3-Part Marketing Plan for Agencies

Here’s the cruel reality about agency new business: it’s not a swift process.

That’s not to say there aren’t things you can do quickly to goose leads in the pipeline (and sometimes that’s necessary and unavoidable).

What you might ask yourself is: does this contribute to a longer term sustainable strategy? Or is this keeping you chained to a feast-or-famine cycle that many agencies complain about?

Is it possible to carve out even a portion of your time to start thinking about the longer term?

I'm talking about how you show up in the world as an agency. Who you are, what you do, and why someone should care.

That message must be built from your agency's core positioning. But that message also needs legs. It needs to breathe and expand across all the places you’re interacting with your ideal clients.

In other words, your message is more likely to reach its audience if it’s supported by a marketing strategy.

Marketing builds trust over time (you know this, of course, because you're a marketing professional) and has the power to build a relationship with your prospects well before you have your first sales call. 

That’s useful if you lead a small agency because it offers leverage. Good marketing reaches an audience far larger than you could through outreach alone. 

It’s also a hedge against the low odds that you’ll be in the right place at exactly the right time when your prospect is looking for an agency like yours. Marketers aren’t looking to hire an agency every day. Timing is a big part of agency business development.

So, what’s a good marketing plan for an agency?

One that gets done, first and foremost.

Look, I know that your time comes at a premium and you’re not easily convinced to squeeze more into an already packed schedule. 

But, if you’re one of those agency leaders I speak to that says “we just need to do a better job of getting the word out there”, ask yourself why this is a problem and how have you tried to solve it in the past?

I see a lot of agency owners trying to solve it by sending more intro emails to prospects who don’t know them. Or hiring a LinkedIn lead generation firm.

It’s not that these tactics objectively don’t work. It’s that most small agencies aren’t well set up to make them work.

Back to your marketing strategy.

It’s best if it fits snugly within a broader new business plan – I think of it as a New Business Operating System – and it doesn’t have to be complicated.

A while back I found a simple 3-part “minimalist marketing” framework from content marketing expert Mariah Coz that I borrow from liberally in my BUILD WIN SCALE© model. It has three steps that are designed to work together and to scale:

1 - Find a Visibility Channel by borrowing someone else's audience. 

One way to do this is through a strategic partnership with a non-competitive service provider that shares the same ideal client audience. For example, a digital design agency might partner with a hosting platform. You’re looking for leverage here. What businesses or organizations can expand your reach and at the same can benefit from distributing your content or expertise to their audience? 

2 - Once the Visibility Channel is up and working, you’ll have a source for growing your mailing list. Deepen the relationship with the audience you own through an Email Marketing Channel. 

Before you push back and tell me no one wants to get more email, email is still the primary content distribution channel for B2B marketers (and most of them say they’d rather give up social media than email). Plus, this is an owned channel filled with people whose attention you earned. 

3 - Develop a Nurture Channel. This is evergreen (or near-evergreen) content that is searchable such as a webinar series, a blog, a podcast, or a book and that positions you and your firm as experts in your area. It’s a nurture channel because it just may take months or even years of a prospect listening faithfully to your podcast before they have an opportunity to work with you. 

Nurture channels are really good at building a reputation, but they probably require the biggest investment in time. 

Start with email marketing, since it’s a platform you own and control, unless you don’t have an email list. 

In which case, build it by leveraging someone else’s audience through a visibility channel.

Above all, start.