I have written a couple of blogs recently about being a Small Smart agency that has attracted a lot of interest. The first was called “Why Small and Smart is the New Advertising Agency Model.” It was followed by “How to Become a Small Smart Agency.”
A number of comments related how they have embraced this approach for years. Certainly agency networks like Brand Establishment advocate this approach.
This post is called How to Market Your Small Smart Agency. First if you are an agency owner stop reading this. You won’t market yourself. You say you will but you won’t. When the phone rings and it is a prospect, qualified or unqualified, you will pursue and chase them with more energy and passion than you will market your firm.
Let’s face it. Most agencies are great at marketing their clients but lousy at marketing themselves. They will advocate all day long that their clients should invest in marketing and advertising and getting more exposure through PR and social media but their own agency’s engagement with these vehicles is generally minimal based on my experience.
The menu for marketing your small smart agency is simple.
The execution is hard.
Your first objective is to own the first page of Google when prospects research you. You need to be robust and vibrant with thought leadership to validate your expertise. I am not talking about having your website come up first. That doesn’t cut it these days. You need more than presence; you need thought leadership about the core competency you are smart about.
You get that robust Google presence through electronically optimized press releases distributed through a wire service.
Those releases provide a platform for your knowledge and your smarts. They can provide you with reprints to send to your prospects and to your clients to remind them that they made the right choice in selecting your agency.
Last year I distributed four releases through Business Wire and I am a single person consultancy.
You should also Blog about what you are smart about. Link that blog to your site and to your Linkedin profile if you are the Principal of the agency. You need to blog weekly.
Then you use the power of social media to spread your voice.
You need to have a social media strategy that focuses on distributing your thought leadership not the fact that you had a taco that day. You can use Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook to repurpose your press release and blogs.
On Linkedin join groups that would be interested in your areas of expertise and post your content on their discussion areas on a regular basis.
Turn your thought leadership into a presentation that you deliver to organizations and at conferences.
Promote monthly webinars on the subject that you can invite both clients and prospects to attend.
So that’s the plan. Pretty simple to do.
Hopefully this will energize you to market your agency with the same expertise and enthusiasm that you promote your clients.
It’s time to stop reading and start investing in the growth of your agency.
If you really want to get it done this year hire somebody to do it. It is the only way it will get done because they will make it happen.
Hank helps agencies become Small Smart to grow their business. Hank Blank frequently speaks to AAF Chapters on Why Agencies Don’t Want New Business and to many organizations and companies on Networking Your Way to New Business. You can contact Hank at hank@hankblank.com
You can connect with Hank on Linkedin
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Watch his video on YouTube on How to Rise Above the Crowd.
Like the article Hank! Jane
Thanks Jane. We need to catch up. Take care.
Hank
Fantastic article, Hank. I couldn’t agree more; marketing and advertising agencies need to “practice what we preach”. It’s hard, even hypocritical, to ask a client to devote huge amounts of time and resources to their marketing mix when the agency asking doesn’t even do this themselves. Heck, I Googled “small agency marketing” and yours was the first (and second) result to appear. Fantastic thought leadership, keep it flowing!
Good, no, make that essential, stuff here. Timely for our shop, as we go into our second month of business. But you’re sidestepping or at least not addressing the central agency marketing tool. The agency site. Specifically, what do you do with it? So many shops are following the same stultifying template: shit zipping around the page, lots of animation, video, music, sfx — basically, a boated layer of Flash and other trickery laid on top of the same organization: About, Work, Contact. I think there’s a big opportunity to think the problem through, and come up with a strategy that better answers potential clients’ needs.
Some good stuff here. Just finished listening to your CD, too, that offers some new business insights.
Thanks for this. Hopefully you enjoyed the CD. Take care. Hank