You must have the willingness and ability to change your agency's services, processes, and infrastructure to accommodate market shifts.

Your agency's future depends on its ability to adapt, deliver measurable and meaningful results, and develop professionals who are capable of providing consulting and services across multiple disciplines.

The market is moving fast, with growth opportunities everywhere, but do not come into it unprepared and try to sell services you are not qualified to deliver.

The marketing agency ecosystem, which consists of disruptors, traditionalists, softservers, specialists, connectors, and soloists, is client centric. This means agencies must continually evolve to meet client needs and demands.

Talent Cannot Be Replicated Model agencies are constructed one employee at a time. They do not allow market demand or outside expectations to dictate their growth, and they do not sacrifice the quality of their hires to satisfy short-term needs. They take a controlled, almost methodical, approach to expansion. They develop talent from within and construct teams based on shared values, innate abilities, and complementary character traits.

Constructing an agency filled with top talent establishes a distinct and formidable compet.i.tive advantage.

Although intelligence and experience are key, their character, internal drive, personality, and innate abilities are the intangibles that truly differentiate great candidates from good ones.

Hybrid agencies are built on a culture of we, succeeding and failing as one. Professionals are pa.s.sionately loyal to the agency and to each other.

Client acquisition and retention must be driven by the collective strength, reputation, and capabilities of the firm.

Professionals who are unmotivated or who fail to live up to their potential can negatively impact the team's performance, but more important, they drag down the morale and momentum of peers and leadership.

Professionals are given unparalleled opportunities for career advancement and encouraged to build strong personal brands.

The top firms, which will lead industry transformation and deliver the most value, are built from within. In order to excel and continually differentiate, agencies must have a solid strategy to recruit, advance, and retain emerging talent.

Hybrid professionals are trained to deliver services across search, mobile, social, content, a.n.a.lytics, web, PR, and e-mail marketing. They provide integrated solutions that historically required multiple agencies and consultants.

The Best Plan Is to Prepare for Perpetual Change Change velocity principles dictate that trying to plan for anything beyond three years is an exercise in futility. Have a vision for the long-term, but make infrastructure decisions based on current and short-term realities.

Success is an iterative process.

Hybrid agencies are built on a stable operational foundation with nimble management systems that enable them to execute and adapt faster than the compet.i.tion.

Making decisions too far ahead of the growth curve can cost you valuable resources now, but not planning for the contingencies of growth can be detrimental to your ability to profitably build your business in the future.

Marketing agencies are bound by the limitations of human resources.

Cloud applications offer rapid deployment, often without professional IT support. They enable agencies to build more agile systems that are capable of adapting quickly to changing business environments.

Doing Is the Key to Differentiation The marketing world is full of thinkers, talkers, and self-proclaimed gurus, but after awhile they all start to sound the same. What we need are more doers-agencies and professionals that drive change by practicing what they preach.

A hybrid agency is defined by the collective strength of its employees' personal brands. Your job as an agency leader is to clearly establish the agency brand, and then give your team the freedom and support to build and evolve theirs.

Treat your agency website with the same care and attention that you do your clients' websites. Continually a.n.a.lyze, track, and monitor its success through inbound links, traffic, referrers, and website visits by keywords, among other metrics.

When building your agency marketing strategy, be sure to think beyond prospects.

Agencies have the ability to reach and influence audiences directly at the exact moment they are searching online. In essence, they are granting you permission to market to them, but you have to be there, and provide value.

Social media is about listening, learning, building relationships, and bringing value to the communities relevant to your agency.

Content marketing enables you to differentiate your agency while driving acquisition (leads) and retention (loyalty). It requires that you understand your audiences and continuously publish compelling, multimedia content.

Public relations is about listening to your audiences, sharing your unique story, creating connections, gaining influence, and building loyalty in a measurable and meaningful way.

Everything Is Sales You are always selling. You are selling an idea, vision, service, agency brand, personal brand, and belief that your firm is more capable and qualified than the next one.

However, in a professional service firm, sales happens at every level of the company. It is often the account executives that have the most direct client contact, and, therefore, regardless of whether they are charged with it, they function as the agency's primary salespeople. They are the ones whose performance, behavior, and ability to build strong client relationships determine if an account stays or goes and whether clients provide referrals and testimonials.

Selling is both an art and a science that requires experience, education, and an intimate knowledge of the agency.

Concentrate on creating a sales system that meets your current needs for lead generation and that is scalable with your long-term growth goals.

When building your sales system, your most valued a.s.set is your team. No one individual sales or business development manager can possibly deliver the value and lead volume that you can create through a collective and strategic effort.

Sales processes help define responsibilities, set performance expectations, give professionals the knowledge and resources to excel, and connect actions to business goals.

In order to maximize the lead-generation and nurturing process, and increase the probability of conversion, it is important to understand how organizations make marketing-services buying decisions.

All Clients Are Not Created Equal Although agencies need to make every client feel valued, the reality is that some accounts are far more important to the stability and success of your agency, and they need to be treated different.

These priority accounts have a greater appreciation for your services; they value your people and treat your agency as a partner, not as a vendor. They pay bills on time (or early), have realistic expectations, and reasonable timelines, and they commit the time and energy needed to make the relationship work.

The need to build strong client relationships must be ingrained in an agency's culture. Employees should be 100 percent focused on the happiness and success of their clients.

Become indispensible through your hard work, insight, consultation, services, expertise, friendship, and professionalism.

Do the little things that build relationships, and take the time to show clients that you care about their successes, both on individual and organizational levels.

The greatest value you can bring to clients is staffing their account teams with A players. These professionals are a.n.a.lytical, confident, creative, detail oriented, highly motivated, and strategic-all traits that consistently translate into success for your clients.

Use nonbillable exercises to educate and train your team while enhancing the value you deliver to clients.

Agency management, as it relates to client loyalty, comes down to two things: intelligence and action. In order to take the actions necessary to retain and grow accounts, leaders have to have their finger on the pulse of the agency.

An Agency's Value Is Measured in Outcomes, Not Outputs Leading marketing agencies turn information into intelligence, and intelligence into action. They build campaigns that consistently produce measurable outcomes, including inbound links, website traffic, leads, and sales. Hybrid agencies must shift away from arbitrary metrics, such as media impressions, reach, advertising equivalency, and PR value, and become measurement geeks who are obsessed with data-driven services.

Marketing agencies from every discipline-advertising, PR, social, SEO, content, and web-have the opportunity to evolve and play an integral role in bringing structure and meaning to the wealth of information available to businesses.

Take a scientific approach to marketing, and develop processes to a.n.a.lyze data for insight that can increase efficiency and maximize ROI for clients.

Turn your hybrid professionals into a.n.a.lysts. Teach them to make decisions based on logic and reason. Show them how to gain insight from information, and how to use that insight to educate clients, build consensus, and drive action.

Every campaign should start with performance benchmarks, including current lead volume, inbound links, website traffic, content downloads, blog subscribers, and social media reach.

Builders are services designed to set the foundation for future success, while drivers are intended to produce short-term results. Your agency's ability to succeed and bring value to clients requires a balanced and strategic approach to both.

Never Hesitate to Head in a Direction That Others Seem to Fear Disruptors need to be willing to take risks that established agencies cannot or will not. While traditionalists try to fix their models, you should be focused on continually reinventing yours.

Failure builds character, teaches us humility, shows us how to cope with adversity, and challenges us to continually test, revise, and improve.

Marketing agency leaders have to make difficult choices to break from traditional agency-centric pricing models, invest in technology, recruit and retain hybrid professionals, build scalable infrastructures, and transform their services.

Traditionalists, along with soloists and specialists, have to put their fears aside and confront the challenges ahead. They have to think and act more like start-ups. They have to become disruptors themselves.

Be willing to deconstruct your brand and business model to remain relevant, and position yourself where the market is going.

Do not wait for desperate times to evolve.

If you are not scared and unsure when creating content and pushing new ideas, then it is probably not worth pursuing.

Give people something they did not know they wanted, and take them places they did not expect to go.

It Is Purpose, Not Profit, Which Defines an Agency We are programmed to set revenue goals, target growth rates, and measure our importance and value based on financial returns. We compare ourselves to industry benchmarks, flaunt our client lists, and tout our awards, because they create the perception of success and make us feel good about ourselves.

There is nothing wrong with having financial goals and achieving milestones, but these are simply means to an end. If you believe that your agency exists solely to make money, then you are likely falling short of your potential and cheating your employees of opportunities to realize theirs.

In order to find happiness, we must be a part of something greater than ourselves, something that we truly believe in.

True entrepreneurs will never be satisfied with riches alone. They have to effect change, and they will risk everything to make their visions reality.

Purpose evolves as the agency and its employees mature and as their perspectives and priorities change.

To create an enduring brand, you need to a.s.semble a team of talented and intrinsically motivated employees, build partnerships with like-minded organizations, and surround your agency with clients who value your professionals and services.

Success requires persistence, perseverance, and an uncommon drive to achieve remarkable things. There are no shortcuts and no guarantees.

The truly transformational agencies, the ones that will thrive and lead in the new marketing-services ecosystem, will pursue purpose.

Thank You Thank you for reading The Marketing Agency Blueprint. I wish you and your agency success. Please visit us at www.MarketingAgency Insider.com to learn more, join the agency community, and help lead the industry transformation.

Resources

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The Marketing Agency Blueprint presents 10 rules for building tech-savvy, hybrid agencies that are more efficient, influential, and profitable than traditional firms. This book was written as a practical and candid handbook to help agencies and consultants: 1. Build tech-savvy, hybrid firms.

2. Generate more qualified leads.

3. Win clients with value-based pricing.

4. Secure more long-term retainers.

5. Create diverse and recurring revenue streams.

6. Develop highly efficient management systems.

7. Construct more effective account teams.

8. Recruit and retain top talent.

9. Deliver greater results and value to clients.

10. Increase client loyalty.

However, the book is just the beginning. We have launched a website and online academy dedicated to building a more open and collaborative agency ecosystem. MarketingAgencyInsider.com is the hub for marketing agency news, information, resources, training, education, and engagement. The site features include: Marketing Agency Insider Blog: The Marketing Agency Insider blog serves up a mix of original and curated content, industry news, interviews, case studies, change-velocity a.s.sessments, and more. I invite you to subscribe, and send us your thoughts and ideas about topics you would like to see included in upcoming posts.

Marketing Agency Academy: The Marketing Agency Academy is an education and training program designed to accelerate industry transformation.

The Academy curriculum mirrors and expands on Marketing Agency Blueprint concepts and processes through live and on-demand webinars and original content. Visit Marketing AgencyInsider.com to register for upcoming events.

Resources: Check out the resource center on MarketingAgency Insider.com for access to management templates, guides, how-to videos, software recommendations, affiliate/VAR program opportunities, and relevant industry links. The resource center is continually updated with the following audiences in mind: Advertising agencies.

Brand-development agencies.

Content-marketing firms.

Copywriters.

Digital/interactive marketing agencies.

Graphic design shops.

Inbound marketing agencies.

Marketing-communications firms.

Marketing consultants.

PR agencies.

SEO firms.

Website development firms.

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