Why Hedgehog Agency Doesn’t Sell Services

BY JOSH BERG

Hedgehog Agency is a new breed of marketing agency, started by brother (me) and sister duo Josh and Ali Berg. But, we’re actually both managed by our hedgehog boss and CEO, Hilda the Hedgehog.

We’ve spent the last 1.5 years crafting our offering and building our team to provide a solution to the market which we felt was missing.

Companies of all sizes have come our way. Publicly traded, ASX listed companies. Pre-revenue startups. Small to medium businesses. Large private businesses. FMCG, charities, not for profits, hospitality, skincare, pharmaceutical, health professionals, construction, building developers, social enterprises, lawyers, co-working spaces, aged care homes, fashion labels, SaaS providers. You name it — we’ve probably seen it. Except for any company that sells meat, milk or eggs directly — but that’s a story for a different time.

While we’ve worked within a host of different industries, there’s one thing which has rung true through and through. It’s the same thing which we have stuck by since day dot. It’s deep within our philosophy and runs through every vein of the business.

Doing the same thing over and over doesn’t work anymore.

We’re all about testing, tinkering and optimising. Even more so, we’re all about being channel and preference agnostic. We don’t approach every client with the same jingle of, “You know what would work really well for you? Social Media!” Or, “You know, we’re the best in the business at SEM.” Instead, we don’t even talk about what solutions we would suggest to offer until we’re about 75% of the way through the sales cycle.

We work closely with our clients and act as their entire marketing department, or fill the gaps for them. Our team is filled with Marketing Managers, Creatives (Copywriters, Designers), Ads Specialists, Strategists and Web Developers. We’ve also built a robust set of processes which allows us to complete work in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take. This means that we can work across a broad range of channels and enter each with confidence of producing a killer campaign or always on management.

Each one of our clients is designated a Marketing Manager from our team who most closely fits the needs of the client. Our Marketing Managers work together with our Business Manager to closely understand the business objectives of each of our clients. This allows us to put together an overarching strategy, which aligns to the goals of our clients’ business.

Then, we get testing.

This is where the service part really kicks in. We don’t stick to just one, or a few channels. We’re open to all and have equally found success in all (Don’t believe you can find success in all? Check out Traction by Gabriel Weinberg). We keep our finger on the pulse and only proceed with a particular method if it’s doing one thing — aligning with the strategy that was set out to achieve the business goals of our client.

But yet, I can see why the attraction to stick to the one thing is overwhelmingly strong. From a profitability standpoint of an agency, it makes complete business sense to streamline an offering to be a turnkey solution. Unfortunately, that key can’t be turned for much more than a few months at a time. In the digitally transparent world we now live in (check out Info & Ads now available on Facebook for example), it’s pretty damn easy for the rest of the competition to play catch up to what you’re doing. And when that happens, saturation approaches and prices skyrocket.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to find another specialist agency and use your precious hours in the day building those relationships. We want to worry about that for you and be driving your marketing pivots before you even need to consider them.

Why didn’t we do this straight away? Because that would be against our philosophy of always testing. We wanted to work closely with companies of all sizes to identify their most common challenge — even when they didn’t know it was the case — and find a way to offer a reliable solution which doesn’t hurt our clients.

If you’d like to learn more about hiring a marketing team, not just an agency, I’d love to hear from you. We provide agency quality services for affordable prices to businesses of all sizes.

It doesn’t need to be so scary to speak to an agency. We don’t come with preconceptions or assumptions. We’re just a bunch of friendly humans — who all work for a hedgehog called Hilda — and want nothing more than to provide our clients with solutions that work for them.

Let’s chat.