If you’re trying to market an agency, these 7 resources and our new ‘Marketing your Agency’ guide will help you
Where do you turn to, to check your Agency’s new business framework is as comprehensive and potentially as effective as it could be? Well if you’re reading this, then Smart Insights is one of those places. But there are other ‘new biz’ coach or consultancy voices out there with lots of experience to share. So I thought it would be useful in this post – that accompanies our recent guide about marketing your agency – to share a few of those with you.
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Marketing an agency
As part of my work with agency clients, I talk about taking a structured approach to raising their profile, promoting their services with a sound value proposition and working through a coherent new business framework. Much in the way, they will do with clients but often don’t for themselves – falling foul of the cobbler’s children syndrome!
Taking time to read or watch the thoughts of new business experts (a subset of the ‘agency growth’ field) can pay dividends in terms of where you focus your agency resources and efforts to acquire new clients.
That’s something I do myself, even though I’ve worked alongside and at one point directly in new business units over the past 25 + years. I ‘get’ (or at least hope I do!) best practice agency new business approaches but you can always learn from others.
Things change and you need to flex your activity accordingly: if you are still doggedly only using cold calling as a new business approach you’re in trouble. That’s an extreme example but hopefully, it illustrates why staying on top of what’s working is a good thing to do!
To keep on top of new approaches (or to confirm my recommendations are still working in the wider agency world) I have a public agency growth Twitter list. The list is dedicated to agency growth practitioners and as a subset of that, I include dedicated new business consultancies and coaches. The list is set up as much for myself as anyone else but I hope it is useful for agencies everywhere.
Agency marketing resources
By way of showing the mix of resources you can access to stimulate your new business activities, I have handpicked 7 for you. These range from ‘big consultancy’ to growth-hacker.
Some of the thinking overlaps but each has a great take on the changes that required in an agency’s new business toolkit and their thoughts on what are perennial, effective approaches. Have a read through these resources, you’ll gain lots of ideas around making your agency attractive to the types of clients you really want and having a consistent pipeline of leads in place.
- John Heenan – John has a great approach to explaining the new business goals for every agency.
- Michael Gass / Fuel Lines – No new business resource list would be complete without the insightful posts from Michael.
- Jody Sutter – Jody has lots of experience in marketing and new business for creative businesses and that comes across in her regular blog posts.
- RSWUS – Representing the big consultancy camp is RSWUS, their blog is regularly updated and has many an insightful new business article.
- Jason Swenk – he is a prolific content creator and insight provider across written posts, video and podcasts. He covers more than new business but that’s the focus of this post so have a look here at an example new business vlog from him.
- Entourage – Entourage are a business development business helping agencies across their biz dev strategy, profile development and communications. I particularly like their ‘reconnaissance’ series of videos with client-side marketers, explaining what they look for in an agency and what types of approaches work for them. See the Union Roasted Coffee interview as an example (above).
- Vin Clancy – Vin is a ‘new breed’ of business development thinkers, looking at innovative marketing approaches a.k.a growth hacking. Some of his ideas might well work for you away from the ‘write content, share content’ approach that is maybe easy to settle on.
Aside from those seven resources, there are several great agency growth podcasts. A couple that features discussions around new business are the Creative Agency Podcast and the Small Spark Theory podcast (sat in the blog but also on iTunes) from Lucy Mann at Gunpowder Consulting.
There’s larger list of specific new business coaches and consultants on a post I put together but I think those above have plenty for you to initially absorb and to spark ideas from!
Let us know if there is a particular trusted source of new business knowledge that you regularly refer to.
Download Business resource – Marketing your agency effectively
A best practice guide with case studies and checklists on how to effectively market your digital agency.
Access the Marketing your agency effectively