The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Inbound 16 is behind us and what an amazing experience it was in Boston. The event itself was fantastic, the content delivered was amazing, the people in this community are unique in all of business and almost everyone I talked to had a fantastic experience.

As business owners and inbound marketing agency owners we must make sure we’re prepared for what comes next. If you attended the Partner Session on Wednesday at 5:30PM you heard a lot about what HubSpot is prepared to do to help us be better, more successful agencies. Wonderful, right?

Let’s read between the lines a little and get you ready for what’s ahead.

Inbound 16 is right around the corner and if you have anything to do with the inbound community this is an exciting time. Over the course of the week, you’ll feel like the entire world is moving to inbound and you're at the leading edge of the movement.

Once you return, you’ll realize that everyone who has anything to do with inbound was at the event and everyone else in the world couldn’t care less or knows little or nothing about it, but for those few days, you were at the center of the inbound universe.

All kidding aside, this event is a must attend for inbound agency owners. The sessions, the experts, the networking and the training are second to none and you’ll pack weeks’ worth of information into just a few days. You’ll definitely need rest after you get back from this event.

If you’ve been paying attention to what other agency owners are talking about you probably heard something about Agile Marketing.

Maybe you know what it is, maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve tried it, maybe you are considering it, maybe you’re already doing it. Regardless, its time you all got comfortable enough with it to think about it for your inbound marketing agency.

The other day I was speaking to an agency owner who was proud to announce he didn’t write any website copy for his website development projects. I also see agencies who continue to outsource content to freelancers and services like Writer Access or Zerys. It seems like more and more agencies are recognizing the challenges associated with content creation and simply punting the task to someone else.

It’s hard to argue the economics associated with punting content to someone else. Clients are constantly changing their minds, over editing, rewriting their own edits, pivoting their entire marketing strategy in the middle of content creation and simply being overly picky. Not being responsible for content also does wonders for lowering your monthly investment requirements too and being very competitive on website projects.

If you Google “marketing conferences” there are a ton of pages that appear, but if your agency is an inbound agency, if you’re considering offering inbound services and if your clients are asking about inbound marketing or inbound sales, then there is no better conference out there than Inbound 16.

Having attended this conference for the past five years and seeing the conference grow from 300 people to 15,000 people last year this event is the premier inbound event on the planet. By attending It can fast forward your progress, efficiency and expertise in days instead of typically taking months or even longer. If you run an inbound marketing agency, this even is for you. 

Vorsight reports that at any given time, only 3% of your market is actively buying, 56% are not even looking and 40% are just beginning. This is a great statistic to help new inbound marketing clients understand why most of their leads are top of the funnel leads.

This data also supports the need to make sure your inbound marketing programs include some form of targeted outreach to handle the 56% of the people who are good prospects but have not even started their buyer journey.

I like sharing with all of you what I learn by working with all of you. Lately, I’ve been hearing more and more about agencies leaning away from inbound marketing. Some are leaving it all together and going back to what they did before inbound marketing became so popular. Other are weaving inbound marketing services in and around traditional digital services.

What’s going on? What do you do about it? Do you even need to worry about it? Of course you do. What’s going on in the community of inbound marketing agencies and the boarder digital agency community affects us all. More importantly, you need to be able to adjust your own strategy accordingly and if necessary. So, what are you? Inbound? Digital? Or Both?

Having worked with over 100 inbound marketing agency owners over the past two years and having talked to four or five times that since launch Agencies 2 Inbound, I’ve started to see a pattern in the issues and challenges facing the inbound agency community.

Below I’ve listed out the seven most common challenges agency owners share with me during our conversations and these are in order. The first is the most common and so on down the list. I’m sure these won’t surprise many of you and perhaps you have similar challenges with your agency.

I’m also including a collection of recommendations on how you fix these challenges so you can cross these off your list and move on to other issues that will undoubtedly pop up when these are corrected. Here we go!

Continuing our conversation about differentiating your inbound marketing agency means honestly evaluating your ability to be an inbound marketing expert. Are you a pro or a pretender? Unfortunately, my evaluation of the true capabilities in most of the agencies calling themselves inbound agencies is more pretender than pro.

I’m not criticizing. I’m actually challenging anyone reading this to step up their game. The consequences of continuing to “fake it” is going to impact the entire community. We’re already seeing it. More and more of our opportunities are made up of companies who have had disappointing experiences with inbound. This has to change.

Anyone see what I do? More and more agencies, offering similar services, for less and less money. Today there are thousands of inbound marketing agencies.

Most of them are new to it and offering services for ridiculously low levels of investment. Remember when you started doing inbound? You offered retainers for $2,500. Then you realized you couldn’t move the needle for that amount and you couldn’t make any money. So you astutely started raising prices.

Well there are now thousands of agencies calling themselves inbound agencies and doing just that. Most of the clients don’t understand the difference between a set of tactics that cost $10,000 and one that costs $2,500. To them they look similar enough to want to save the $7,500 a month. After all, the agency said they could get results for $2,500. Any of this sound familiar?