Marketing agencies are notoriously poor at marketing themselves.
These are the reasons I hear most often:
“We spend all our time on our clients, so our business has to take a backseat”
“We don’t want to come across too ‘braggy’”
“Are you kidding? We’re just trying to keep the lights on right now!”
But even with agencies who proactively focus on their own marketing, many:
1) don’t know how to talk about what they do, or
2) how to make it sound any different from what other marketing agencies are doing.
After all, “it’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle”- Roy H. Williams
Here’s a 10-point plan to help you begin marketing your own agency:
Write down every step of the current process you use when you start working with a new client (e.g. “we begin by conducting an audit of the current assets…”)
Talk to current clients and find out which parts they found most valuable. What did you do differently that their previous agency didn’t?
Simplify and remove any non-essential stages
Name every stage, e.g. Research, Strategy, Execute, Evaluate, Optimise
Create a visual representation of this process, e.g. a flow chart
Name the whole process, in a way that makes it specific to your business
Ask a current client for feedback and incorporate it where necessary
Gather testimonials from current and previous clients
Create case studies
Market your bespoke process as you would for a client, using testimonials and case studies to prove the efficacy of your approach
Most marketing agencies never take this process-orientated approach to describing themselves. Instead, they rely on describing the services they offer, rather than how they work with clients.
Want to see what this looks like in action?
Both Upperdog and Emfluence (neither of which I have any relationship with) describe their process in such a way that it’s easy to imagine yourself going through the process.
If you can trigger a potential client to imagine working with you, you are substantially closer to that becoming a reality.
Try the approach above, and let me know how you get on.