Online communities are quickly becoming one of the most powerful biz dev tools out there, but there’s etiquette to starting and maintaining one. It’s not for everyone, but for those who are ready, an online community could be your ticket to selling without ever having to actually sell.
This week, we’re continuing the conversation about online communities vs. online audiences, and the vast benefits they can offer to agency owners. Now that we’ve established the differences between an audience and a community, it’s time to ask ourselves deeper questions about why and how we should start one.
The main purpose of starting an online community shouldn’t be selling or profiting from its members. But if you’re in it to genuinely help others and create an avenue for collective thought leadership and connection, increased sales are just part of the benefits.
If you think starting an online community could be the right move for your agency, tune in to this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency.
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.
In This Episode:
- How to start an online community (who, what, where, why)
- Are you starting a community for the right reasons?
- Why you should expect nothing in return from online communities
- Identifying your target audience
- What a community leader should provide to community members, and vice versa
- The main difference between a community and an audience
- 3 questions to ask yourself before creating a community
- Consistency wins over complexity in online community building
- How to benefit from a community without starting one yourself
- Using online communities as a powerful biz dev tool
- Qualifying your community members
Everybody has a story they’re trying to tell, and brands play a massive role in people’s stories, whether they realize it or not. Most of the time, the stories consumers associate with a brand aren’t what we think they are. This is where behavioral economics becomes vital to creating an effective marketing strategy.
Behavioral economics is a study that attempts to make sense of people’s behavior around spending. We don’t always make spending decisions in our best interest and often base purchasing decisions on our emotions. In fact, people usually connect and interact with brands the same way they connect with people.
This leaves brands with a lot of pressure on their backs. If you ignore your loyal customers’ needs and wants, they will feel deeply betrayed. But if you listen to their stories and get to the core of what they’re looking for, you’ll build a trust that feels like a close friendship.
The psychology behind consumer behavior is complicated but fascinating. Join us this week to discover how brands can use behavioral economics to build an effective marketing strategy that fosters deep trust from your customers.
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 is behavioral economics?
- Why people build human-like relationships with brands
- How narrative psychology can improve our relationships with our customers
- Clues that a brand uses narrative psychology well
- Convincing clients that a strategy based on behavioral psychology is worth investing in
- How strategic changes ripple throughout a whole organization
- Getting to the bottom of your customer story
- What brands get wrong about customer stories
- Why feelings of betrayal run deep when brands miss the mark
In-person networking is still a big deal. After a brief Covid hiatus, trade shows, conferences, and workshops are back and bigger than ever. So, if you or your team plan on attending any of these events soon, it’s important to get up to date on the do’s and don’ts of networking at these events.
Instead of being stuck with a stack of business cards and struggling to recall conversations with specific individuals from an event, seasoned keynote speaker Dave Delaney shares how to manage and nurture your client and prospect interactions effectively.
Not sure how to strike up a conversation with a prospect or keynote speaker? Or what about when you get home from the event and still want to close a potential sale without sounding too spammy? Dave shares insights on approaching these topics and more during this episode.
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:
- Why in-person networking is still essential
- How we get networking and connecting with others wrong
- Networking best practices for competitors, prospects, and keynote speakers
- The etiquette behind not being creepy or pushy to your peers
- How to get people’s information while you’re at the show
- Don’t count on the other person to reach out to you after the show
- How to create meaningful relationships with people after trade shows and conferences
- Focus on relationship-building over getting someone in your sales funnel
After a tough sales year in 2023, many of you have been looking for the next thing to consistently fill your sales pipeline with new prospects. With sales cycles taking longer than before, it’s essential always to have warm prospects teed up and ready to go. But how?
The answer is in thought leadership combined with lead gen and lead magnets. Positioning yourself and your agency as an authority in your niche (and giving some of it away for free) generates trust in your agency’s expertise before they’ve officially met you.
When done right, lead gen can be mostly automated. And having great lead magnets like a podcast or YouTube channel, or offering a free mini-service to prospects to get them interested in your services will build trust and establish your agency as a thought leader in your niche.
This week, Jay Feldman shares his tips and tricks for how his agencies used automated lead gen and lead magnets to still be profitable in a challenging sales year. This episode is packed with actionable insights that you’ll want to take notes on, so make sure you have a pen and paper ready to go, and check out the links in the show notes for all of the programs and tools he mentions during the interview.
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:
- How lead gen and lead magnets turned a bad sales year into a good one
- Commit to being relentlessly helpful to others
- What Jay’s agencies used as lead magnets to attract attention from prospects
- How to retain the clients you close from lead gen
- Giving big wins early on when working with new clients
- Establishing trust authority in the first 90-120 days with lead gen clients
- Cold email tactics that work
- What defines success for lead gen and lead magnets
- Scalable lead magnets that bring results
- Avoiding shiny object syndrome and doing what works for your agency
We’ve all been here before — your agency grows, and your day-to-day is getting a little too chaotic for comfort. Each team member has their own way of doing things, and no one is on the same page about the best approach to doing recurring tasks. As the agency owner, you’re getting pulled into things that you shouldn’t, becoming the organization’s bottleneck.
If that’s you, it’s time to break that cycle with some project management software.
With a million choices and a few that have become the industry standard, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly which is right for your agency. Often, agencies will pick one based on how popular or how pretty it is, and forget about its functionality specific to your agency’s day-to-day needs.
This week, Alane Boyd is clearing the fog around project management software to help us decide if we need one — and if so, what tools and functionality we should be looking out for that will get our productivity back on track.
Don’t be afraid to take the time to really learn what tools are right for your team, and be generous with how long it takes for the new systems and processes to become sticky. Once you find one that works, your agency productivity will be back and better than ever.
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 benefits of project management software
- Taking your time learning new systems and software
- The signs an agency is ready for a PM software
- Questions to ask yourself before choosing which product is best for you
- Why capacity planning is the most important factor for choosing a project management software
- How to recognize if you’re using the wrong tool
- Training your project managers to use a new tool
- Setting up a project management tool to automate recurring tasks
- Considering the internal and external integrations of a PM tool that are necessary for your agency
- Finding a tool that your team is willing to adopt
- The most common mishaps with picking a project management software
Humans are hardwired to belong, and the desire to be a part of something bigger than ourselves is in our blood. Whether we connect over shared values, a favorite sports team, a hobby, or even just from living near one another, we can find community and belonging all around us.
These days, many of us are finding community online through social media and spreading our social nets wider than ever. This leaves a huge opportunity for agency leaders to build their own online communities to help others learn and share their experiences about business leadership, entrepreneurship, or any form of thought leadership in which they excel.
Online communities should, first and foremost, be a way to bring people together with shared goals and interests, but the benefits reach far beyond that. With enough time and care, they can become robust sales and networking tools that do the prospecting work for you.
But it’s not for everyone, and that’s ok.
In this week’s solocast, I’m doing a deep dive into the ins and outs of creating online communities, building an audience online, and how to make sure you’re doing it all for the right reasons. With enough patience, online community building could become your agency’s secret sales weapon that provides perks and benefits for the people in it.
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.
In This Episode:
- What is a community, and how does it relate to work?
- The difference between an audience and a community
- Online communities do the selling for you
- B2B brands have less competition in creating online communities
- Asking yourself the who, what, where, and why before starting a community
- How communities make biz dev easier for agencies
- Being a safe harbor for people as a community leader
- Community building isn’t for everyone
- 3 questions to ask yourself to determine if you should build a community or an audience
- How to build an online community and spread the word about it
- Having a community is a long game — have a growth plan
Sales cycles are elongated, but that doesn’t mean agencies can’t still win new clients. If we change how we think about and approach prospecting, we can up our client outreach game to really hone in on our right-fit clients without being too sales-y about it.
In this episode, I talk with Dan Englander about how to stand out against the competition in our prospecting and outreach efforts. He shares how personalized client outreach can cut through the noise and win us new business more often if we just take the time to commit and dial in our systems and processes.
He also shares some tips and tricks for smaller agencies looking to build a sales team for the first time. You’ll learn how to identify the right hire who cares about solving your clients’ issues and won’t just read from a script or phone it in.
If you’re among the majority of agency owners who are ready to get out of the slow sales cycle and want to revamp your sales efforts this year, be sure to tune in to this advice-packed episode.
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 are companies looking to agencies for the most?
- Rethinking when it’s the right time to reach out to prospects
- A continued move toward specialization and thought leadership
- How to build and strengthen trust in the sales process
- Focusing on more than one niche isn’t a bad thing
- Best practices for personalizing client outreach efforts
- Consistency is key
- Walking the walk and talking the talk to build client trust
- Getting past the noise to stand out in your client outreach
- How a smaller shop can start building a sales team
- Common mistakes in sales training
In a sharp contrast to the earlier pandemic years, many agency owners said that in 2023, they have the best teams they’ve ever had and want to find ways to keep them around. This is great news, and we want to help keep your agency dream team alive and thriving.
To help in that journey, HR expert Barbara Mason joins me to share what agency owners and leaders can do to help make their employees feel like valued team members while staying true to the agency’s mission and values.
She is a fountain of knowledge — from interviewing best practices and why HR experts need to be a part of your business to how to create the agency culture you want while caring for your agency employees as whole people. She’ll even share her top 3 secret interview questions she uses to get potential hires thinking about how they fit into the agency’s mission and values.
This episode is full of practical and common-sense tips that will hopefully get the gears going and help you keep your agency dream team alive and thriving in 2024 and beyond.
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:
- Two simple things that will help you keep your agency dream team happy
- Transparency goes a long way with agency employees, but know the limits
- What makes a healthy agency culture?
- How more introverted business owners can engage and connect with their employees
- How benefits packages have changed post-Covid
- Creating agency culture in a hybrid or fully remote environment
- The importance of knowing what you’re hiring for and interviewing accordingly
- Motivating agency employees to be more engaged in the work
- HR’s role in having a succession plan for the business
- Interview best practices for agency leadership
- Exercising radical candor in agency communications
- Employment trends to keep an eye on in 2024
- The biggest mistake agency owners make with their people
Video budgets are up in 2024, which means the demand for video content from clients will be high this year. For agencies, it also indicates that we must start utilizing this incredible business development tool for ourselves to know what’s up when our clients ask about it.
Not only that, but video content creation is an incredible medium for agencies in prospecting, connecting with current clients, and gaining valuable data and metrics on what content is engaging to your audience.
Are prospects clicking off your video in the first 10 seconds? Are they even opening the email? Or are they going back to watch it again and again? Video tracking and metrics give us all these answers and more.
Ready to learn more about what will soon be your best business development tool in 2024? Join us in this week’s Build a Better Agency to discover more about the power of video for agency growth.
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:
- How video helps you connect deeper with people
- Making videos vs. being a content creator
- Getting comfortable on camera and remaining authentic
- Deciding what types of videos you want to create and where to share them
- 5 ways agencies can use video to connect with clients
- Teaching clients to use video as a business development tool
- What video data and metrics can tell us about our content
- Using video to market and grow your agency
What exactly makes an insight versus just an observation? What are the different types out there? How the heck do we uncover them? This week, we’re getting insightful about insights and laying out the key characteristics of strong agency insights — like inspiring action and reframing problems.
Chris Kocek will share his favorite techniques for generating insights during brainstorming sessions, like continually asking “why” like a toddler until you reach some real gold. With agencies feeling more and more pressure these days to stay competitive and continuously innovate, it’s important to know what really gets us to those “ah-ha” moments before building out a whole campaign.
And once you uncover those golden nuggets, really selling them to your team for maximum impact is the cherry on top. Join us in this insightful episode to learn how to piece together all of these agency insight strategies from one of the pros.
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:
- Getting to the core of the word “insight”
- Do agencies always need to feel pressured to be insightful?
- When agency owners should be pushing for more insights from their team
- The 3 different types of agency insights
- Inspiring action and problem-solving through insightful thinking
- The methodology behind building insights
- How to sell innovative ideas to clients
If there’s one word that will send any agency owner or employee running for the hills, it’s timesheets. Although one of the most universally disliked words in the agency world, timesheets are still the number one way to detect and diagnose problems within the agency before they become catastrophes.
Essentially, they’re your best friend whether you like it or not.
Timesheets, especially when completed daily by all agency employees (including the agency owner), will give you invaluable data about your agency’s day-to-day operations and where there’s room for improvement.
For agency owners, daily timesheets will show you inefficiencies, areas where more staffing is needed, needs for more training, and so much more. For agency employees, this is your ticket to job security, bonuses, promotions, and recognition for excellent work.
Tune in to learn more about why daily timesheets are essential for agency owners and employees and how to get everyone on board with the practice this year.
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.
In This Episode:
- Why early detection matters for agency operations
- The diagnostic warning signs that your agency isn’t running effectively
- What daily timesheets show us about our agency
- How timesheets and time-tracking metrics can boost our profitability
- Why do them daily vs. weekly?
- Why timesheets are a good thing and help agency employees defend themselves
- How to get your team on board
You’ve probably heard of IQ, EQ, or even SQ (spiritual intelligence), but have you heard of NQ? For those new to the term, it’s natural intelligence, or our ability to tap into our inner wisdom to guide us in our decision-making in the most high-stakes situations.
In life and leadership alike, we tend to let our ego get in the way of our decision-making. It’s normal, but it’s not often helpful for reaching our goals or leading our teams effectively. Instead, we should be listening to our natural intelligence to guide our leadership decisions.
This is how animals survive in the wild. They don’t have the ability to overthink or hide away from a challenge like humans can. Instead, they innately know how to act in order to stay alive or lead their pack to victory.
If we approach leadership in a similar manner, we can access a side of our leadership abilities we might not have known we had. To access it, all we have to do is learn to observe nature and understand our own gut reactions to survival moments. Join us to learn more about finding our personal natural intelligence and how to apply it to agency leadership.
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 is NQ?
- How to apply natural intelligence to your business leadership
- The obstacles to us tapping into NQ
- To tap into natural intelligence, you must know yourself
- Gaining self-insight and peer insight as a leader
- What horses can teach us about rotational leadership
- Coaching NQ abilities out of your leadership teams
- Trusting your gut and getting over the fear of judgment from peers
- The different benefits of prey, predator, freeze, and flock mode in business
- Why having the ability to access different modes can be beneficial in agency leadership
It’s clear we can’t keep hiring and managing talent as we used to. Back in the days of the pandemic, and then The Great Resignation right after that, we were afraid to set boundaries and ask for what we needed out of fear of losing great team members.
The way we work isn’t the same, either. Many of us are now remote or hybrid, and a fully in-office team isn’t as common as it used to be. So, we have to adapt and change how we hire, train, and problem-solve with our teams scattered all over the place.
It’s a mess sometimes, and many of you probably wish we could go back to the simpler days of training new hires through simple observation and shadowing. But we can still make this work for the new era of work.
Vicky Brown is sharing some of her HR superpowers with us this week so we can learn about hiring, managing, and retaining great talent, regardless of the work environment. The simple answer is that we must roll up our sleeves and invest time in our people from the very first interview.
Join us to dive deeper into the world of HR to discover how to be a better leader while hiring and managing talent so you can make your agency more successful in return.
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:
- Leadership’s perspective on remote, hybrid, and in-office workplace structures
- Agency owner fears regarding hiring and managing talent
- Getting agency teams engaged and feeling fulfilled with their work
- How new hire training has changed in the new era of work
- Hybrid work is the future
- In-person creative brainstorming is still important in agencies
- Finding enthusiastic hires who remain passionate and hungry at work
- How to do behavior interviewing for potential new hires
- Conducting mid-year HR checkups for taxes, payroll errors, benefits, etc.
- How to talk to employees about coming back to the office
This year, agencies are in for many industry changes — and fast. We’ve been scratching the surface a little with AI ever since ChatGPT first dropped, but even since then, everything has changed drastically. To start the year, we’re shifting our focus to learning how agencies can use AI tools to become AI consulting powerhouses.
Many agency owners and employees have been learning how to integrate AI tools into their day-to-day over the past year or so, from writing, planning, research, and more. Now, it’s time to take it to the next level (and to our clients).
This week, Casey Meehan shows us how agencies can become thought leaders and subject matter experts for their clients using AI tools. Over his time as an agency leader, he has shifted from traditional marketing and PR work to creating content repurposed for AI consulting to teach clients how to harness the power of AI and create personalized content for their audience.
Although there’s something new in the AI market each day, it’s an exciting time to take advantage and lead the movement toward becoming thought leaders and experts for our clients through AI consulting work.
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:
- Making the shift from traditional marketing and PR to AI consulting work and content creation
- The cornerstone and cobblestone approach to content creation
- The new look of agency staffing with AI tools
- Using AI to make the agency function better internally
- Bringing personalized results into the sales process with “Just in Time Content”
- The different modalities of AI chatbots and their unique skills
- Publishing and promoting content through cited subject matter experts
- Where agency leaders should be setting their sights on AI tools
There’s no other way to spin it — agency owners had it rough in 2023. And while we spent all year going over the struggles of agency ownership, one universal positive kept coming up with everyone.
Your teams are better than ever, and you want to learn how to keep your agency employees happy, so they stick around.
So this week, we’re turning to some of our Agency Edge research to dive into what agency employees said are the key factors that keep them happy and willing to stick around for the long haul.
While the assumption is that you’re already fairly compensating them and creating a fair and inclusive workplace, there are some less obvious things that really matter to agency employees. They could even be the difference between a star player staying for 10 to 15 years instead of three or four.
This episode will teach you the dos and don’ts of increasing employee retention and really going above and beyond to help your teams feel valued and cared for. It’s got a lot of valuable tips and tricks, so if you’re curious about how to keep your agency employees satisfied, don’t miss out on this episode.
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.
In This Episode:
- Recognizing that not every agency employee will want to stick around forever, and it’s not personal
- The one thing you should not do to earn employee loyalty
- Why offering equity or partnership in the company is almost always a bad idea
- What agency employees actually want from agency owners
- Setting quarterly growth goals for employees
- Creating space to truly get to know your people beyond work
- Rewarding employees for their effort fairly, but not equally
- Getting agency employees involved in deciding their own perks for excellent work
- Simply ask your employees what will make them stay
- Get personal and thoughtful with your praise