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How to Position Your Agency for Success

Every day across the globe, agencies are working hard to differentiate their clients and help drive their clients’ growth. These agencies use the art and science of positioning to help their clients stand out from competition in an important and authentic manner. Sadly, most of the agencies doing this fine work have not worked the same positioning magic for themselves, in spite of the fact that they compete with dozens—if not hundreds—of other agencies on a daily basis. There is an abundance of talented and effective agencies who have failed to differentiate themselves. As a result, they are missing out on the significant (and very profitable) growth opportunities triggered by a compelling brand position. So, how to position your agency for success? Let’s talk about it. The Challenges of Agency Growth As you no doubt know, there are numerous challenges when it comes to growing an agency today. These challenges include: • More competition • Greater complexity • Difficulty expressing the uniqueness of your agency • A more educated and informed buyer who does his/her agency research without your knowledge Most agencies face these challenges. There is, however, an opportunity to address these challenges by positioning your agency in a truly unique, compelling and differentiated fashion. In this paper we will share the learning we have regarding how to create such a differentiated position for any agency by leveraging best practices that we have learned from our 28 years of agency related consulting. The Great Agencies of Old Most agencies today face the challenge of how to effectively position their firm and how to present their agency in a compelling, client-centric manner. It was not always like this! The great agencies of old stood for [...]

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Sharing Agency Performance Goals—It Changes Everything

If you’re operating your agency with the goal of achieving the performance metrics of 55/25/20 recommended by the AMI, it’s easy to see in any given month just how well the agency is performing. Those three numbers should be the basis to guide your decisions on everything from personnel to pencils. Setting goals is great, sharing agency performance goals though, that has the power to change everything. One of the most important questions agency owners should be asking themselves is a simple one: How many of your agency staffers understand or are even aware of those numbers and how they drive a healthy, sustainable enterprise? Is it just a few—perhaps your finance person and your number one key executive? That’s the most common answer, and it’s also a big mistake. As an owner, if you’re hesitant to educate everyone in the agency about the numbers, you’re literally managing with one hand tied behind your back. Here’s how sharing agency performance goals changes everything, empowers your team, and sets an exciting path for the future. Sharing Agency Performance Goals—Financial Transparency Fuels a Growth Mindset In coaching sessions I have with agency owners, one of the first things I want to uncover is the owner’s comfort level with financial transparency. If the owner is new to AMI, I’ll take them though the metric; 55 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI) is the target for the agency’s fully loaded compensation, 25 percent utilized for overhead, and 20 percent profit. For those who already know the formula, I work to understand just how deep this foundational knowledge runs throughout the agency. As an agency owner for 30+ years, I get the hesitancy about “opening the kimono.” A common concern [...]

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The Principle of Dual Minds—the Secret to Business Success

I’m really enjoying billionaire investor Ray Dalio’s book, Principles. Dalio writes very candidly about his journey in life and work, and the principles he has developed that guide him. Chapter 3 in Part II of the book is titled ‘Be Radically Open-Minded.’ Though the title suggests our need to be humble enough to listen, it is also about the value of allowing other people in your life to help you overcome the barriers (e.g. your ego and blind spots) that are standing in the way of what you want, challenge your thinking through thoughtful disagreement, and of listening to ‘believable’ people (his term). The Principle of Dual Minds Dalio also discusses the importance of having people in your life who will thoughtfully disagree with you. This idea resonated with me so deeply that I decided to give it a name: the principle of dual minds. Put into consistent practice, the principle of dual minds can be a powerful tool to amp up the success of your personal and business ventures. In fact, this principle of dual minds trumps most people’s ability to operate on their own. This chapter spoke to me about the value of partners in business, whether legal or operational. However, Dalio isn’t just talking about any legal partner—he is talking about a partner that you are humble enough to listen to and who is courageous enough to disagree with you—you guessed it, that’s “the principle of dual minds.” But it’s not always easy to accomplish. Truly, it takes work and practice to get to a place where you can argue well with your partner and reach a conclusion that two limited people could not have reached on their own. Dalio points out [...]

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Niches Get You Riches: What Your Agency Marketing Strategy is Missing

There’s that word: niche. And you’re likely thinking: “One more consultant is telling me to eat my vegetables.” If you are an agency owner and have thus far resisted niching as part of your agency marketing strategy, think you don’t need it, or are tired of the topic, perhaps I can change your mind. Niching is perhaps the best form of marketing strategy that can help get your agency where you want it to be. Niching has helped me generate over $10,000,000 as an entrepreneur. It’s the same idea I’ve taught to over a thousand graduates of my agency accelerator. In one case, an agency owner attracted over 2,000 leads for her business in just a single year leveraging this strategy. My goal is to help our clients make their agencies more successful, work less, make more money, and create predictable business models so that their agencies are assets that could potentially be sold at some point in time. When Drew asked me to share my insights with his community at AMI, I was excited to be a part of what he’s created, and I hope that some of what I have to share proves beneficial to you. Hope Marketing Isn’t Good Enough Referrals and word of mouth are the number one strategy digital agency owners use to grow their businesses. I call this, “Hope marketing” and it really isn’t a strategy at all. It’s called: Not doing anything. Hope marketing is the reason so many digital agencies struggle with predictability and scale in their business. And it might be why you can’t get out of the marketing and sales seats. When I tell owners that word of mouth is "doing nothing," the response I [...]

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How to do a content marketing audit in 8-steps (plus, best practices for fixing your content)

It’s the 80/20 rule of content marketing: 80% of results come from 20% of content. This is true for every website and for every content marketing audit I’ve ever done. A handful of articles pull in the largest percentage of traffic and conversions. Just look at your own data. A report of your top posts by traffic probably looks something like this. A few posts bring in a lot of traffic, while most articles drive little or no traffic.   If you calculate the conversion rate for each piece of content, you’ll see a similar curve. A few articles convert visitors at a high rate, while most articles convert few or no visitors.   A Content Audit for Finding the Top Performers If it’s true that 20% of articles create 80% of the results, then why aren’t we focused more on these performers? The problem is that we usually don’t know which articles are the real heroes. To find out, we need to do an audit. Here’s our content audit checklist. Use the links below to skip to the sections you want. ✪ Advanced Readers: Skip down to section seven for the deeper analysis. FINDING TRAFFIC CHAMPIONS 1. SEO: Content that attracts visitors from search 2. SEO: Content with declining search traffic 3. SEO: Content that has search ranking potential 4. Email: Campaigns that attract visitors 5. Email: Measuring the engagement of visitors from email campaigns 6. Social: Content that gets the shared the most FINDING CONVERSION CHAMPIONS 7. Content that converts visitors into leads at the greatest rate ACTIONS 8. What to do now that you know the strengths and weaknesses of each piece of content. This is a step-by-step guide for auditing content marketing [...]

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The Ultimate Guide to Agency Partnerships

Strategic agency partnerships are one of the top lead generation methods. If you’re an agency owner then it is easier to get into partnerships with other agencies than it is to acquire new clients. Reach out to companies that are similar to your agency and ask them to send over their overflow work. It is the easiest way to build a base of clients. Let’s look at how to break down your strategy for agency partnerships into the steps mentioned below for the sake of easier implementation. Define a Goal for Outreach. Let’s say for instance you run a small dev-shop. You do a little bit of direct client work, but you want to get almost all of your deals through partnerships. That’s your new outreach goal. You will want to define what you are looking for and find a company that matches your goal. Define a Client Profile. What company would be the perfect client for your agency? Rank companies based on their hourly rates. If it is not possible to find the hourly rate because of the company size, then there are two places where you can look for this information. One is super specific to agencies, like clutch.co, and the second one is LinkedIn.   Go to LinkedIn. Define the search criteria as mobile app development agencies in the United States with hundred or two hundred employees. LinkedIn allows you to search for specific criteria, for example mobile app or even further specific searches like IOS. Filter your search results by specifying company expertise, number of employees, or other specifics. You can change the target to get more results. Once you’ve found a company that matches your search criteria, you have found a good pool [...]

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The Work-Life Balance is Dead: How to Achieve Perfect Work-Life Blend with Scott Beebe

The work-life balance is dead in 2018: it’s time to work towards work-life blend. When I was a kid, my “work dad” would come home from the bank in his three-piece suit and he’d go upstairs and my “home dad” would come downstairs in jeans, looking for his martini and the download of our day while my mom cooked dinner. Sounds very Leave it to Beaver, doesn’t it? It really was. My dad didn’t have a computer or a cell phone. I can remember the only time the office called him at home – the bank building was on fire. But other than that – there was complete separation of work and home life. We do not have that luxury. We carry our laptops home and even when we don’t, that pocket-sized computer means we can work 24/7.   At best, we can strive for work-life blend. Our personal lives will seep into the work day and our work will seep into our personal time. But for many agency owners, what that translates to is that you are always on and always working. That’s not only unhealthy for you but it’s unhealthy for your business. You can’t grow your agency if you have to do everything that’s mission critical. Everyday I talk to agency owners who bemoan the fact that they can’t get everything done because they are too entrenched in working in the business, which means they do not have the time they need to work on the business. If you hear yourself saying (or thinking) “I am the only one who can do XYZ” then you know your agency is broken. Whether you’ve hired super junior people and then not invested in them [...]

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How to Catch Up on Work with the Right Systems & Processes with Terry Ogburn

I don’t know about you, but I never feel quite caught up and haven’t learned how to catch up on work in full in a long time. Thanks to my high tech Post It Note strategy (every night I list the 3 things, and no more, I must get done the next day and put it on my laptop), I get the most critical things done but there’s always more to do. What saves my bacon every day is that I have a superb leadership team around me and they have systems and processes that allow them to work miracles and keep me on the straight and narrow. Like most agency owners, I have a short attention span and it’s easy for me to get distracted. Our systems pull me back to center. Many agencies struggle with implementing process and systems. In the beginning, the system is tribal – everyone walks around, carrying the important data of the agency in their brains. By the time you get to eight or ten people, that system falls apart. As agencies grow and change, they often rely on the old system for too long. Usually something big has to fall through the cracks to convince everyone that it’s time for the next evolution of how you get your work done. Every business is made up of processes and systems, whether you have them documented or not. If your systems for teaching others how to catch up on work are informal or tribal, then odds are you and your team aren’t being as efficient or effective as you could be. You are literally trying to shove more work into a system that is simply too small. That’s where my [...]

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Six Ways To Dramatically Improve Your Agency’s Content

During a recent podcast, my guest, C.C. Chapman, made a rather blunt statement about agency content creation. His assertion? Every day, agencies violate the “speak human” mantra. Instead of treating potential and current clients respectfully, they throw out acronyms and gibberish, making readers scratch their heads and ultimately turn away. And we have the audacity to wonder why clients are tuning us out. To be sure, Chapman is the no-nonsense, straight-shooting author of books such as Content Rules and Amazing Things Will Happen. In this case, he's also brutally correct. If agencies want their content to have punch and traction, they need to stop writing for each other and begin writing for people who aren’t enmeshed in agency jargon. In other words, it’s time to wipe the slate clean and start creating content your clients can actually appreciate. Differentiate, for goodness’ sake. What separates one agency from another? It’s not all the bold logos or shiny websites — every agency has those. Instead, it’s the culture and brand, the community of individuals who make up the agency. To truly distinguish itself, agencies have to define their uniqueness. Are they playful? Outdoorsy? Musically inclined? These are the differentiators that matter. When a prospect has to choose between three relatively similar agencies, chemistry counts. Where does content come into this picture? Most clients do their homework online by examining digital footprints. According to Demand Gen Report, roughly half of all clients will read no fewer than three content pieces before contacting a prospective agency. Besides, marketers recognize and respect smart content. According to a survey by LinkedIn, nearly three-quarters of marketers have a content strategy for their businesses, allocating as much as 46% of their budget to content marketing. If an agency’s web presence [...]

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How to Increase B2B Sales with These B2B Sales Techniques with Ryan O’Donnell

The typical agency owner isn’t a natural salesperson. They don’t enjoy chasing after business but they love engaging a prospect once they walk in the door. The idea of cold calling in our business has always been dismissed as “never works” but what if there is a happy medium? My podcast guest Ryan O’Donnell joins me on the show with his message that sales is really all about automation and efficiency. Ryan explains that when you use automation in the right way, you lay the right foundation for sales, which inevitably gets you in front of the right people and gets you more opportunities to have the right conversations. Ryan and his team are behind two successful products, Sellhack and Replyify, which were built to help people drive sales into their organizations through automation. Join Ryan and I and start thinking a little differently about how you approach sales for your agency with: Why sales is all about automation and efficiency Using data to take the guesswork out of the prospect search Crafting compelling emails to prospects based on what you know about their competition (that you already work with) Figuring out how many prospects you need to capture every week at the top of your sales funnel in order to get the number of new leads you need at the bottom of the funnel SellHack’s algorithm for verifying the email address of a person who you might just know their name and company Replyify: a tool specifically devised for sending out cold email campaigns and building a sales process to contact prospects in other ways Strategies for crafting an email using B2B Sales Techniques that works for cold selling B2B products and services How [...]

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