels.
What did you find most impressive about them?
The first thing that comes to mind is flexibility. Knowing that I don’t need to find five other specialists because Paradox works with a variety of technologies translates into a certain comfort and confidence as a business owner. Their flexibility is what I find most valuable.
Are there any areas they could improve?
We always work on improving, namely the total knowledge share of what exactly Paradox marketing does. The things that they can do are extremely technical and intelligent. For a little while, Paradox undersold or under-conveyed just how smart and gifted they are and what exactly they did. I want the client to know just how sophisticated and special their work is, whether that’s a finished website or growing organic traffic.
Ultimately, they should better communicate the big picture and the micro-value of what they can do. It might be a case of humility or the fact that this is just common to them. This isn’t necessarily a negative, but I wanted to provide some context for it. For example, when they QA a website, they address 40–50 specs across mobile and desktop. Then, they simply confirm the QA is done, without saying that they looked at 52 use cases. That work would’ve taken the client nine hours.
After everything is completed, I get a small-to-midsize PowerPoint. As a parallel, if the problem in algebra class was four divided by two, you’d write down two, but the teacher would ask you to show your work. Similarly, I keep telling them to show the client just how much they cover. That now comes with every project that we do.
Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?
For any project, the needs and goals need to be well-defined. Also, there needs to be awareness that there may be more than one way to tackle a problem. Having as many stakeholders as possible involved helps get everybody on the same page to minimize rework.
If the goals are too general, there can be misalignment regarding how long things will take or the different paths to the result. The availability to communicate regularly is another aspect. If the client can only talks to Paradox twice a month, they won’t have that level of intimacy and detail along the way. This isn’t mandatory, but I believe it’s how we get the best results.
RATINGS
-
Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
"I rate them for the value of what they deliver, and I haven’t had any issues with either the deliverables or the results."
-
Schedule
4.0On time / deadlines
"Because of our relationship, I’m planning eventual problems in advance with Joshua. I know that I need to leave enough wiggle room with due dates."
-
Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
"Paradox Marketing is the best option for me and my clients because of the value of what we’re delivering."
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
