Changing marketing agency doesn’t have to mean disrupting your leads. Sam Cross, commercial director at Purplex, explains why a carefully managed transition can be smoother than most retail installers expect.

You’ve got a showroom. Multiple fitting teams. Turnover north of £5m. That means you need a steady stream of leads, quite possibly hundreds a month, just to keep everyone busy.

That flow is generated either by a marketing agency or an in-house team, and the bigger you’ve got, the more you depend on whoever’s running it getting it right, week in, week out.

So, when the results aren’t quite where you want them – not bad, just not good enough – changing agency isn’t a simple decision. It’s a difficult one.

This is the position some installers find themselves in. The current agency isn’t failing outright. Enquiries are still coming in. But you suspect there’s more available elsewhere, and you can’t quite bring yourself to find out, because any change carries the risk of a dip in leads while someone new gets up to speed. When leads are what keeps the business running week to week, that’s not a risk you take lightly.

So the relationship carries on, not out of loyalty, but out of fear that the fix could be worse than the problem.

How we’d handle the switch
We’re contacted by businesses in this exact position on a fairly regular basis. As one of the leading agencies in glazing and home improvement, people want to know what we’d do differently, and how we’d manage the move without putting their leads at risk. Here’s what that actually looks like.

We start by reviewing the strategy properly, not just the numbers. What’s the hook? What’s the angle that gets someone to stop scrolling or pick up the phone rather than move on to the next installer? A lot of marketing in this sector leans entirely on data and spend, and loses sight of the fact that people still need a reason to remember you.

Marketing is an art form as much as a science, and the creative behind a campaign matters just as much as the targeting behind it.

On the technical side, everything gets a proper overhaul. Tracking, tagging, account structure – the unglamorous plumbing that most businesses never see, but that quietly determines whether campaigns are actually being measured and optimised correctly. Our SEO team can spot and fix issues fast once they’re in an account. Our PPC team works the same way.

We’ll also look at what’s missing. It’s common to find a business doing well on one or two channels and leaving genuine opportunity on the table elsewhere – social, video, email, direct mail etc.

Because we’re a full-service agency rather than specialists in one channel, we can look at the whole picture and recommend honestly, without steering you toward whatever we happen to sell.

None of that happens by ripping the account up in week one, though. What’s already working is identified and protected while the rest is reviewed, and changes are introduced gradually as the picture becomes clear.

We won’t pretend a handover is ever completely without incident – small things can crop up early on – but the honest version of a good transition isn’t zero disruption, it’s catching those issues quickly and dealing with them before they have any real effect on lead flow.

We’ve made this switch work before
We’ve taken on accounts from long-standing agencies before, including installers who’d been with the same provider for the best part of a decade, and grown their leads and sales significantly since the switch.

That experience runs from mid-sized retailers right up to some of the largest installers in the country, and it’s exactly why we’re confident taking this on.

Not every switch looks like this, of course. Plenty of businesses who get in touch with us haven’t done any marketing at all, or have an agency relationship that’s simply gone stale rather than failed. Those conversations tend to be far more straightforward.

Purplex has spent more than 20 years working in glazing, home improvement and building products. We’re strategy-led and relationship-driven, backed by an account management team with real longevity, and we use technology and AI to sharpen our work rather than replace the judgement behind it.

If you’re getting decent results but suspect there’s more on the table, that’s the conversation worth having properly, not putting off.