If I asked 20 inbound marketing agency owners, "what is your biggest challenge," the answers would probably all be the wrong answers.
The biggest challenge facing inbound agencies is not hiring, it’s not culture, it’s not picking the right clients, it’s not pricing and it’s not technology.
The biggest challenge facing inbound marketing agencies today is that we’re all not good enough at inbound to make it obvious why businesses should invest in inbound and hire us.
What this means is there’s going to be pricing pressure on all of us. While most of you are correctly raising your prices, your clients and prospects don’t know enough about inbound to differentiate between your $8,000 a month engagement and a $6,000 a month engagement, so they’re picking the cheaper option—putting pressure on all of us to now lower our prices. This is bad, actually very bad.
In essence, our market is overheated. There are too many agencies doing the same things, offering the same services, telling the same stories and producing the same mediocre results. It’s a bubble that’s going to burst and the result will be a reflection on inbound marketing—potentially making it another fad that failed to live up to the hype. This is even worse.
We have to prevent that from happening by doubling down on the work required to ensure inbound marketing lives up to its promises and the results from inbound are quantifiable, predictable and reliable for all our clients regardless of their budget and experience.
Here’s what you should be doing about this.
Focus On Services Not Sales
Every agency owner I talk to wants to get more new business but at the same time they talk about how they can’t keep the business they have. The whole in the bottom of the bucket makes filling up the bucket much harder.
If your clients are never leaving you because you do amazing work for them and you’ve transformed their business, then you only need a few new clients to grow your companies. But if you’re constantly losing clients because you didn’t meet their expectations, then you have a much bigger problem.
Focus on getting client's results, don’t meet their expectations, exceed their expectations and the buzz, referrals and connections from your current customer base will more than fuel your own new business efforts.
Make Sure Your Team Can THINK Their Way To Program Performance
A lot of people think inbound marketing is just a series of playbooks and that its formulaic. Do these four things and the results will follow. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As with any marketing tactic, it almost never works exactly as you expected and constantly requires adjustments based on knowledge, experience and skill. It’s not a turnkey system. It is a system but it’s one that requires a vast array of tactics, creative applications and analysis to make it work.
You can’t turn this system over to junior people or people who have little to no experience with inbound marketing programs. You need people who can think. People who can look at a landing page and find four areas that could potentially improve conversion rates on that page, set up four separate tests, explain their thinking behind the experiments and then execute those tests making forward thinking decisions based on the results and keeping track of the performance over time. Do you have people who can do that? If not, you better get them.
Know What Makes Your Agency Different
Look around at the inbound agencies in your local market and across the national market. Do a Google search and take a look at the top agencies, do you look different? Do you tell different stories? Do you offer different services? If your review produces the results I expect it to produce, you have a problem.
When people don’t know what makes you different, do you know what they use to make their purchase decision? Price. Welcome to the commoditized inbound marketing agency community. While there might be plenty of business to go around today, pretty soon you’re going to be losing business to agencies who have no business even saying they’re inbound agencies. Regardless, they are and they’re charging less and they’re winning business.
Innovate Don’t Copy
I get the lure of the inbound community. The agency owners are super friendly, they love sharing and they all have great ideas. The problem—all of us have all of the great ideas. None of our agencies look or sound different because we’re all working together to do the same thing.
Innovation is what you need to be thinking about, not how you copy what another agency is doing by adding it to your agency. Potential clients are telling us they don’t know how to differentiate between your agency, the other local inbound agency or the inbound agency across the country.
You’re going to have to start innovating what you do, how you do it, how you work with clients, how you charge clients and how you talk about it—this is the only way you’ll be able to stand out in a crowd that is getting more crowded every single day.
Start Today Tip – I bet some of you are probably thinking, “shit, we just figured this out and now he thinks we need to blow it up and start all over again.” That’s not entirely what I’m saying. I am saying, if you think you're done because you’re an inbound agency offering retainers—that’s where you might need to adjust your thinking. It’s just not enough to grow your agencies. It might be enough to get you some new business this year, but by the time 2017 rolls around, you’re going to be wondering what went wrong. Start thinking about what’s next now and start planning for how you stand out, how you provide a better experience and how you get your clients even better results.
Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Go ALL IN ON Inbound!
