It’s no secret that there has been a sharp growth in the development of internal agencies. Ad Age reported about a year ago  that 78% of Association of National Advertisers members have now developed some level of in-house agency. That’s up from just 58% five years ago. Further, of the 22% that didn’t have an in-house agency, 8% said they were considering it for the near future. This year (2019) my team has worked closely with more than 30 Fortune 500 companies on helping to operationalize a content marketing approach, and we’ve seen this trend firsthand. As content marketing becomes a more recognized piece of what the company is doing, centralizing the approach and creating a content-focused team is a natural extension. At The Service Of – Not IN The Service Of  For our clients, building a team to manage and serve internal clients with a streamlined set of creative services, production capabilities, and even media buying may be an extraordinarily productive strategy (though I think the pendulum may be swinging too hard in that direction at the moment). However, our experience is that looking at the content team as an internal agency is a mistake. Content marketing is a fundamentally different approach and needs a leading, not a serving, approach. Content marketing (and content strategy) should be an active and discrete business model within any organization. Thus, for any company, the content team is more akin to your R&D team, your legal team, or your accounting team. No sane company would never look at the legal team as an internal agency (or a firm) that services internal clientele. Can you imagine going to the lead lawyer for the business and telling them, “marketing didn’t [...]

Referrals are every agency's dream. Do good work. Others take notice. Inbound, warm leads get referred. What happens when those referrals aren’t coming in as much as they were in the past? Or, better yet...how do you get in front of the drought to ensure a steady flow of new leads that could convert into revenue-generating opportunities for your agency? A strong outbound sales process is a lot easier to set up today than it was even 5 years ago. The key is creating a consistent process for identifying prospects and using the right tools to automate the most time-consuming components of this strategy. Before we jump into the framework for building the strategy, ask yourself whether you have the right team in place to generate new business. Do you have folks on your team responsible for searching for new business? Do they have experience generating leads or are they better suited for managing referrals and building relationships that could develop into new business? This can be a tough exercise and possibly requires a shift in responsibilities or a new hire to execute the new strategy outlined below. The fastest-growing companies in the last 5 years all have one thing in common...a highly motivated, process-driven inside sales team tasked with making it rain. Their playbook isn't rocketed science or proprietary. It follows a very simple methodology that I’ll share with you now. 1) Define your prospect segments. Your current clients are the single greatest asset you have to define new segments or reinforce that you need to focus on a specific niche. For example, if you primarily work with auto dealerships then you need to go and find other dealerships to contact. If your work [...]

If you’re running a marketing agency, there is a good chance that you deliver social media marketing services of some form or another for clients. Your prospects are convinced of the value of social media amplification. Moreover, they feel that social media can generate leads to their business. While you probably provide some kind of social media service, there is a good chance you are not actively using social media to land clients of your own. I hope to change that. In this guide, I will layout how to use LinkedIn to find leads for your marketing agency. Let’s start at the very beginning. Why Use LinkedIn for Your Business There are a half dozen major social networks. While LinkedIn might not be the biggest, it is certainly the most relevant for business professionals in the B2B space. LinkedIn has over 610 million members. There are approximately 121.2 million active daily users. A proportion of these members will work for and represent the kind of clients your agency is targeting. This makes it the perfect place to search for leads. Why Does Your Agency Need To Define Its Goals?  If you plan to use LinkedIn as a marketing channel for your business, you need to set clear marketing goals. This will help you quantify success, and forces you to consider how to achieve your target. When setting out your goals, it’s good to have a clearly defined goal that everyone can reference. For example, here is a general LinkedIn marketing goal you might use: Sign up one client per quarter from LinkedIn Once you have defined that target, you can then set out some sub-goals. These are the actions you need to complete to achieve [...]