Drew McLellan is the Top Dog at Agency Management Institute. For the past 21 years, he has also owned and operated his own agency. Drew’s unique vantage point as being both an active agency owner and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies throughout the year, give him a unique perspective on running an agency today.
AMI works with agency owners by:
- Leading agency owner peer groups
- Offering workshops for owners and their leadership teams
- Offering AE bootcamps
- Conducting individual agency owner coaching
- Doing on-site consulting
- Offering online courses in agency new business and account service
Because he works with those 250+ agencies every year — he has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Augmented reality and virtual reality: what you need to know about this technology that is coming fast
- Influencer marketing: connecting your client’s brand with their audience through social influencers who have built an audience around a specific topic
- Ratings & Reviews: How agencies can turn a profit by solving this problem for existing clients (and how to use it as a door-opener for prospects)
- Why agencies are developing relationships with more people inside companies than just CMOs
- Why you need to play nice with the other agencies that you share a client with
- If you’re not being offered exclusivity, do you need to offer it in return?
- Selling what you know and what you think instead of “stuff”
- ROI: why it’s not an optional conversation
- Why you need to be transparent on your fees
- Bragworthy benefits like a student loan repayment program
Ways to contact Drew McLellan:
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Own a digital marketing agency? Learn how to keep content interesting and focused on business issues your clients are looking to solve.
Simon Thompson is the founder of Content Kite, a content marketing company that helps digital marketing agencies increase their quality and number of leads through content marketing.
Simon has held content marketing roles for some of the largest digital publishers in Australia such as Mi9 (Microsoft + Ch9), Daily Mail, and MTV. He’s worked on content projects for major global brands such as L’Oreal, Nissan, BMW, Adidas, Disney, and Mondelez, to name a few.
Whilst he was in a good place in his publisher roles in Australia, the entrepreneurial bug eventually took hold, and he decided to go out on his own and start Content Kite. He now runs Content Kite full-time and hasn’t looked back.
What you will learn about a digital marketing agency in this episode:
- How a digital marketing agency can keep its content interesting and on topic for the business issues and challenges your customers need to solve
- Focusing all your content so it moves toward the same goal
- Optimizing your content to collect email addresses and then regularly engaging with those people
- How a digital marketing agency can effectively repurpose content across multiple mediums
- The frequency with which you must create content
- Why you should spend as much time promoting a piece of content as you do in creating it
- Influencer outreach: how to actually motivate people to share your agency’s content by positioning them as authorities
- Tools for mapping out an editorial calendar for your digital marketing agency
- Why you must share a piece of content more than once
- How Content Kite works with agencies to create amazing content
Alex Berman is the founder and SVP of Operations of a marketing and lead generation firm Experiment27. Alex is responsible for generating over $2.5 million in B2B sales and over $50 million in leads for his clients. He also creates weekly videos to help agency owners grow their businesses and bring in more revenue teaching them how to optimize B2B sales cycles and put inbound marketing strategies in place.
Alex was also Chief Marketing Sumo at InspireBeats, a company valued at over $100 million, former Director of Marketing at three time INC 5000 company Dom & Tom. He is also a network video partner for Entrepreneur Magazine.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- The massive opportunity outbound marketing provides for agencies
- How to know if your marketing strategy is the right marketing strategy
- What to measure with your tracking software to make sure your leads are working
- The best channels for capturing leads
- Tailoring cold calls to the target
- Why cold emails need to be short and to the point
- Partnering with other agencies to take on overflow work/give away your overflow work
- How to capture leads at meetups/in-person events
- Making yourself memorable by connecting people
- How to do the follow-up right (it differs if you’ve actually met them or not)
- Why you need to set a KPI
Ways to Contact Alex Berman:
- Email: alex@experiment27.com
- Website: experiment27.com
- YouTube: b2bsalestraining.org
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Craig Barnes consults with owners of small to midsize advertising agencies to improve their people, processes and profitably. It’s the sum of a lot of experiences across 30+ years of owning and operating an advertising agency.
He learned early on that operating an agency was both rewarding and challenging and benefitted from seeking the counsel of others to help guide a path to growing his three-location agency.
As a 15+ year member of an AMI owner network group, Craig has fully lived AMI’s mission “to help agency owners increase their AGI, attract better clients and employees, mitigate the risks of being self employed in a such volatile business and best of all — let the agency owner actually enjoy the perks of owning the joint.”
While still involved with his agency, Craig now spends the majority of his time working with owners who seek AMI’s assistance to achieve their goals.
He has a passion for a hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves approach to analyzing issues and developing actionable solutions.
An amateur chef, Craig enjoys cooking for family and friends and has a not so secret desire to spend part of the year in Italy. He’ll also gladly share recipes with you.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- The key executives (#1s) group Craig facilitates for AMI
- What makes key executives so valuable
- Integrators: the employees that don’t want to be owners and just want to pull the levers
- How we as agency owners make life hard for integrators by not letting go of control
- Having an empowerment agreement with your #1s for setting expectations for who gets to control what
- Setting regular meetings with your key executive that you do not break
- How agency owners can know whether or not they’re ready for a #1 to take things over
- Traits that make for a great key executive
- How to compensate your #1s
- The impact key executives are having on agencies by committing to goals
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!