How to Market an Agency: 10 Lessons From 10 Years in the Industry
“The cobbler’s son has no shoes.” Unfortunately, this saying applies to many marketing agencies. You see, a marketing agency provides a professional service. While they may drive impressive results for clients in particular industries, those same strategies and tactics might not work to generate qualified business leads and opportunities.
As an agency leader, you might know this. But your people trying to market the agency might have a hard time figuring it out. After all, spending hours each day making sure your Instagram grid is aesthetically pleasing is time well spent…right?
After more than a decade working in agencies, I’ve held client-facing roles, internal-facing roles, sales roles, R&D roles, and today I own a small digital marketing agency. Even though I know the business model fairly well, I still think it’s really f*cking hard to market an agency. So take my $0.02 with a grain of salt. Here are 10 lessons I’ve learned from the last 10 years working in an agency business.
Show agency value in your brand
Understand your buyer’s trigger moments
Clearly articulate your niche or specialty
Co-create content with clients
Build a referral program
Invest in personal branding
Leverage influencers
Work with the right partners
Collaborate on building the process
Recognize contributions to marketing
Need help marketing your agency? Simply reach out to start a conversation.
Ok, now let’s break each of these 10 lessons down with examples and frameworks:
1. Show agency value in your brand
The cornerstone of successful agency marketing is the ability to showcase the unique value your agency brings to the market. For instance, if your agency specializes in research, consider the impact of publishing original research. During my tenure leading research services at Hinge, this strategy not only enhanced our SEO but also served as compelling content for social media, digital PR, and webinars. Lesson #1 underscores the critical importance of aligning your marketing efforts with the core strengths of your agency to create a resonant and differentiated brand.
If you’re a research agency, publish original research
If you’re a PPC agency, run ads for lead generation
If you’re a content agency, create killer content
For example, I led research services at Hinge Marketing for a while. We published original research that fueled search, social, digital PR, webinars, and more. Below is a visual of a content marketing framework that shows how research was used as a source that fueled other channels:
2. Understand your buyer’s trigger moments
In the dynamic world of marketing, change is the driving force of opportunity. Recognizing and leveraging your buyer's trigger moments can significantly impact your agency's success. A trigger moment is what sets someone into an active buying journey. They know are motivation to take action.
Conducting thorough audience research to identify these trigger moments and staying attuned to market signals is a crucial aspect of effective agency marketing. This lesson emphasizes the need for agility and strategic insight to position your agency effectively in response to evolving market dynamics.
“Change is the engine of opportunity.” And in the marketing world, change happens all the time. Especially when it comes to people and careers.
For buyers of agency services, one of the biggest trigger moments is when a marketing leader changes jobs. They come into a new position, take stock of what they have, and sometimes fire their existing agency so they can put their stamp on the marketing program early on in their tenure.
Keeping an ear to the ground to uncover these market signals is a key part of agency marketing and sales. But first, you need to do audience research to uncover trigger moments and jobs to be done.
3. Clearly articulate your agency’s niche with content
Don’t try to boil the ocean. Instead, clearly define the unique value your agency brings to clients in concise messaging. Format these messages on your website, in pitch decks, on social media, and other external-facing channels.
Reinforce the messaging with social proof. Testimonials and client case stories are a great way to do this. They highlight how your expertise and services solved specific business challenges. Position the client as the hero of the story. On a recent Breaking BizDev episode, my co-host Mark and I broke down the client success story in professional services. Here’s a clip that translates well to the agency world:
Next, produce content that speaks directly to the pain points and needs of your niche audience. There are many content marketing frameworks you can use to keep your team aligned. Engage in industry-specific events and communities to build relationships with people who represent ideal client profiles.
4. Co-create content with clients
Taking the concept of case studies to a new level, co-creating content with clients adds an authentic dimension to your agency's narrative. Recording conversations between clients and account leads, such as podcast interviews, provides a transparent view of your agency's collaboration and expertise.
Drawing on my experience as the director of marketing at Silverback Strategies, where I moderated a podcast interview between a client and the account team lead, this lesson advocates for going beyond traditional case studies. It encourages agencies to leverage dynamic content that allows potential clients to witness the chemistry and effectiveness of working with your team.
This takes case studies a step further. Record a conversation between an ideal client and the account lead. Chances are, they have good chemistry. It will shine through in the recording.
On the Digital Marketing Troop podcast, I moderated a podcast interview between a Silverback client and the account team lead. I tee’d them up with a few questions and then got out of the way. This was a great way to show what it was like to work with the team:
5. Build a referral program
Referrals tend to close faster and often make fantastic clients. But waiting for referrals to come to you serendipitously is hardly a reliable growth strategy.
Instead, create some structure with a referral program. Turn satisfied clients into advocates and organically expand your client base. It's a cost-effective way to secure high-quality leads, leveraging existing relationships to drive new business. By incentivizing referrals, you tap into a powerful network effect, fostering a continuous cycle of client recommendations and agency growth.
On a recent episode of Breaking BizDev, my co-host Mark and I talked about a process for generating referrals. This can be a great place to start if you’re thinking about building a referral program for your agency:
6. Invest in personal branding
Building personal brands within your agency fosters credibility and trust. Clients connect with individuals, so showcasing your team's expertise positions your agency as a go-to authority. It also humanizes your brand, creating lasting client relationships built on the strengths and personalities of your team members.
Between 2019-2020, I co-hosted the Visible Expert podcast with Kelly Waffle. Recently, I caught up with Kelly to chat about our experience co-hosting that show together. The premise of the show was to highlight the journeys of prominent experts to becoming a well-known authority in their field. In the video below, Kelly and I speak about the various ways the podcast made an impact on the business and our target listeners.
7. Leverage influencers
Leveraging key industry voices amplifies your reach, establishing trust and credibility. Collaborating with respected figures fosters authentic connections, driving brand visibility and fostering community engagement.
I began following Katelyn Bourgoin in 2021 and absolutely love her content. (If you don’t subscribe to Why We Buy, you should do so right now.) Naturally, when Silverback contracted with Katelyn to do a workshop on how to do customer interviews, I was ecstatic. I asked her if she would do an interview on the Digital Marketing Troop podcast. It ended up being the most-downloaded episode. The halo effect of her personal brand lifted it up.
You don’t have to luck into these influencer relationships like I did with Katelyn. Below is an illustration that depicts a content marketing framework you can use to “borrow” ideas from existing thought leaders and tie in your product or service. For agencies, these influencers could be individuals who serve a similar target audience with complimentary products or services.
8. Work with the right partners
Strategic partnerships are a cornerstone of agency growth. By working with the right partners, agencies can create synergies that lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. Here are some ways you can leverage partnerships for your agency:
Service delivery
Lead generation
Media production
Referral programs
Tech implementation
Co-marketing activities
Fractional business support
9. Collaborate with your people on building the process
In agencies, there can sometimes be too many cooks in the kitchen. It can slow projects down and cause otherwise brilliant strategies to wilt and die. A good process keeps agency projects moving.
In my experience, process development works best when a small team does a pilot test, documents the workflows, and slowly involves other people as they build. When key team players are involved in the workflow construction, more people are likely to buy-in and adopt the process.
10. Recognize contributions to marketing
In an agency, you’re all in it together. Bring in new clients and keep the good ones for a long time. That’s the goal.
Rewards and recognition typically go to sales heroics and achieving client results, in my experience. Contributions to agency marketing tend to go unheralded.
If your marketing strategy includes showing your agency value in your brand (lesson #1), then your people should be in a position to contribute. That makes it easy to recruit help and reward contributions. You do it for clients, so you can do it for yourself with the right structure.
Market your agency more effectively
After more than a decade of working in agency businesses, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to market an agency. It’s not easy, but it can be done. If you need help, simply reach out or shoot me a message on LinkedIn or X.
