Are you special?

- Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week I am coming to you from Pacific Beach, California. Big shout out to Phil for sending me his favorite minor league ball team's t-shirt, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. Thank you, Phil. In this week's video, I want to talk about agency positioning. This is not a new topic. We have talked for decades in our industry about whether it's better to be a specialist, or a generalist. Are you better off to have a niche, or an industry that you serve, or are you better off being able to serve the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, whoever comes in the door. I have a strong opinion about this. I believe that it is better for you to have an area of expertise. I believe it is easier for you to run your business profitably, to find new clients, and to actually have prospects coming to you if you sell from a position of authority. But today, what I want to talk to you about is some of the research data that came out of our most recent agency's ad research. So I mentioned it to you last video that we had just come out of the field and we'd learned a bunch of stuff and we'd talked to over a thousand agency buyers. So they might be business owners, VPs of Marketing, CMOs, whoever they are. But we asked them a bunch of questions around how they select the agencies that they hire. One of the areas we focused on was location, and we asked them where the agencies that they worked with were located in relation to their office. And I will tell you I was surprised to learn that over 50% of the respondents worked with agencies that are over 200 miles away from them. Why? Subject matter expertise. It might be an expertise in a geography. It might be an expertise in an industry, or an audience. So they listed a bunch of them, which you can read about in the executive summary. But I will tell you, that the one thing that didn't factor in when they were choosing an agency that was more than 200 miles away, was price. They were willing to pay a premium for the expertise that they wanted. So I'm going to challenge you. If you are a generalist, if you talk about yourself in terms of "We're a full service integrated marketing agency" and you stop there, you don't say "that serves the pharma industry" or that "has a depth of expertise about millennial moms" or whatever it is. If you haven't niched yourself down, if you haven't figured out a way to talk about yourself that does differentiate you from all the other agencies out there, I really do challenge you to think about it, and to see if there's a position out there that you should, and could own that would make your agency more profitable, make biz dev easier, and make you easier to find, so that prospects are actually knocking on your door because they want your expertise. Okay? I'll talk to you next week.