Your Mind Map

- Hey everybody! Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week, yet again, I am coming to you from my house. We're actually in my home office. And I'm standing next to probably my favorite piece of Disney memorabilia, and I'm want to show it to you because I think it's relevant to what we're all going through right now. So this is a mind map, in essence, I'm sure they didn't call it that back then, that Walt Disney built in 1957. So, Disneyland had been open a couple of years. And you can see here that he's got Disneyland here. He's got merchandising and licensing here. He has the studio and the theatrical films here. Publications, Walt Disney Magazine, comic strips, and up here, music, 16 millimeter films, television, TV commercials, business films. And then all the ways that all of these different entities, different parts of his business drove business and audience to the other parts. And so, as we are thinking about how are we going to come out of COVID, how are we going to reinvent our business, our agencies, it's seems to me that an exercise like that would be a pretty powerful tool for us to build. I think there are questions about how we work, who we work with, the kinds of things that we sell or don't sell anymore. What do we offer to our clients? How do we prove value? And then how do we help people find us? So in my mind, that is a brilliant 1957 version of: So in my mind, that is a brilliant 1957 version of: If I am a media property, if I am an entity, that I want to have all of these different media channels driving people to me, here's how that might map out. So at AMI, we might think about the podcast. We might think about our live workshops. We might think about our owner peer groups. We might think about the articles we publish. We might think about our social media channels. And then all of the ways that those can add value to our audience but also introduce the audience of, say, the podcast to another aspect of what AMI does. And I think we need to be doing that for every agency. Every agency should have a mind map of how do customers find us? And how do we drive them to understand the different aspects of our business. So many times, one of you will say to me, "I cannot believe it. We've had a client for five years, and all of a sudden, they're telling me that they hired someone else to build their website or do their lead gen or do something that we do every day for clients. How do they not know that we do that?" Well, how do they not know that you do that? Now is a great time for us to all be thinking about how do we want to retool our business for this new normal season that we're heading into, post-COVID, and how do we lay the breadcrumbs? How do we, in a mind map, demonstrate how when somebody finds us on LinkedIn or speaking at a trade show or whatever it is, how do we start to draw those crisscross lines so that they very quickly learn more about us, how we can help them, and how they can interact with us? All right? A little challenge for you to replicate the way Walt was thinking in 1957 for today's new reality. All right? I'll see you next week.