The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

As I speak to inbound marketing agency owners I hear a lot of the same challenges over and over again.

How do I get a steady stream of opportunities so my new business becomes predictable and repeatable, month in and month out?

The answer to that question is you need your own Inbound Marketing Machine. I actually think most people already know the answer, but perhaps they don’t know how to go about creating a Marketing Machine for their own agencies.

This might not sound like a revelation, but that’s probably because you’re not exactly sure what we mean. I know every decent agency talks about strategy and most of them actually deliver strategy work for their clients.

But strategy for an inbound marketing program is different than strategy for a social media campaign, website deliverable or any traditional ad campaign.

Today most of the firms who call themselves an inbound marketing agency are paying lip service to the idea of strategy. They create a handful of personas and off they go. The reason for this limited approach to strategy is twofold.

I get it. You’ve done traditional work for clients a lot longer than you’ve done inbound. Outbound work makes up a significant amount of revenue and to cut that out is scary.

I can rattle of 20 reasons why you think you should do both inbound marketing and outbound marketing for clients. However, today I’m going to make a case for why an inbound marketing agency shouldn't do any traditional tactics. 

Perhaps this should have been my first blog, But in all transparency, I wanted the site to launch with an educational blog and I blew right past something to set the table for why Agencies 2 Inbound is even in existence.

But later is better than ever and how we have a nice following of subscribers that the message will get out and hopefully resonate with all of you, new readers and existing.

The response to the launch of Agencies 2 Inbound has been phenomenal but a few people have asked me, appropriately so, “why would I help other agencies?” 

You’ve already made the mental move to drive your agency to be more inbound. But the steps required are time consuming and in some cases you’re getting stuck with some of the major adjustments that need to be made.

In addition, you’re busy running your business and it’s hard to find the time to work ON the business instead of IN the business.

If you’re running an inbound marketing agency or transitioning from a more traditional agency into an inbound agency, then you’re getting a lot of advice from a lot of different people. You job is to sift through the advice and adopt what works for you and your agency.

One of those questions is, “Do we publish pricing on our website?” Once you start looking some of the more popular and successful inbound marketing agencies you see that a majority of them DO publish pricing on their site. However, before you make that decisions, you should be aware of the pluses and minuses of putting pricing on your site.

Something we learned early at Square 2 Marketing  was that working with good clients is as important as almost anything else we do here. So while the prospects think they’re deciding whether to pick us, we’re also deciding whether we want to work with them at the same time.

Our company’s goal is to make every single client a raving fan, in fact, that’s one of our Core Values. So if we bring on a client who has a bad attitude, is looking for a vendor or doesn’t value what we do and how we do it, there’s very little chance they’re ever going to be a raving fan.