Agency Growth: The Increasing Importance of Agency Marketing

Many agencies apply inconsistent efforts to their marketing program and experience equally inconsistent results. One month you’re generating quality leads. The next month, you’re not. Business is up. Business is down. Business is flat.

There’s a reason.

We call it “The Yo-Yo Effect”. Marketing activity only ramps up as client-related activities decrease. Then, when client activities increase, marketing gets pushed into the back seat once again. This is due to a philosophy that minimizes the importance of consistent, high-value marketing to your agency’s growth.

For example: Bob’s billable work has fallen off so the CEO assigns him to “new business development” (conveniently ignoring the very real possibility that Bob may not be at all qualified for this responsibility). When Bob’s billable hours increase, he’s taken off marketing/new business and replaced by Martha who now has too much free time on her hands. When Martha’s client work gets busier, she’s replaced by Fred. 

Sound familiar? On again…off again…on again…off again…the cycle keeps repeating itself. It’s no surprise that the overall impact of marketing for this agency is minimal.

Even in the best of times, marketing requires consistency of leadership, resources and effort to build your agency’s reputation and consistently drive quality leads. Today, with COVID-19, marketing in general and especially digital marketing is more important than ever. With the traditional conferences and other in-person events currently on hold, agency leaders have far fewer face-to-face opportunities to generate leads.

The key to success is consistency of quality effort over time.  It takes commitment throughout the agency.

The role and responsibilities of your marketing leader.

How can your agency expand its reputation, drive quality leads and win business in this never-seen-before environment? Who is going to drive the marketing function forward for you?

First, to start putting an end to “The Yo-Yo Effect”, you must dedicate an experienced and respected leader solely to marketing who is not constrained by client billability. This leader must deeply understand your agency’s value proposition and supporting intellectual property. 

Second, this leader must have the right attitude, mind-set and digital know-how to be successful. He or she should be able to drive the agency’s marketing strategy and tactical execution (and be supported with resources to help with lower-level work).

Third, s/he must be able to develop and execute a robust (and written) marketing plan. The plan should include not only activities to build overall agency reputation but also the reputations of niche practices areas, premium products and even senior leaders as experts.

Fourth, agency ownership expects and this person accepts accountability for results. Again, this assumes adequate resources have been dedicated to the marketing leader.

Fifth, this person must make a strong first impression with prospects and be able to translate prospects’ challenges into communications solutions without being too salesy.

The characteristics of a robust and effective marketing plan.

A powerful marketing plan is always strategic in nature. It’s not simply a list of things to do. Rather, it should flow directly from your agency’s fundamental reason for being. How are you meaningfully different? How do you achieve better results than competitors? Why should a prospect select YOU instead of the hundreds of other choices available?

To be effective…to relentlessly drive quality leads to your agency…strong marketing plans share common characteristics such as:

1. The plan is in writing. It’s understood and agreed upon by you and your senior team.

2. Your agency is clearly differentiated vs. competition.

3. Differentiating based on what you know (deep knowledge has your firm competing at a strategic level) and not what you do (which is usually generic and you’re competing as a commodity).

4. New business-friendly website with powerful SEO (which we’ve learned that even many digital agencies don’t know how to do well).

5. Development of a large database including tight targeting and segmentation. Content marketing is a numbers game so a larger database will lead to greater results.

6. How to ensure the consistency of the brand look/feel for your firm.

7. Creation and delivery of consistent, relevant, insight-rich and useful messaging delivered via multiple channels to prospects (e-mail, social media, digital advertising, online events, selected snail mail and more).

8. Non-stop lead-generation based on the integrated orchestration of multiple activities.

9. As soon as possible post-COVID-19, also execute a myriad of activities including sponsorship of key conferences, speaking opportunities, spokesperson outreach with media on newsworthy issues that reinforce your agency expertise, industry award submissions and events, new client wins, etc.

Finally, successful agencies also recognize that translating marketing success into new business success requires creating and maintaining a “New business state of mind” throughout the firm.

The marketing function has many responsibilities.

Your marketing function must integrate a wide range of activities into a cohesive, lead-driving whole. Including:

1. Setting goals with metrics for results and ROI.

2. Database development:

• Building a large, comprehensive database of your best prospects

• Segmenting this database by target categories

• Ongoing management of the database to keep it current and clean

3. Messaging and content development:

• Developing with your senior leadership team effective content for mailings, social pages, scripts for phone calls, etc.

• Don’t just add to the clutter – Conduct the sales research needed to provide insight-rich and useful Thought Leadership that your prospects can actually use to build their businesses and brands

• Identifying the channels to be used to reach your targets

• Content and messaging that work across channels

4. Planning and purposeful pursuit of the agency’s Top 5 dream prospects

5. Managing and coordinating multiple campaigns:

• Paid media

• Earned media

• Social media

• Owned media

6. Managing and continuously improving the agency’s sales tools:

• New business-friendly website (Navigation, on-page content, SEO, SEM)

• Capabilities deck (For in-person presentation, via video, as attachment, microsite)

• Case studies (Brief, feature strategic insights, specific results included)

• Social media pages (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)

• Oversight of (and contributions to) agency blog and thought leadership

• Senior team bios and photographs

• Other collateral pieces

7. Monitoring key metrics and activities… and creating appropriate responses:

• Website visits

• Pages/content most visited

• Downloads and follow-up

• Requests for more information

• Target selected visitors with customized content and digital activity

8. Lead generation and follow-up:

• Number of leads

• Research prospects and provide information to pitch leader

9. Lead or participate in:

• Lead qualification process

• Pitch/not pitch decisions

• Oversight of pitch team to ensure that the agency’s pitch process is followed

• Pitch debrief sessions to help hone the agency’s pitch process over time

• Specific organic growth opportunities

10. Providing research, information and materials:

• To pitch team based on insights learned during lead qualification process

• To prep and support senior leaders for networking opportunities

11. Custodian of the agency brand:

• Visual identity for the firm (Logos, color palette and more)

• Sales tools and brand materials

• Consistency of formats for documents and presentations

• Brand tone and personality

• Creating new and differentiating online brand-related experiences for prospects

These are the areas that drive sustained growth and new business success over time. Put an end to “The Yo-Yo Effect” forever.

The bottom line for marketing your agency.

Given that Covid-19 may be here for the foreseeable future, marketing (and digital marketing in particular) will be the primary drivers of leads for agencies. To win quality new business, agencies will need to be more consistent and intentional with their marketing efforts.

The above goals and tasks may be a daunting for agencies that have never had a dedicated business development function before. Prosper Group is here to help you design the overall function, the specific roles for each member of the business development team, recruit the right leadership and design the hand-off process of a prospect from marketing to the pitch team.

The critical pieces of business development.

Marketing is but one piece of the business development program. The function must also support senior team prospecting and networking efforts along with supporting pitch teams after leads have been properly qualified.

You should also be measuring the effectiveness of the agency’s marketing spend, senior team networking efforts, junior team training for growth and the agency’s new business win rate. However, the biggest contribution to agency success for this function is driving a robust marketing program.

You’re the reason why we exist.

Prosper Group was created to help the owners of independent marketing communications agencies achieve their ambitions and maximize the value of their life’s work.

Our team of former agency leaders and owners focus their deep experience on implementing proven proprietary methodologies across our three practices of agency performance, owner exit planning and M&A transactions in order to drive owner and agency success.