Last week I had a chat with Jason J. Zotara, founder of Ten26 Media, because he has an interesting perspective on positioning your agency that may help you. (Full disclosure: Ten26 Media is not a client). His agency was born out of a scenario similar to many; he built his digital marketing muscles as an…
There are different stances on the state of the economy as of Q2 of 2022, but the general consensus is that everything that went up, must come down at some point in the foreseeable future. Since a downtown is foreseeable, you have no excuse as an agency owner to not get your house in order…
In my assessment, many of the activities marketing agencies spend their time implementing in effort to market themselves and generate new business is wasted because at the end, it’s still just a polished turd. What is a Polished Turd? In the context of marketing your creative services or advertising agency, polished turds are the campaigns…
Contentment has been a recurring theme in my conversations with agency leaders since about November, I’d say. This topic is one that I like to keep top of mind in my own pursuits because contentment is the only way to actually achieve a measure of success in any arena of your life. If you have…
I had a conversation today with the president of a marketing agency. Part of our conversation revolved around the changes in the social media landscape that are impacting the offerings her agency can provide to clients. A Pattern Emerges Not unlike other digital marketing agencies, this organization has been seeing Clients dropping social media from…
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…