With the elongated sales cycles we have all seen throughout 2023, knowing your lifetime customer value is more important than ever. It’s essential not only for you as an agency but also to calculate that data for your clients.
Clients are looking for the most value for their money, and everyone is tightening their belts. Gone are the days of patient clients willing to wait around for results. Now, it’s all about data-driven, proven results that your agency can provide ASAP. If you can’t provide everything they need, they expect you to find the people who can partner with you to get it done.
In this episode, we’re discussing how you can adapt to the new era of agency ownership with data-driven metrics and proven results for your clients and their customers. We know it’s hard to adapt to a fast-changing and ever-adapting world of work, but we’re here to help you work through it and find innovative ways to stay ahead of the curve.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- Defining lifetime customer value
- How an agency can help a client calculate their lifetime customer value
- The trends and metrics that non-commerce agencies can analyze for their LCV
- How LCV calculations can help you and your clients get smarter about budgeting
- Why agencies are struggling to acquire new customers and how to adapt
- The growing importance of agency syndication
- The swinging pendulum of agency hiring
- The 3 pillars of customer value optimization
- How agencies can troubleshoot for their clients and course-correct their offerings
It’s that time of year again — we’re evaluating the 2023 Agency Edge Research study, where we polled people who hire agencies about what they expect from agencies and what gets them to open their wallets for us.
Despite a challenging year of having to find creative ways to get existing clients to spend more money with us, a lot of good news came out of this study. Overall, existing clients with larger budgets are much more willing to stick with an agency and spend more money if we present them with a compelling reason to do so.
What do we do with that information? We’ve been preparing you for months leading up to this study, covering many of the topics we’ll see today. So, if you missed any of those episodes, be sure to go back so you can be on top of your game going into 2024.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- The three main client archetypes
- How the three archetypes spend their money
- How clients use agencies to fill their different needs
- The revenue and budget breakdowns of each existing client group
- What makes a current client want to spend more money with us, and when
- The biggest motivation existing clients have for increasing their spend
- What clients believe makes the best agency
- The increased importance of client love and getting to know their teams
- Why we should be pitching new ideas to our clients and asking them to experiment with us
Part of being an agency means that you solve problems for a living. Clients come to you with a problem, and it’s up to you and your team to figure out the solution and present it to them in a neat package. Simply put, creative innovation is woven into the DNA of an agency.
Under pressure and deadlines, creative innovation can quickly be squashed, rushed, or underprioritized. But Carla Johnson, an ideation and innovation expert, has studied and produced an effective formula for how agencies can reinvigorate their creative strategies.
Her methodology can be incorporated with client projects and daily agency strategy to improve systems and processes. Innovation doesn’t always have to be creative, but getting creative about innovation can change how your team solves problems and could even save you time and money when putting it to the test.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- What our clients are really hiring us to do
- Figuring out how to connect the dots more efficiently
- Innovative ways to approach creative ideation on your team
- Bringing clients into the creative innovation process
- Getting creative about systems and processes during growth moments in the agency
- The 5-step Wheel of Innovation
- Weaving creative thinking into everyday life
- The intersection of business strategy and creative innovation
It’s that time of year again — we’re going over the top agency trends we’re noticing so far in 2023 and going into 2024. A lot has changed since the last time we went over the data, which means we have a ton of information that you’ll hopefully find valuable and can use as a compass for where to lead your agency through the rest of the year heading into 2024.
As we exit the pandemic era and move into the AI era, there’s a lot to consider in how agencies function regarding what our clients want, how fast our sales cycle moves, how we hire, where we should focus our biz dev, and more.
One thing is certain — many agency owners like you feel re-energized and reinvigorated coming out of 2022. Let this episode be a ray of light that gives you an extra boost of encouragement for the rest of 2023, and keep that momentum going for as long as possible.
For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- The impacts of recession fears on AGI and revenue
- ROI — the new agency buzzword
- A growing agency trend in having amazing teams
- Rebalancing overservicing and overstaffing issues
- The fading trend of over-specialization of agencies
- The PPC, SEO, and data analyst job boom
- A positive trend in agency owner happiness
- The continued importance of thought leadership and community spaces
- The agency employee trends of 2023
- Embracing AI and using it as a tool for your work