Change is one of the most constant companions in life, in relationships, and in work. I chuckle because within my family, the old adage of, “the only thing you can plan for is for the plan to change,” rings true regularly as the seasons change and the world continues revolving around the sun. Because of…
I had an interesting conversation recently and it made me realize something so obvious, I’d never given it much thought before. The short version is that the agency that was the matter of the conversation felt entirely misunderstood by onlookers and prospects. “Nobody understands what we do,” was the phrase that sparked intrigue. The list…
The battle for skilled talent was already waging before the response to COVID. It’s definitely worse now. 86% of young professionals (like, digital marketing employees) reported being willing to take a pay cut to work for a company where their values were aligned according to a LinkedIn study from 2018. Now years removed from that finding, I…
Marketing agencies are weird places. They typically never quite have either a horizontal nor vertical org chart, roles are often much more fluid, and major decision making sometimes is forced into tiny windows of evaluation. In light of this, how much communication is too much communication? How little communication is too little communication? Juxtaposing the…
Writing proposals for marketing work can be a challenge, especially when you do not have productized services or “packages,” but rather build out custom scopes of work. When your proposals take hours upon hours to develop, you should re-evaluate your process and proposal structure. The Golden Rule of Proposal Writing: Focus on the Prospect’s Objectives…
Business development efforts for our own agency is often relegated to the backburner in lieu of pressing client requests or workload shifts due to agency role changes, until famine mode strikes, that is. If you’re internal marketing plan is currently off the rails consider the follow with the objective of getting back on track: Questions…
There are a couple of points in your agency life when you’ll need to assess how to organize your people and client workload. One of those points is at it your agency’s founding. Another is when you are on the precipice of major growth. And on the Debby Downer side is when you are facing…
Challenges was the “nicer” word to use, but really, today I want to talk about the top excuses that are keeping you from marketing your own agency in an effective way and causing you to rely on referrals as your primary income stream. These excuses fall into five primary categories: 1. Client Work Comes First… …but then…
Your agency should diversify its sources of income primarily because the market ebbs and flows and you need to not hedge all your bets in one place. Depending on your form of agency services, your target customers, and the way your organization is structured, market changes will affect you in different ways in different seasons….
In this discourse, to be “inefficient” does not mean one is being ineffective with time, or wasting time. Rather, it means allocating time away from activities that would contribute to your agency utilization rate towards activities support a larger outcome of curiosity, ownership, impact, and camaraderie of your team and subsequently reduce the likelihood of…