FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Get answers to the questions that will make you the most successful with our services.

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Who do I contact about payments/invoices/services etc.?
At The Honest Agency we keep this simple. Any time you have any questions regarding billing, changing payment methods, changing your services, or anything related to payment, please email billing@wearehonest.co. For us to stay legally compliant, all Billing communication must be via email, not a phone call. 

When can I expect to receive results such as more sales/leads?
This depends on a lot of variables, the biggest being how prepared your business is for digital marketing. If you are a new brand or just started your brand online, it will take closer to 3 months before you can start seeing. If your business has been online and has been getting sales, leads, followers, etc. already, we should be able to show you results much sooner.

What if I need to send you 10+ emails or have 10+ calls a week?
We will respond to you as much as humanly possible and answer whatever questions you have. We really recommend keeping the calls, text messages, and emails short and to the point, as the more time our teams spend on communication, the less time we have to actually work on your account to bring you results. Also, keep in mind the more emails and text messages you send consecutively, the longer it will take to answer your questions as we have other clients we need to make sure get responses as well. Try to sum all of your thoughts together in one email.

What if I send you guys last-minute changes or requests?
We will do our very best to accommodate last-minute requests however we really advise against this. We ask you to send any requests a week in advance so we have enough time to properly complete the request for you; rushing work isn’t good for your brand or our teams. Note, if the request is too last minute (a day or two beforehand) we simply may not be able to get the request done in time. If you want to ensure all your requests are fulfilled please make sure to send them ahead of time. For more information about timelines, refer to the General Timelines slide in your Digital Strategy. 

Can I customize my lead generation form that The Honest Agency creates?
Of course you can customize almost anything with us, however, there are a lot of issues that arise out of moving away from our specific lead generation strategies. Our lead generation forms are crafted using specific software, specific warm-up questions, and specific phrasing to get the best possible leads for our clients. This means you may see the following: redundancy on forms, missing questions, missing brand components, etc. People hate doing work and view a form as a trade. They are willing to give you their information as long as you are willing to respect their time and give them some value back. That is why we always need to offer something of value to the form filler and keep the questionnaires short because most consumers will lose interest and leave the form. For example (with our 250+ brands we’ve done work for), 3x more consumers will fill out a 5 question form vs a 10 question form. 

Another important factor to keep in mind is that no lead form in existence is perfect. You will get people putting in fake phone numbers, wrong emails, people who forgot they filled out the form and overall a few dead leads. This is normal and over time these leads get more reliable and have a higher percentage of closing as we get more with your sales process. Though there is no way to avoid bad leads, that is just how the internet works. 


Why can’t The Honest Agency post links in Instagram posts?
Well, we can however it is pointless because Instagram won’t turn it into a hyperlink that people can click through on. Even if we just put a link in plain-text, most consumers won’t manually type the link into their browser, it is too much work. So the end result of having a plain-text link in a post will leave your brand in question as it will come off as a lack of professionalism and overall will lessen brand trust. Instead, we put links in the bio of your Instagram profile because Instagram will turn that link into a clickable hyperlink. 

Does The Honest Agency outsource work to India or freelancers?
Absolutely not! All of the work is done in the office by The Honest Agency's team. You can even find the VP of Client Success often holding meets about your account at the conference room table, that was made right in our office. We take our work very seriously. If there is ever a time where we need to send a special project out that we can’t support (such as package design or 3D In-Store Maps) we will always let you know.

How does The Honest Agency get access to my pages? Does THA create pages?
Most of our clients already have pages and that is wonderful (makes our job easier). Normally, all we need to access your platforms (like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is a username and password. 

There are other platforms such as Facebook, Google products (Google Ads, Analytics, etc.) LinkedIn, etc. that do not have a username and password associated with business pages. In this case, you can take one of the following steps: (1) give us your personal username and password for these access-based platforms and we will give ourselves access or (2) add the email of your Client Success Manager as an Admin of the page. Note: we need admin privileges or else it will make our job much harder. 

If you do not have a page, please let us know early on so we can create that page for you. Of course, we will give you access to the pages so you can see what’s going on.

What is included in the Website Maintenance plan? 
With any of our SeedSite packages, mandatory monthly maintenance is required. With this SeedSite Maintenance package we do the following: host your site on our servers, secure it with SSL encryption, keep the servers up with a 99.9% uptime rate, make daily backups of your site, make 5 minor changes per month, constantly update site to be search engine compliant, keep your site constantly mobile optimized and send your reports (on request). 

We support 5 minor changes each month for your website. Any of the following is considered a minor change: replacing images, replacing text, adding a widget (must be provided to us), uploading or modifying a blog, changing the hours of operation, adding a new deal, updating product information, adding additional domains to your site. While we can also support bigger changes on your website, depending on the complexity of the change it may be an additional charge that we will quote you and get your permission on.

When will my new website start to rank on Google?
It will take a while. There are 5 critical factors that influence how well you rank. 
Website age: Google doesn’t feel comfortable showing new and untrusted websites to the world unless they are backed by backlinks on other sites or good content. The longer your website is around (not just a parked domain) your domain will get more and more credibility with Google and other search engines.
  1. Backlinks: A backlink is a link to your domain that is on another’s website. For example, if www.wearehonest.co is a link somewhere on Forbes (which it is) and people on Forbes can click on it to go to The Honest Agency’s website, that is a backlink. The more your domain gets talked about and backlinked on the web the more Google will see you as a popular domain and will increase your ranking for keywords on those pages that are linked (and your domain as a whole). When you have under 100 backlinks, don’t really expect to rank fast on Google.
  2. Keyword-rich content: a keyword is a phrase people type into Google. Some example keywords that we come up under “Forbes Digital Marketing”, “Top Digital Marketing Agency” and “honest digital”. In order for us to rank on these keywords for our website we to liter our web pages and blog posts with these keywords so Google knows the topics we like to talk about. Generally speaking (if you are starting out), you want to do search engine rank position (SERP) keyword research and find 5-10 keywords that are low competition but higher monthly searches. That way you will get organic traffic to your site and increase your rankings faster. 
  3. Useful content: while blasting out keyword-heavy blogs 5 times a week will help your overall domain get more visible and rank under multiple pages, Google also uses it’s machine learning to understand how useful the content is. The fact is, if you have content nobody wants to read, Google has no interest in showing it. Your articles don’t have to be perfect but make them something worth sharing.
  4. Site usability: the keys here are page speed, mobile optimization, and site security. If the page takes longer than 5 seconds to load, Google won’t be happy. Use a speed testing site like GTmetrix to see where your site lies. If it was designed by The Honest Agency, no worries your site will be blazing fast. Mobile optimization simply means it is legible with mobile. If the font is too small, it is hard to scroll, the buttons are hard to touch, Google won’t like that and your domain’s rank will suffer. Finally, having an SSL (the https in URLs) installed will give you a good boost with Google as they don’t want visitors that find your website on Google to have any compromised data. 

How do I handle leads The Honest Agency gets me?
With fast reaction times and speed. The key to internet leads is to respond within the hour of getting it. The phone is the best method of doing so with email being secondary. On average we find our clients close between 20-40% of the leads we send them. You must keep in mind not everybody who fills out a lead form is interested. Here are rules to tackling leads that we’ve found work best for our clients:
  1. Speed: if you can call a lead within 5 minutes of receiving it, you have a 10x more likely chance of turning that lead to a sale. If you can get it within 20 minutes, you will still have a good chance of closing the lead. An hour is acceptable but doesn’t wait past that. After the first hour escapes you, they most likely would have spoken to someone else who was faster than you.
  2. Source: leads coming from organic sources such as Google search are a gold mine. These leads covert higher naturally because the user did more work to try to find you or your service. Leads coming from ads are more difficult as responding to an ad is much less effort than finding your brand organically. Lastly, pulling from lead generating companies that generate leads and send them to multiple companies at the same time (think Thumbtack, Houzz, Bark, etc.) will have a much less conversion rate because you have a lot of competition who could be faster or more of an expert than you.
  3. Patience: just because you get a lead doesn’t mean you need to push a sale. If you don’t know how to deal with people or if you haven’t done sales, give this job to a salesperson. Don’t be pushy, don’t ask for a credit card, don’t rush the process. Be a source of knowledge, let them explain their problems in detail and overall practice active listening. 

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