The 2021 Agency Edge Research Series with Susan Baier

Speaker 1:

It doesn’t matter what kind of an agency you run; traditional, digital, media buying, web dev, PR, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build A Better Agency Podcast presented by White Label IQ will show you how to make more money and keep more of what you make. Let us help you build an agency that is sustainable, scalable, and if you want, down the road, sellable. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build A Better Agency, thanks for coming back. Glad to have you with me. Some guests are just perennial favorites and one of my guests that people are always excited to see is back is my good friend and research extraordinaire, Susan Baier. As you know, Susan and I, Agency Management Institute and her company, Audience Audit, have partnered since 2014 to put together the Agency Edge Research Series, where every year we go out into the field, we talk to people who hire agencies, just like you, and we dig into something very specific that we want to know about that’s very timely.

Susan is back with us today to talk about the 2021 Agency Edge Research Series piece and what we learned. It was a lot of fascinating stuff. I want to get into it pretty quickly. But before I do that, of course, you know, I have stuff to tell you.

A couple of things, one, I’m sorry to tell you that the Mercer Island Group sell with Strategic Insights is completely sold out. We can’t take more folks. If that was something that you had wanted to do and you were waiting to register, I apologize, but we are sold out. We’ll do it again, I’m not sure when, maybe this summer, certainly, probably next winter again. We try and do that at least once a year. As soon as I know the dates, after I talk to Robin and Steven Lindsay, I will let you know, but we are sold out.

Speaking of selling out, The Build A Better Agency Summit is coming up in May. As you know, we held our first event in August of 2021. It turned out great. We sold out. Everybody had a great time. Tons of learning, tons of connections, lots of hugging, all good things. So, we decided to do it again. May 24th and 25th in Chicago is when the 2022 version of the Build A Better Agency Summit is going to be there.

We listened to our attendees, they wanted more round tables, they wanted more breakouts, they wanted more time to connect with each other. So, we’ve rejiggered the schedule to make sure all of that happens. If you’re an AMI member, remember that on Monday the 23rd, that’s AMI Family Day. If you’re a gold member or above, so gold platinum or a virtual peer group or live peer group member, you are welcome to attend that half day session and then go out to dinner with us.

We’re already a little over a third sold out. Please, please, please don’t let what happened with the Mercer Island Group Workshop happen with the summit. Grab your ticket, join us, and that way you don’t have to worry about the price going up or us selling out. A great 2021 deduction, I hope you will think that, but we would love to have you with us in May of 2022.

Head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com in the upper left corner of the nav bar, you’ll see BABA Summit. All you got to do is click on that and you can buy your ticket and register. Would love to have you. All right, without further ado, Susan, and I want to jump right into the research. So, let’s do that. All right, Susan, welcome back to the show. It feels like we always have something to talk about.

Susan Baier:

I think we always do have something to talk about. Just occasionally, it’s interesting enough for it to be on your podcast.

Drew McLellan:

That’s exactly right. Then we hit the record button. The rest of the time, people just don’t even need to know. As I said in my intro, this is what, seven or eight years into our Agency Edge Research Series. As always, for the last couple of years, we unveiled the findings at Content Marketing World this fall and wanted to get onto the podcast and share it with everybody who couldn’t be with us either at the event or at the webinar we did.

Why don’t you talk a little bit about, just for anybody who’s jumping into the podcast and has not heard us talk about past studies, talk a little bit about the methodology that we use in our studies and why that matters?

Susan Baier:

Sure. Back in 2014, when we did our first study, we really decided that we wanted to offer a different way to look at agency clients than we were seeing out there in the wild a lot. We saw a lot of research that was based on industry people were in, or how big their organizations were. We really wanted to focus on how agency clients in particular were feeling about various things that we wanted to ask them about. Originally, their agency relationships.

We’ve dipped our toe in a little bit of agency side research with the employees, but really our work is focused on trying to understand how agency clients are viewing the landscape that they’re dealing with and how agencies play a part in their minds in solving the challenges that they’re having. This year was no different.

Drew McLellan:

Just for the listeners, what you and I did is we talk about, what are some of the things agency owners are facing right now? What are some of the things that agencies are bumping up against with their clients? What are some of the things that they’re wondering about?

We’ve asked things like, how and why do you fire agencies, and how do you find agencies? One of my favorite studies that we did was what do you expect from your account executives, and how do you decide if someone’s good at that?

We always identify a focus area and then talk to people who hire agencies, who have relationships with agencies of varying sizes, and we’ll get into that in a second, and pick their brain about their relationship with their agencies, but usually pretty narrow cast in this area of whatever we’re focusing on.

Susan Baier:

Yeah. I think it’s interesting, because I think it is eight years now or something, I don’t have to count them up, but we’ve developed a really strong, I think, body of insight around agency clients in general. One of the things we’ve seen is findings that track over time, that are consistent, regardless of what specific topic we’re asking about. Then, there’s always something new because of what’s happening in the industry, what’s happening in the economy. I just love that.

I see things that resonate in our studies now from back when we started looking at this in 2014, and it’s interesting to see those. We never do the same study twice, but at the same time, there are a lot of threads running through all those years of research.

Drew McLellan:

Yep. I agree. For example, one of the ones that we’ve talked about for years is that most clients only have one agency relationship. They typically are dating several agencies. To be able to thread that through multiple studies and different focus points, I think is one of the interesting things now about the series as opposed to any specific one study.

Susan Baier:

Yeah. We see so much consistency over the years about what clients really want from their agencies. We see things pop up and down, but things like listening to us, understanding our business, those things are just consistent, year after year after year. I think you can dive in into our research at any given time during that sort of sequence, and see things that are really going to resonate before and after, even though we do, as we did in this year’s study, we start to see some changes now and then based on things that are going on.

Drew McLellan:

A little bit of a teaser, which we’ll get into later, but there was an interesting twist, I think, in this study that both of you and I said, okay, we’ve never heard or seen that before.

Susan Baier:

Never seen that. No.

Drew McLellan:

We’ll talk about that in a little bit. Again, it’s not just the consistency of responses, but it is the ability to compare, I think, that makes it interesting.

Susan Baier:

Yep. I think that’s great. I loved the outsourcing study we did on how they think about outsourcing, and what they choose to outsource. I think the study we did last year at the height of the COVID pandemic was really interesting, and this year’s study is interesting again, because I don’t know about you, but I expected… We went into this talking about how agencies are operating in an economic boom.

While we see that, I think we also uncovered some things that neither you and I probably expected to see that agency clients are dealing with. I just love that, it’s like Christmas every year, we just get to open up a whole new box and see what’s in it.

Drew McLellan:

Well, I think one of the things that I like about our study and then we’ll get into the specifics of the study, but I think it’s easy, without a doubt, for everybody, to make some assumptions about where their partners are in.

I think from an agency perspective, it’s easy for us to make assumptions about what our clients are thinking and doing, and the fact that the economy is good and that a lot of our clients are doing well. We make some assumptions about that surface reality, and we don’t see what’s underneath. I think what this study really revealed was that there’s a lot more brewing underneath than perhaps we were acknowledging, and that we could have really… What I love about this particular study is, it reveals some landmines that a lot of agencies would’ve walked right into without having this data.

Susan Baier:

Yes. The feedback we get year after year on whatever study we’ve released most recently is always along the lines of, wow, this really flew in the face of my expectations or what I thought was true. We all have assumptions, and I love the fact that we test so many of them and are able to maybe show a different perspective on the things that we all take for granted about who are the best clients for us? What are the big guys who are spending a lot of money like, versus the little guys like?

It’s just fascinating to me year after year, how many of our audience brings that back to us when we present this at conferences or our webinars, or they email you or I with questions about it. It’s always like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, that is really different than I thought the landscape looked like.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Or the way you described this kind of client is that’s the one I want. I don’t want these parts of that. It’s like any other relationship, you don’t get to cherry pick only the good parts.

Susan Baier:

Right. You always say, there’s no bad client, there just may be a not right client for your agency.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. Let’s tell the listeners this, on both Susan’s website and the AMI website, you can download the executive summaries of all of the research from 2014 on. Feel free to have at it and download all of them. Again, you’ll start to see the patterns as well. Before we start talking about the 2021 study, I just want to tell you that, on both websites, the full suite of the research studies are there for your taking.

All right, let’s talk a little bit about the 2021 study. First of all, the kind of research you do is a little different, I think, than how some people think about research, in terms of the segmentation. Can you just explain the methodology and then let’s talk about what we went in asking and what we discovered?

Susan Baier:

Yep. Lots of folks and certainly, lots of your listeners are going to have heard about segmentation of some kind or another. It’s basically putting people into groups. In our studies, this year, we had 1,250 agency clients from around the country participate in this study.

You can look at those clients by how big they are, what their budgets are, where they’re located, what kind of industry that they’re in. But we have found it much more helpful to really understand what kinds of attitudes and assumptions are behind the decisions that people are making. Even more than just decision making, how they view the world around them.

We get to that information by, we build a custom online service. We put anywhere from 35 to 40 statements in there that everybody in the study has to agree with or disagree with, along a scale. They can strongly agree, strongly disagree, something in the middle. When we take just that data and analyze it, what we find is, groups of people who are connected to each other, because they hold a set of attitudes in common. That makes that group look very different from another group that has a different set of attitudes that they link together.

We organically bubble up groups of people among these respondents that really feel differently about things, whatever topic it is we’re asking about at the time. That’s a segmentation, that’s a lens that I find as an agency owner gives me much more helpful insight into which clients may be best for a particular agency, how to approach them, the kinds of things that they’re struggling with-

Drew McLellan:

One, how to interpret what they’re saying and doing, you can see what’s underneath, because it’s based on attitudes and motivations, not data sets, not demographics.

Susan Baier:

Not demographics, or how big their business is. Now, we collect all that stuff. Sometimes we see things, as there was a little bit of that in this study, where clients of a certain size may be a little more likely to have a certain set of attitudes. But a lot of times we don’t see those differences. This is the only way to really differentiate what’s going on with agency clients in a much more effective way than saying, how big are you, and what’s your budget?

Drew McLellan:

We should probably say one of the reasons why we have such a large respondent pool is because we have another partner in this research.

Susan Baier:

Yes, Dynata, which is one of the biggest panel providers in the country and the world, in fact, and they’ve been our partner for many years, giving us access to these agency clients for research. We’re very grateful to their support year after year. Yeah. We couldn’t do it without them.

Drew McLellan:

All right. Let’s talk about the study. Tee up for the audience what are our overarching, I wonder was, as we went into this study, and then we can talk about the three segments that we discovered.

Susan Baier:

Right. This study is coming on the heels of the one we did at the height of COVID. What we really wanted to… As we started planning this study, we saw economic signals that were suggesting that 2021 was going to be a very robust year for the agency business. A lot of organization we’re starting to reinvest again, a lot of the agencies you work with, that I work with, were saying, holy moly, lots of business coming in, all of this kind of stuff.

Drew McLellan:

Which I just want to pause and say is exactly what’s happening. We’re recording this in late November of 2021, and agencies are literally saying, I can’t respond to all of the new business inquiries that we’re getting because, A, we’re getting so many and B, I can’t staff for them. It is a harvest robust season for biz dev. We just have problems actually doing the work because people are struggling to find people. Our premonition of that fact that this was going to be a good biz dev year for agencies and that agencies were going to have lots of opportunity was accurate.

Susan Baier:

Yes. What we really wanted to explore was, what was behind that, on the client side of the house? What was happening with clients? What were they doing more of? Why were they doing more of that? Specifically, how did this explosion in interest and engagement among clients, how was that affecting how they thought about their agency relationships? Because we’d seen the opposite when things were really deep and dark, holy… We knew that it affected-

Drew McLellan:

Is that a technical agency term?

Susan Baier:

It’s a scientific term-

Drew McLellan:

Deep and dark holy.

Susan Baier:

Deep and dark holy. Yeah. Have you not heard that? You’re a little out of the loop.

Drew McLellan:

I’m going to write that down.

Susan Baier:

Okay. That’s good.

Drew McLellan:

I don’t want to look silly by not using that on a regular basis.

Susan Baier:

But we knew that, that affected how they saw agencies, and how they wanted agencies to tap in and where they just didn’t feel. We were like, okay, well, if this is happening, what does that start to look like? That was really the focus of this study, this, how are clients dealing with what’s driving, what’s coming to agencies right now? Which is a lot more marketing work.

We saw a lot during the pandemic, in terms of moving into virtual things, conferences went away. A lot of the things that agency clients had relied on for business had evaporated. What impact was that having on things, as now, things were starting to get churning again.

Drew McLellan:

We went out, we talked to a bunch of people, and again, we’ll talk sizes and all that. But these are people who are actively working with agencies today. What we found were three very distinct and very different segments. The first segment we called committed.

Susan Baier:

Right.

Drew McLellan:

The committed segment, this was about 25% of the respondents, and these are folks who are saying to us, marketing is a big priority for me, and we are actually thinking about doing things we haven’t even done before. We’re thinking bigger and broader, and agencies are critical for us, in terms of our success. We really believe in agency partnerships, we believe in spending good money with our agencies. We really value our agency partners.

Susan Baier:

Yes, absolutely. These folks really see those agencies as a core cog in this process. Part of that is coming from their belief that agencies make things less complicated for them, from a marketing standpoint. They believe that agencies have a tremendous depth of expertise that they don’t have themselves and can’t get anywhere else.

Drew McLellan:

That’s the kind of agency they want. This is a group that said, we really want specialists. We want people who don’t service the butcher, baker and candles stick maker. I want a specialist agency who has a depth of expertise in specifically what I need. Whether that’s my industry or the deliverable or whatever it is. This segment is like, I will pay more for that.

Susan Baier:

I will pay more. These folks believe that good agencies are worth the cost, and they’re willing to pay more for agencies that are really specialized in terms of what they’re trying to do, in terms of their industry or in terms of some approach or whatever. Very closely held, and interestingly, and we’ll talk more about this group as we go through, but one of the things that I found fascinating about this group was when we ask about the tactics that clients are working on right now, this group consistently was more likely to cite a whole bunch of stuff. They’re just not blowing smoke. They really are diving in and exploring and engaging in a wide breadth of things. No wonder they value that agency support, because they have a lot going on.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, absolutely. The second group, the largest group… When I think back, I’m not sure we’ve had a group this large in all of the studies. 42%-

Susan Baier:

Yeah, that’s a really big-

Drew McLellan:

… of the respondents, we labeled as concern.

Susan Baier:

Yes.

Drew McLellan:

These folks, they’re struggling.

Susan Baier:

Yeah, they’re struggling, but they’re not the same as the group we saw struggling when we did the COVID era research, the height of COVID. These are different kinds of struggles. But they are having a hard time. Now, it’s worth noting, Drew, that everybody in the study was like, this is going to be a good year for us. But these-

Drew McLellan:

Which, by the way, as you might imagine, is not the tenor of last year’s study, in the height of COVID, where people were petrified.

Susan Baier:

Yeah. Everybody knew it wasn’t just going to be a few months anymore. It was a real big problem. These folks know that the opportunity is there for them, but, man, they’re having trouble with a lot of things. First of all, they say it’s harder to find new customers than it used to be. Some of that may be a function of the mechanisms that they used to find. New customers are no longer super prevalent, like in-person conferences and trade shows and some of those kinds of things that they may have been doing.

Drew McLellan:

Well, you know what, we’re seeing that, I’m seeing that with agencies too. Agencies who did a lot of prospecting at trade shows and live events are also struggling to figure out how do I get to my prospect if I can’t get to them in the normal way?

Susan Baier:

As you cited earlier, just like the agencies, these folks say finding qualified marketing employees is also harder than ever. They’re really struggling with the labor thing, just availability-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Just like agencies. Yep.

Susan Baier:

But then they have this trio of concerns and they really are different than everybody else. The first is that economic conditions are going to create significant challenges for them. That can be supply chain issues, that can be cost of goods issues. There’s a lot of economic stuff going on that they’re really worried about. Secondly, they’re worried about shifts in consumer behavior.

If you have been reliant on foot traffic for brick and mortar retail, if you have really been able to skate by without having much of an evident vision, mission kind of thing for your organization, and now consumers want more of that. Maybe you have a problem. That whole consumer behavior thing is bothering them. Then the third thing is shifts in employee expectations. This isn’t just, can I get people? This is, what do my current employees and prospects expect me to provide, and that is worrisome to them.

It’s just a whole raft of stuff. But it’s interesting to see a group that is really, in the midst of all of this, and despite thinking it can be a good year, really mired in some challenges that they don’t appear to know how to solve or at least think will be really difficult for them to tackle.

Drew McLellan:

Again, what’s interesting about it is that they are bullish on the year. We’re having a great year. We’re going to have a great year, but they are really banging their heads against… I think they feel like they’re pushing a boulder uphill to try and take advantage of this great year.

Susan Baier:

Yeah, because it’s just coming from all sides for them. It’s not one issue, it’s a lot of issues.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Then the third group, 33% we called close. Let’s talk about why we named them that.

Susan Baier:

These folks are interesting. It’s important to understand, first of all, that they feel pretty good at what they can do in-house from a marketing standpoint, both with their capabilities, in terms of handling work, but also expertise, they feel pretty good about that.

They’re tapping into agencies a little differently than some of the other folks are. But the thing that was most striking to me about this group is that part of their defining attitudes are that they say it’s important to meet with their marketing agencies in person-

Drew McLellan:

Again, this was the thing that we teased before.

Susan Baier:

Right.

Drew McLellan:

In every study we’ve done, what we have heard over and over again is, I care about them having a depth of expertise, and I don’t care as much about where they live. This is the first time since 2014 that any client segment has said, “I want to hang out with these people in person.”

Susan Baier:

In person. Then the other one is they prefer to work with marketing agencies headquartered nearby. There are two of their five defining attitudes that are about presence, that are about physical continuance, I don’t know if that’s a word, with their agencies.

Drew McLellan:

It’s like the [crosstalk 00:25:27]

Susan Baier:

Is it like that [inaudible 00:25:28] I was an English major in college, so I’m sure about that. But this was striking to me and this is a third. I think if we’d seen it and it had been a little blip, it might have been like, okay. But this is a third of this group. We’ve seen the confident that we can handle things. We’ve seen that segment before, but we’ve never seen this element of, I really want to be up close and personal with my marketing agencies. It has some interesting implications and questions for agencies.

Drew McLellan:

Especially agencies who have specialized to get out of the geographic bind of having to have clients close by. Again, what will be interesting now is to track this over the next couple of studies, because is this a weird post-COVID, I want to be close to my people because they’re my wooby thing, and I don’t get to see anybody in person, so my agency better be in person? Or is this going to actually be a new expectation and demand?

Susan Baier:

A new thing. Yes.

Drew McLellan:

As we’ll talk about in implications, what do you do if your clients aren’t that close? You’re not going to move your headquarters.

Susan Baier:

No. One of the things though, and I think it’s a good time to talk about it, because I see it as a really key opportunity for agencies, and you and I have talked about this before, I think on your show. These segments are very different, these three different groups, but there is a theme running through all of them, which is about that search for expertise in a marketing agency. They all want that. They all want that.

The committed are a little more likely to hope that they can find that in the one can do everything for us agency, but they still really want that specialized expertise about what they do or whatever. This group, close, they like working with multiple agencies, but they want each of them to be excellent at something in particular.

The concern too, one of their challenges is that they have trouble finding expertise that they think is relevant for them. I think there are some opportunities and challenges related to that close segment. But I think when the rubber hits the road, what we see consistently, and we’ve seen this year over year, Drew, as we’ve explored this, is that that specialized niche expertise of some kind runs through what all of these clients want.

Drew McLellan:

I feel like sometimes I am beating a dead horse around this issue, but clients believe that their business is unique. Every client believes their business is unique and they want someone who understands them and has a shorthand of depth of knowledge. It’s like the book Steven and I wrote, it really is about being an authority in something.

Susan Baier:

It really is.

Drew McLellan:

It really does then allow you to sell completely differently than being a generalist agency. I know some of you listening have chosen to be generalist agencies and we can debate that till the cows come home. But what the data shows us over and over again is clients prefer to work with agencies who have a subject matter expertise. Again, it’s not always the industry, it might be an audience, it might be a deliverable like your Amazon marketplace agency, whatever, but they don’t want somebody who says, “Oh, we are a full service integrated marketing agency.” Like all the other agencies say.

Susan Baier:

Right. I’ll forgive you for beating a dead horse because from a research standpoint, this shows up over and over and over again, and it is wildly consistent. You know the work that I did with predictive ROI with Steven’s agency on what thought leadership followers want from a B2B standpoint. That is huge, that expertise. We have seen the impact in research where people say, I’m more likely to investigate a firm, an agency, for example, that is a known expert. I’m more likely to hire them. I’m more likely to stay longer with them and I’m more likely to refer them to somebody else.

This is not your imagination, I see this in studies ours, but also others where it just comes up over and over again. My hope is, with respect to the close, that even if you are not geographically nearby a prospect or a client, the combination of hands on, flying in for meetings, that kind of thing, and a real specialized expertise that they recognize can overcome the fact that you’re not located within 20 minutes of them.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Absolutely. All right, we’re going to take a break and then we’ll come back and we’re going to talk about what this means for us as agencies. All right, guys, we’ll be right back.

I know you did not want to break away from the show, but I had to tell you about this workshop that’s coming up soon. One of my favorite workshops to teach is Money Matters, and it will be in December, on December 9th and 10th in Orlando, Florida on beautiful Disney property. Here’s why I love teaching this workshop. It is all about money, for two days. That’s all we talk about.

We talk about how you can make more money, how you can keep more the money you make and how you can grow the agency’s bottom line and your own personal wealth. I love teaching this stuff. There is not a time I have taught this workshop that somebody doesn’t walk up to me and say, “You know what, Drew, I wish I had been here 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, I could have made so much more money.” Then what I say to them is, “I know, but you’re here now, so let’s put it into play.”

But here’s what I’m going to say to you, don’t wait another five years to attend this workshop. I promise you, it is worth its weight in gold, and as always, we have a money back guarantee. Come join me December 9th and 10th in Orlando for Money Matters. All right, let’s get back to the show.

All right, we are back with Susan Baier, my partner in the Agency Edge Series. We’re talking about the 2021 study. By the way, we are barely scratching the surface of everything that is in this study. Not only can you go to either of our websites and download the executive summaries of past research, but you can also grab the executive summaries of this study.

We break down all the different things. It’s a 13 page report of all the different ways that these segments looked at things. Everything from their own staff, to spending, to tactics they’re going to spend on, but we just don’t have time in the show to get into it all. What I want to get to is, what always happens when we do this research is agency owners will say two things, one, how do I diagnose who my prospect or client is? Two, how do I work best with this particular segment? That’s really, I think, where I want to focus for the rest of the show. Let’s talk about the committed clients. First of all, I’m going to recognize them how?

Susan Baier:

Well, they’re going to come in with a very high value associated with agencies. They’re going to want that specialization, and they’re going to be like, “We have all this stuff we want to do. We are so excited. This is our year. We are going and going.” They really want that closely held agency advisory relationship, because they have big plans.

Now, it’s important to recognize that just because they have big plans doesn’t necessarily mean they have a big budget right now. We see all of these clients at all different revenue and budget levels, but we do see the committed a little more likely to be on the smaller end of things. In terms of that. But I think with respect to whether these are the right client for you, has something to do, in my opinion, with how willing are you to play the long game?

If you’re an agency that is willing to get on board with an organization that really values your contribution, is willing to listen to you, and is doing all kinds of things and willing to test their limits and try new things, are you willing to grow with them as your work has its impact and they become bigger than they are now? Because these folks are not sitting on their hands, they got a lot going on. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in organizations like this for agencies, but they may not be for everybody.

Drew McLellan:

But, I think if you want to catch their attention, there’s some things you can do to do that. First of all, these are not people who want the standard old answers. They’re looking for big and bold ideas. Again, they are looking for you to humbly beat your chest about your depth of expertise.

Susan Baier:

Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

And how you have specialized in how you can help them get to market faster, because of your depth of expertise. It’s not that they care about your depth of expertise on the abstract. For them, the value is the shorthand, and that they can get to market faster.

Susan Baier:

They’re going to be the ones that are going to say, “We don’t know.” This is the group that’s going to say, “We need your advice. We need your guidance. We have great ideas, but we can step in it if we don’t get some expert help.” I think you’re going to see them coming to you and saying, “We really need you, and it’s not just transactional, and it’s not just, here, we’re going to throw you a little bit of work every once in a while.” These are the folks who are going to get you involved in everything they’re doing, from tactical to the highest levels of their strategic initiatives.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. The concerned clients again, these are the folks who, they know they’re having a great year, but oh my gosh, is it hard? It’s hard to get employees, it’s hard to find new clients. They see the opportunity, but they’re struggling to take full advantage of it. How do I recognize them in a new business pitch or even in an existing client?

Susan Baier:

Well, they’re going to tell you these things. They’re going to say, “Our biz dev stuff is a disaster. We’ve lost 40% of our marketing team and we can’t seem to hire people. Honestly, I don’t know how all of this stuff is going to affect us.”

The fascinating thing to me about the opportunity here, agencies that have strong client relationships are great at solving problems for those clients, even if they’re not what you would typically think of an agency is doing. But I think of some of the things that these folks are really worried about, like hiring and employee expectations. How can an agency help an organization with that kind of operational initiative? Tons of stuff. You and I both know agencies that specialize in employee communications and all of that kind of stuff.

I think what agencies have to realize about the concerned clients, is that they’re not going to be able to really unleash until they get some of these things addressed. If you as an agency can help them suss out what’s happening in the marketplace and develop strategies and keep them informed and just try to chip in, then I think that once these folks have some of these issues resolved, bam, things are going. Finding new customers is more difficult, well, how as an agency can you help your potential client or your current client pivot from the way they used to do that to a better way? What is CRM having to do with things? What are virtual events having to do with things? What are ways you can demonstrate thought leadership of your client, that’s going to bring the right clients to them?

There’s so much that agencies can do just besides putting ads out there as we all know. This is really where I think the opportunity lies for these folks.

Drew McLellan:

When I put on my agency on our hat, one of the things I’ve said for almost 30 years, is I think our job as agency people is to stick our nose into every part of their business. Because we’re smart problem solvers. To your point, whether it’s finding employees or it’s R&D or whatever it is, I think we should be always be doing that. I think the agencies that we have been observing, who’ve done really well with this kind of client, are the agencies that come to their relationships with that attitude, which is marketing is everything.

Susan Baier:

I think that’s something that clients don’t often realize. The agencies I see doing this well are in there saying, hey, we can this kind of work that really helps with this. Clients may not ask for it because they don’t see us necessarily as an organization whose job it is to contribute to that effort. But-

Drew McLellan:

Again, now you’re tapping into different budgets, different departments. It’s also a great way to grow an existing relationship. Not deeper with the marketing department, but wider. Now you’re working with the HR folks or other people.

Susan Baier:

Well, and bigger priorities. Honestly, these organizations, marketing is not at the top of their list right now. How can you make yourself essential so that it can be once again?

Drew McLellan:

All right. Let’s talk about the close clients. What are they going to look like for me?

Susan Baier:

Well, I think we’ve seen… With respect to the proximity discussion, that’s a little new, but we’ve seen these kinds of clients before that really feel like they have a good handle on their marketing, they have a robust resource internally for getting things, what they want done, but what they want is expertise, specialized expertise.

You talk a lot about how that expertise doesn’t necessarily have to be as narrow as agencies sometimes think it is. Doesn’t just have to be, we work in a particular type of industry. It doesn’t just have to be, all we do is SEO. It can be expertise on an audience, it can be expertise on a buying behavior or trend. There’s just a lot of opportunities out there, but that’s what these folks are looking for, because they really have the basics covered in-house. They’re good. They’re working with multiple agencies. You’ve got to really stand out to give them something that somebody else doesn’t already have that they can pull out of their backpack on their behalf.

Drew McLellan:

I just feel like, and whenever we talk about this, I feel like we barely scratch the surface, and I look at the clock and I’m like, oh crap, it’s been an hour. We got to wrap this up. But again, I just strongly encourage you guys to please go to either audienceaudit.com or agencymanagementinstitute.com. Find the Agency Edge Research Series, please download the executive summary of this. We will also put a link to the executive summary for this in the show notes. There’s all kinds of ways you can find this information.

Susan Baier:

Right. We’ve got visualizations of the actual data that you can go play with. It’s online, you can go filter it and look at it yourself. So, yes, read the exec summary. But if you’re-

Drew McLellan:

Talk a little bit about that, Susan.

Susan Baier:

We want agencies to be able to use this to their benefit. We build the results of these studies in an interactive data visualization, so that you can look at clients of a particular size or understand geographies or whatever it is for that particular series, and really dig into this and see the actual data, not our… We try to do a good job in the executive summary, but as you said, there’s a lot here. This really allows you to just go in and play with it. You don’t need any special software, it’s a link you can go in and filter and look at all sorts of different kinds of things.

Drew McLellan:

As a layperson, let me just tell you what she said. You can click on a link and then you can say, I just want to see companies who spent over this amount of money said about this question. Or I just want to see what men said about this question, or I just want to see what… There’s all kinds of ways to slice and dice the information, which you can do completely by yourself. You need no technical skills whatsoever other than to make choices in a dropdown menu.

Then it just shows you the data… For example, let’s say none of your clients spend more than $500,000 a year. You can say, okay, I want to look at every question through the filter of only people who spend $500,000 or less-

Susan Baier:

Yeah, and see if they’re really different than the folks who spend other… Maybe you’ve got some assumptions in there that are pivoting you to a particular profile of a client, that don’t make sense, given what we found. Yes, lay man’s terms appreciated. Play with the numbers, play with the charts.

Drew McLellan:

Click on things, learn new things. That’s what we’re saying.

Susan Baier:

It’s pretty colors.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Anyway, I hope that this was super helpful to everybody, but Susan, as always, I love having you on the show and I’m so grateful that we partner in all the ways that we do.

Susan Baier:

Me too brother. Very much so.

Drew McLellan:

Thanks for being with us.

Susan Baier:

I would say, if you have ideas about what we should survey, let us know. Email either Drew or me because we’re starting to work on the 2022 study.

Drew McLellan:

Oh my gosh, it comes so fast.

Susan Baier:

It does.

Drew McLellan:

Thanks again for being with us.

Susan Baier:

Thanks for having me, Drew.

Drew McLellan:

Of course. All right guys, this wraps up another episode of Build A Better Agency. We do this research because we’re trying to give you a different lens, a different way of looking at your clients other than the data sets that we traditionally look at them. I love the idea of thinking about people’s motivations and their attitudes and the stuff that we can’t see on the surface, the stuff that we can’t walk into a room and say, oh, if I had to rear range these people by gender or height or whatever, I could do that.

This is under the surface stuff, and this is the stuff I think that allows us to connect deeper with our clients and to really suss out the clients that we are best suited to serve. I invite you, I implore you to take full advantage of this. It’s why we do it every year is so that you are smarter about the work that you do. I hope you take advantage of it.

With that, I will say, as always, I am super grateful that you check in every week and that you listen. I never take that for granted. I’m always glad to be hanging out with you, whatever we’re doing. I know I’m on a treadmill with some of you and I’m golfing with some of you and I’m on a subway. I think I walk a lot of dogs, which is, I love that. But also want to say a big thank you to our friends at White Label IQ. As you know, they are the presenting sponsor of this podcast.

What they do for agencies is they do white label, PPC, dev, and design. They are the go-to partner for many, many podcast listeners and their agencies. My agency has used them. They’re awesome human beings, but they’re also really skilled at their craft. Head over to whitelabeliq.com/ami, because they will give you some free hours so you can test drive them. How can you beat that, right?

Anyway, I’ll be back next week with another guest and we’ll be thinking a little differently about your shop. In the meantime, you guys know how to get ahold of me. I’m pretty much all over social and you can shoot me an email and send me a carrier pigeon, however that works, and I promise I will get back to you as quickly as I can. I’m grateful for you and I’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for spending some time with us. Visit our website to learn about our workshops owner peer groups, and download our salary and benefit survey. Be sure you also sign up for our free podcast giveaways at agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway.