Over the past year, I’ve worked with over 60 agency owners and spoke to more than 200 people who have agencies with inbound in the name. Unfortunately, there are still a ton of agencies who are pretending to be inbound agencies, when in reality they're still doing what they’ve always done.
I know moving from web design, development, SEO, PR, branding, email marketing or video to inbound marketing is a big change. I know it requires sacrifice, investment of both time and money, clients need to be fired, team members trained—it’s a ton of work.
So let’s get introspective and look at our agencies honestly and decide are we an inbound agency or just pretending to be one?
Not sure if you’re pretending to be an inbound shop or you’re actually one? Simple, look in the mirror and if any of the descriptors below sound like your agency then you might be pretending to be an inbound agency.
We do inbound marketing but most of what we do is other stuff – Inbound takes practice. 10,000 hours-worth of practice so if you’re only doing inbound for a handful of clients and the rest of your time is spend doing website work, PR, branding, social media or search engine optimization work only—then it’s going to take you much longer to learn inbound and get new clients to see how they need to be buying inbound—when you still offer individual marketing tactics too.
We do inbound marketing for our clients but we can’t seem to get them great results – If you can’t get clients results, you won’t have an inbound agency for very long. So if you’re not all in on inbound, if you don’t have a variety of inbound engagements, if you don’t run inbound for your own agency, if you can’t plan inbound experiments—it’s going to be very hard to get good enough to get clients the results they expect.
We do inbound marketing for our clients but we don’t use inbound for our own marketing – If your prospects don’t come to you through inbound and if they don’t get an inbound experience from your company how are they going to trust you to do it for them? They’re not going to. They have to call you or click through to you—you can’t be cold calling them and expect them to trust inbound.
On top of this basic premise, you need the inbound leads to grow your business, so you should get good enough at inbound to fuel your own new business efforts. Plus, as I mentioned above, you need to learn on your own agency, not your clients. Run experiments, make adjustments, test processes on your agency first, then when it works, make it standard operating procedure for the agency.
We do inbound marketing but we don’t use any technology to automate the activities – Inbound agencies do a lot of the same stuff over and over again. That stuff needs to be automated. If you’re not using technology to make your agency more profitable, to make the client work easier to deliver and to help you get better results for clients then you’re doing inbound in an inefficient and potentially ineffective manner.
We do inbound marketing but we only provide a select set of services – Inbound marketing by definition includes anything to gets clients results without interrupting, renting or buying their prospect’s attention. This means if you only provide social media services or you only build websites or you only provide search engine optimization services—you're not doing inbound. Inbound agencies provide the full set of services so they drive leads, business results and revenue for their clients.
We do inbound marketing and our retainers are less than $1,000 a month – I guess you could be an inbound agency with clients paying you less than $1,000 a month but I doubt you can get them the results they’re looking for. The cost to deliver even the most modest program would far outweigh the profit from a small retainer like this. Maybe all you do is blog for them, again this isn’t inbound marketing. Maybe you maintain their website or do small website updates for them but that’s not inbound either.
If any of these sound like your shop, don’t worry. It’s not the end of the world and it’s not uncommon. Most of the agencies in the inbound community are going through a transition. Some are farther than others but most are dealing with some or all of the issues outlined above. Honestly, it’s not about your current state, it’s about what you’re doing to transition out of the current state that matters most.
However, it is important to recognize where you need to be and how you’re going to get there and the one nice element of the inbound community is that people are willing to support you, give advice and help you skip some of the mistakes they’ve made while you continue on your journey to grow into an inbound agency.
Start Today Tip – If you find yourself in this situation your first step is to recognize that you need to make progress and do so quickly. Identify the areas where you need the most help and where the help will have the biggest impact. For instance, if you’re telling people you’re an inbound agency but still offering to do advertising or interruptive outbound, that’s confusing your prospects and your team. Get focused, go all in on inbound, and make decisions that pull to that direction. If you’re telling people you’re an inbound agency but making cold-calls for new business, that’s confusing to everyone. Get your own inbound marketing going so you can practice what you preach.
Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Go ALL IN ON Inbound!
