How SMART checks can help your metrics.

Amara Omoregie, Founder & CEO of amaraREPS talks about how to review your growth scorecards for maximum results.

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The post How SMART Checks Can Help Your Metrics – Amara Omoregie [VIDEO] appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

When you think of an office, you’re probably picturing something like this:

Or if you’re feeling fancy (and worth billions of dollars) like Google is, so you’re thinking something like this: 

These days you can even think of an office as a rented, shared space like WeWork:

Thanks to 2021, more offices than ever before are looking like this, home offices that we’ve set up in the quietest corner of our homes:

Although let’s be realistic…how many of your home offices actually look like this:

Yep, I’m raising my hand too.

When you think about work in 2021 and beyond—we’re no longer just thinking of this:

We’re thinking about a hybrid or totally remote model:

And that changes how we build our agencies.

Our offerings and products can stay the same—but the way our agency works internally…can completely shift.

There are 3 organized models that you get to choose to run your agency from nowadays:

#1: Gig Model

Short-term tasks that can be managed by one, or at most, a handful of people. With the Gig Model, you’re the opposite of a stage 5 clinger. Your business runs project-to-project and you’re focused on excelling at each of those projects—and then moving on.

There’s no need for water stations or happy hours because your team is distributed. You’re entirely remote and all of your workers are freelancers. Chances are you’re the only person on your payroll.

This model works great for startups that can’t afford full-time employees yet and are still getting themselves off the ground.

#2: Corporate Model

Hire a team to work on long-term open-ended jobs that can last for years. This is what you picture when you think of an office—lots of computers and people. We’re thinking of water station conversations and in-person team happy hours (remember those?!).

This is how DigitalMarketer ran pre-March of 2020. We had some freelancers, but the majority of our workforce was in-person, full-time employees. And it worked!

This model used to be an inevitable transition once your business required some full-time staff. It usually starts by bringing on some sort of operations or marketer—and quickly turns into full-time HR people, office managers, and interns.

But there’s a model in-between that most of us have missed—and it wasn’t our fault. We missed it because pre-March of 2020…we just weren’t thinking this way.

We were all thinking home offices and gig workers → rented office space and full-time employees. That was success in terms of an agency. Especially if you could afford the *good* coffee and the fancy snacks for your team.

Having to figure out how to run our businesses entirely remotely for months and in some cases over a year has taught us that we don’t need all of that fancy stuff. 

• Do we really need every employee to be full-time?
• Do we really need the fancy, expensive office space?
• Do our employees even WANT to spend 40 hours of their week in person with us?

The answer is no, and I’m not even offended!

Forbes found that 61% of employees prefer being fully remote. 

And Fast Company found the number of people who considered freelancing as a long-term career option increased from 18.5 million to 28.5 million between 2014 and 2019.

I know I’m not the only one thinking that with all these changes coming to market…there’s no way a new business model can’t emerge from them.

And I’m calling this new model…The Hollywood Model.

The Hollywood Model

Stay lean and bring in the best on a project basis. This means that you have some full-time employees and the rest of your workforce are contractors/freelancers/gig workers (all the same thing).

Chances are your full-time employees are your decision-makers, they’re your executives and the people who report directly to the CEO. There might be a set of employees under them as well, depending on the size of your business and your service offerings. 

The rest of your employees get brought in on a project-by-project basis. 

• Your copywriters are on retainer to write your email campaigns as needed
• Your graphic designers are on retainer to create your social media graphics
• Your Facebook ad expert is on retainer on a per-client basis

“A project is identified, a team is assembled, it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task, and then … the team disbands.” – Adam Davidson, Co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money

If the majority of employees want to continue remote work…and we have more people than ever starting to freelance—the Hollywood Model was made for times like these.

Times when businesses most want to stay lean thanks to the unpredictability of the markets, and employees are A-okay with switching up how they used to work.

How The Hollywood Model Works

The thing about the Hollywood Model is that it has to be done right. If you don’t do it right, your life can easily become:

• A perpetual state of hiring as you look for gig workers who have the experience and availability for your projects
• A mess of workflow as your full-time employees fail to efficiently teach your gig workers what platforms to use, how to send in deliverables, and how to communicate with the team
• Tight, impossible deadlines due to lack of communication between full-time employees and freelancers leading to delayed launches, campaigns, and products

You can learn more about the Hollywood Model here. 

Business has changed—and in some ways, it’s for the better.

Maybe we weren’t being as efficient as we could have been by having our employees come into the office and spending all this money on rent, utilities, and snacks when people are happier working from home.

But that doesn’t mean we have to go back to the Gig Model—DigitalMarketer, Scalable…they wouldn’t succeed with that model. They’re past the stage of being able to survive with just gig workers.

But they don’t need an entire full-time team.

The Hollywood Model is the lean business model that works in 2021 and the foreseeable future. It creates consistency with our full-time employees and the opportunity to tap into highly qualified talent through our freelancers.

It’s the model we’re running at Scalable and DigitalMarketer—and it’s working.

Time to turn this around for your business.

You can generate $3,500/month retainer clients and build a marketing agency that sets you apart from the competition.

Not just because you’re better at marketing…

…But because your business runs lean, is highly adaptable, and uses high-quality talent to get the job done.

And that’s something your competitors using the Corporate Model or the Gig Model can’t compete with.

Grab our free Fractional CMO Playbook so you get the exact, 4-step client attract, convert, and onboard process we teach our agency partners at DigitalMarketer as well as:

• Understand the math behind a $336,000 a year, part-time “Fractional CMO” practice
• The one-sentence “pivot script” that has prospects begging to book a meeting
• A simple little “trick” that filters out virtually all the “lookie-loos” and crazy clients with unrealistic expectations…
• When to sell retainers (and when NOT to sell retainers)

This training is for:

Coaches & consultants thinking about expanding into marketing services.

Freelancers & solopreneurs sick and tired of giving away their time for free.

Marketing professionals thinking about making the leap and launching their own marketing coaching or consultancy.

Anyone thinking about making the leap and launching their own marketing agency or consultancy.

And I’m teaching it.

Register here for The Fractional CMO Playbook to learn how to generate $3,500/mo retainer clients and build a marketing consultancy that sets you apart (thanks to the Hollywood Model).

The post The Agency of the Future is Remote Working appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Everybody tells you to make SOPs as an agency owner. It’s the only way to grow, right?

Yes…and no.

Your marketing agency needs SOPs. That’s a fact. But your agency doesn’t need to waste time creating documents that collect digital dust. If you make SOPs for every single task in your business, your hiring process will be a breeze. But, soon, you’ll find your employees and contractors aren’t even opening up those SOPs. They figured out their way to get the task done, and it’s more efficient. 

All the time you spent on those SOPs is wasted—and it could have been used in a better way. At this year’s Traffic and Conversion Summit, Ryan Deiss talked about the importance of creating SOPs and not creating SOPs.

That’s the secret of functional SOPs that your employees actually use. 

We’ll explain…

How to Create Functional SOPs

Functional SOPs are the brain of your business. We’re not saying that you don’t need SOPs. You definitely do. Standard operating procedures (SOPs) help you hire, move employees to different positions, and figure out where you’re inefficient. Especially as an agency owner, SOPs are your absolute best friend.

If you want to scale your agency from 5 clients to 10 and eventually 20+, SOPs are the way to do it. But only if you use them the right way. If you spend too much time on SOPs your employees don’t use, you wasted time that could have been spent on lead generation or deliverables. 

Here are the 3 steps to create functional SOPs your employees open, use, and share.

Step #1: Choose the top tasks you need SOPs for

The first step in creating functional SOPs is figuring out what tasks need them. It’s tempting to create an SOP for every single part of your business because it feels efficient. But, if your team doesn’t use them, then it was a waste of time. As Ryan talked about in his Traffic and Conversion Summit session, you only need SOPs for the most important tasks.

Everything else will collect digital dust on your employee’s desktops, never opened again. What’s an important task? This can range from running your meetings, uploading content to WordPress, or writing podcast show notes. The important tasks of your business are the ones that are moving the needle and are consistently on to-do lists.

• Tasks outsourced to VAs (like writing podcast show notes)
• Meeting templates (Gino Wickman shares meeting templates in Traction)
• Tech instructions (like publishing a blog post to WordPress)

Here’s part of an old SOP we used to write the Perpetual Traffic Podcast show notes:

This was an important SOP for us because 1) we uploaded a new podcast every week (recurring task), and 2) we needed to create a consistent experience with our listeners (to move the needle on audience growth).

Once you’ve figured out the tasks that move the needle and are a consistent part of your agency, it’s time to write your SOPs. 

Step #2: Write down every step with an explanation

Each task that moves the needle and is done on a consistent basis has the green light for an SOP. In Step 2, don’t worry about anything but writing down every step of a task or process in as much detail as possible. Your goal is to be able to hand this document to someone one the street and have them be able to do that task or run that process.

Yep, your SOP needs to be that detailed. 

When we write SOPs, we divide them into sections. This makes it easy for the person doing the task or running the process to know what they need before getting started and moving on to the next step.

For example, here’s the Table of Contents from our Blog Post Uploading SOP:

Working with the Blog Document:

• Section 1: Get Finalized Post
• Section 2: Prep Post for Layout
• Section 3: Process Images
• Section 4: Uploading Post Copy into WordPress
• Section 5: Fill out SEO and Sidebar info
• Section 6: Publish Post

In each section is a detailed description of the standard operating procedure. Here’s what the two first sections of our Blog Post Uploading SOP look like:

At this stage, you’re just writing down everything involved in the task. The next step is giving your SOP the final polish.

Step #3: Delete as many words as possible

Each SOP should be as short as possible. The longer the SOP, the more complicated you’re making the task or procedure. Complicated tasks and procedures are the opposite of growth in a business. You don’t want your employees stuck on a single task all day because it takes them 30+ pages to get through the SOP.

Just reading that sounds unrealistic.

In step 3, you have one goal: delete as many words as possible from your SOP. Shorten your sentences. Tighten up your explanations. Use more images. Make your SOP a seamless experience instead of a cartography class. 

Our SOP for the Certified Partner Weekly Email is two pages long. It doesn’t need to be any longer for our email team to get it written and out the door. This SOP is broken up into two sections:

1. Procedure
2. Email Outline

At the top of the document is the schedule for ideating, drafting, reviewing, and submitting each week’s email. Below that is the email outline to follow. 

Could this SOP be 10+ pages long? Absolutely. If we added every detail possible to writing the email and uploading it to our email provider, it could probably be longer. But, we don’t need every detail for it to get done right. We just need our team to know the schedule (so the email gets written!), to understand who’s in charge of what part of the process, and to have the outline. 

That’s it.

Now, you have an SOP that your team will actually use because they genuinely need it! Ahh, the magic of functional SOPs.

Are Your Employees *Really* Using Your SOPs?

They might not be today…but they can be tomorrow. Just by simplifying how many SOPs you create and how you write them, your marketing agency can change overnight. You can go from putting out little fires all day long to knowing that any task/procedure moving the needle and happening consistently is getting taken care of. 

As the owner, executive, or manager of a marketing agency, this is a breath of fresh air. If you’re focused on putting out the (consistent) little fires that come with employees and freelancers not using SOPs because they’re too complicated, bulky, and time consuming, how can you captain your ship towards smoother waters?

There’s a hard way to grow your agency and an easy way. Part of the easy way is creating functional SOPs so your employees actually use them. The other part is the realization that you don’t know everything, and you’re not supposed to. There are marketing strategies, agency growth tactics, and marketing knowledge that you don’t have—that could help your agency reach your big goal this year.

And they’re all inside of DigitalMarketer Lab. Lab is our members-only platform where the top marketers give away their marketing expertise through Insider Trainings, Workshops, Playbooks, and our Toolkits. 

By becoming a Lab member, you get access to every past Training, Workshop, Playbook, and ToolKit—and our community of 10,000 marketers.

See what’s inside Lab here.

The post How to Create Functional SOPs (That Your Employees Actually Use) appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Are you overwhelmed, overworked, and burned out, but your income still seems capped…because there’s only so much of your time you can trade for money?

Is your income feast or famine? Some months are great, but you just can’t seem to maintain it.

Are you struggling to balance the need to both serve the clients you have and find new ones? It’s even worse if you don’t know where the new clients come from.

Do you keep losing clients to competitors who are less qualified but better at selling? We hate cold calling, too, and with our Fractional CMO Playbook—you don’t have to.

You can build a thriving Fractional CMO practice that generates more clients who actually listen to your advice and pay you what you’re worth so you can get off the time for money hamster wheel. It’s just as great as it sounds, but let’s be clear.

Becoming a fractional CMO isn’t a:

1. Get “rich quick” or “do nothing” to make money career (this stuff takes work!)
2. Opportunity for you to turn into an ego-maniacal marketing guru (this is about getting results for clients, not getting famous)
3. Easy way to create a successful business (90% of businesses fail)

It’s a way to create more income from fewer hours, so you can stop trading your time for money (while still using your marketing expertise).

What is a Fractional CMO?

A fractional CMO is a marketing leader who is brought into a company part-time to help the CEO set a strategy and execute critical projects. Here’s the key to a fractional CMO’s role—they don’t have to actually do the marketing work. You’re just setting the strategy and ensuring it gets implemented. 

Fractional CMOs aren’t a new concept, but they’re emerging now more than ever. Here’s why…

Before 2020, 16% of retail sales occurred online, and in 2021 it grew to 30+%. Even though it feels like digital marketing is old news, we’re still on the cusp of digital transformation. There’s a lot of room for growth because every business knows they need to be digital.

But, while the need is great, so is the complexity. There’s a lot that goes into the marketing technology landscape. A business can’t do this all on its own, and CMOs make an average of $200,000 per year (the highest CMOs are the best digital performers!). Companies have a massive need and budget to spend, but they can’t find (or afford) full-time marketing executives who “get” digital.

That’s where you come in…

Now is the greatest time to be a digital marketer if you know how to position yourself.

The 4 Step Fractional CMO Playbook

Step 1: Engage with Value-First Content

Your competition isn’t big, successful agencies. Your competition is sleazy marketers who they hired before you. They promised your prospects that they could help them with SEO…and didn’t. Now, your prospects are on edge whenever they hear the word “marketer.”

That’s where your value-first content comes in. 

What is value in advance content?

• Timely, relevant content that talks about what’s happening TODAY
• Specific content that isn’t broad or too general
• Actionable content that tells them what to do with this information

By leading with content, you can differentiate yourself from being another sleazy marketer. You can deliver value-in-advance content by public speaking, email newsletters, online videos, webinars, blog posts…you get the idea.

How you deliver this content doesn’t matter as much as making sure it’s timely, specific, and actionable. For example, here’s a bad topic to cover as a digital marketer:

“Digital engagement in the new economy”: This isn’t timely, specific, or actionable. Do you know a business owner who woke up this morning and thought, “I want to read about digital engagement and the economy…” No way!

Instead, here’s a great example of value-in-advance content:

“3 Copy and Paste Facebook Campaigns that Generate Leads from Scratch”: It’s timely, specific, and actionable!”

At the end of your value-in-advance content, you need a strategic call to action that turns readers into prospects that reach out to you asking for help. This is where the Content Pivot Script comes in…

Content Pivot Script

“What I just taught you is important, but it may not be the most important growth strategy for your business right now. We have identified 30+ additional growth strategies, so let’s schedule some time when we can figure out the ONE BIG THING you should do first…CTA.”

The Content Pivot Script gets your readers to convert to a free strategic consulting session, which brings you to Step 2 of the Fractional CMO Playbook.

Step 2: The Strategy Session

Your strategic consult meeting will have the following goals and objectives:

• Determine if this is a client fit (think of it as a first date)
• Engage them in the planning process (get buy-in on a wholistic solution, not just a tactical implementation to make sure they see you as a CMO, not a task-oriented consultant)
• Deliver real value in advance and don’t make this a sales pitch in disguise
• Close them on a 90-day project or implementation

Every strategic consult meeting needs 4 things:

#1: Checklist/Questionnaire

• You need a questionnaire because it creates trust and liking. We are fascinated by the people who are most fascinated by us. 
• It signals expansive knowledge and expertise.
• Signals higher-status because doctors diagnose people and salespeople don’t 
• Systemizes sales and onboarding, and eventually, you can have someone else do it

#2: Pre-Built Presentation 

You can’t just wing your strategy session. If you’re not strategic in this session, how can you expect your clients to think you’ll be strategic as a CMO? Your pre-built presentation can be used across all of your prospects with minor tweaks.

#3: Audit/Gamification

We highly encourage adding an audit to your strategy session to show your prospects what they’re missing (and how you can help them fill those gaps). Your audit can cover metrics like:

• Awareness
• Lead generation
• Engagement
• Conversion optimization
• Their North Star metric
• Ascension, expansion, and retention (ACV)
• Reviews and testimonials
• Generating referrals

#4: Planning Framework

Strategic planning is an important part of this strategy session. You want your prospect to see what working with you would look like if you got started. DigitalMarketer Certified Partners map out the Customer Value Journey to show prospects how they can get clients.

Here’s the thing: you don’t need to dive into the technical aspect of this (you already did with your value-in-advance content). At this point, it’s about strategic planning.

A strategic planning framework is:

1. Valuable: It answers the question, “How do I get more leads and sales?”
2. Great at creating buy-in: If they help create the plan, they’re more likely to invest in the plan!
3. Turns on the ‘Crazy Filter’: If they don’t engage with you strategically, they don’t respect you as a professional

This is why we train and license all our Certified Partners to use the Customer Value Journey during the sales and onboarding process because your job is not to “Wow” your clients with how much you know. It’s your job to help them understand and then remove the burden of implementation. 

It’s officially time to go for the big close with one magic question…“Want some help with that?”

If you followed the Fractional CMO Playbook so far, you wouldn’t need to ask anything more because your prospect can already see what they need to do—and that you can help them with implementation. 

Do you believe if you can demonstrate real value in advance, qualified prospects will gladly pay you to help them implement what you show them? Certified Partner Griffin Brown followed this system to get his first client during his “practice” round of the Fractional CMO Playbook:

But what if you don’t know how to do what they need done?

As a fractional CMO, you don’t want to say, “I can do that for you,” you want to say, “I can get that done for you.” See the difference? This is the key to moving from stuck and frustrated to fewer hours and more income. Your clients don’t care if you’re the one that does it or if it’s somebody else. They just want it done.

Your clients just want a beautiful symphony of growth, sales, and clients. But that doesn’t mean you have to play all of the instruments. You just need to be the conductor.

As long as you can say, “I can get that done for you,” you have all the skills to move to the next step. 

Step 3: The 90-Day Engagement

The biggest mistake consultants make is trying to sell retainers too early in the relationship. It’s really tempting at this step to ask for a retainer—but we suggest holding off for now. Instead of a retainer, offer a 90-Day Paid Implementation for $10,000 or 3 payments of $3,500. 

During your 90-Day Paid Implementation, you want to get them a quick win and make yourself “free” (what’s something silly they’re doing that you can fix and help them pay your invoice?), create a 90-Day Growth Plan with goals and initiatives, and establish benchmarks and metrics (this is great for retention!).

Every 90-Day Engagement needs:

#1: Pre-Built Presentation Productizing Your Services

We recommend one full day meeting every 30-days and weekly check-ins facilitated through these pre-built presentations.

#2: 90-Day Game Plan

Make sure to define what winning looks like ahead of time, so your clients know they’re getting an ROI. Just like you want to know your investments have an ROI, your clients want to see an ROI too. Show them with your 90-Day Game Plan (or you can call it something different if you’d like).

#3: Growth Planning Framework

Chances are this framework starts with the Customer Value Journey. Bring the CVJ into your framework where clients define the 3 key goals they want to help closing the gap on (or become a Certified Partner to get the Growth Planning Canvas). 

#4: Scorecard/Metrics Template

This is optional at the beginning, but it’s really great for retention. Your clients can see what’s going well, what’s not going well, and most importantly—why. If you don’t have a Scorecard/Metrics Template in your business, this is your sign to implement one.

Here’s what happens at the end of the 90-days…

Step 4: Offer Your Fractional CMO Services

Around the 75 day mark, set up a call with your client to talk about how you’ll move forward. Give them three options:

1. They can take everything you’ve built and do it on their own (if you haven’t enjoyed working with this client, this is the only option you need to give )
2. Offer Done-With-You services for $500-$1,500/month
3. Offer to keep doing what you’ve been doing for the same rate of $3,500/month plus additional services as their fractional CMO.

This is the beauty of a 90-day implementation. You’re not asking them to sign up for anything you’re not already doing! It makes this an easy sell. And that’s why the Fractional CMO Playbook works so well. 

But, does $3,500/month seem like a lot? It is if you’re just a consultant. It’s a bargain if you’re a Fractional CMO because fractional CMOs make an average of $200,000 per year and the highest paid CMOs are the best digital performers (a.k.a you!).

$3,500/month is ⅓-⅕ of the salary of a marketing executive and half the salary of an entry-level marketer salary. Clients usually waste at least $3,500/month on things that aren’t working, and you’re just reallocating their existing budget.

A budget that needs to go towards digital marketing.

What Could Being a Fractional CMO Do For Your Business?

By productizing your sales and the onboarding process, it doesn’t have to be you doing everything. You don’t have to facilitate the workshops and brainstorming sessions. You can focus on the work you love most because systems equal freedom. 

If you bring this into your existing agency or consultancy, you can be your own boss and do your own thing (part-time or full-time). You can add a new income stream to your existing business. Or you can build it and sell it.

Is this a business model that could work for you? If the answer is yes, here are your 3 options:

#1: You can do nothing…

#2: You can do it yourself…

#3: You can do it with us…

You can become part of the DigitalMarketer family and get a turnkey strategy to build your fractional CMO practice. You’re invited to become a DigitalMarketer Certified Partner. As a DigitalMarketer Certified Partner, you’ll be licensed and trained to deploy our proven and proprietary models and frameworks as a fractional CMO on behalf of your clients. 

The process is simple. We teach you the frameworks, you facilitate the frameworks, and you keep all of the profits! 

Become a Certified Partner today and get access to our Partner Success Kit with everything you need to:

• Attract clients with our Turnkey Content Presentations.
• Convert clients with our Appointment Getting Email Campaigns, Client Intake Questionnaire Template, Audit and Assessment Tools, and our Discovery Session slide deck.
• Serve clients with our Partner Directory Listing and 90-Day Growth Accelerator Slide Deck and Proprietary Tools & Frameworks.
• Plus support and community you need to “get it done” with our Private Partner Community

Apply to be a Certified Partner today.

The post The Fractional-CMO Playbook: How to Launch an Outsourced CMO Consulting Practice appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Building a smarter marketing agency doesn’t involve becoming the “agency of the Future,” selling marketing like a “mad man,” or aiming for 7-figures. Real growth could be as simple as employing this one agency model.

There are 3 things you need to stop doing in order to be an agency of the future.

STOP IT! #1: Stop Asking What the Agency of the Future Will Look Like

We’ve been talking about the agency of the future since 2009. Back when every agency NEEDED to start using QR codes or they were going to be left in the dust. 

The “Agency of the Future” does not define itself by the SERVICES it offers, but instead defines itself by the markets it SPECIALIZES in and SERVES.

If you waste all of your time trying to figure out the next QR code, you’re going to be left behind. You’re going to miss the real focus which should be on serving your client and providing what they want and what they need. THAT is what you need to be focused on.

This means that you shouldn’t be asking yourself what services you should offer, instead, ask yourself WHO you should be serving. Your future agency will specialize.

The agencies who win will be the agencies who make their clients feel truly UNDERSTOOD.

What do all of your clients want… they want more sales. If you’re talking about fancy marketing words, you’re missing that connection.

You have to know who you’re serving if you want to make them truly feel understood.

Specializing does not mean that you only serve one, it means that you only talk to one at a time.

You need to make your clients feel that you understand them and their particular needs. It is not the case that every business is different, every CLIENT believes that their business is different.

If you want to serve your clients you must first give them what they want so you can earn the right to tell them what they need.

Step asking “what” the agency of hte future will look like and what you need to to worry about right now.

Start organizing your agency to better serve SPECIFIC markets and their SPECIFIC needs.

STOP IT! #2: Stop Trying to be a “Mad Man” 

Mad Men isn’t just good TV, it tells the story of the marketing industry. 

The opening pilot “Smoke in Your Eyes” talks about how the agency needed to find a way to come up with a hook to sell cigarettes AFTER they could no longer say that cigarettes were healthy.

How did they solve this problem with a simple pitch? They claimed that their client’s cigarette tobacco was “toasted.” The feature wasn’t anything special in cigarettes, but the “big idea” worked.

Later in the same episode the head secretary Peggy shows a new employee around the office, first stopping at the cool creative department, then to the slick-looking sales department, and finally to the ordinary-looking media buying room. Peggy then informed the new hire that the media buying room was where all the ACTUAL money was made. 

To be a marketing firm back then meant that you were literally an “agent.” The goal was to pitch the client great ideas so that they could become the “Agent of Record” for placing the client’s media buys. Agents were allowed to enter into contracts on the client’s behalf. Marketing agencies required a big idea side, and a media buying side.

Related Articles

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 2

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 1

• Unlocking the Secrets to Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent in Your Agency

We believe that this classic “agency” model is starting to change because of automation, A.I. like Albert, and increasingly clever tools that put tools that used to be exclusive to marketing agencies into the hands of internal departments (or even low-paid interns).

The end results is that businesses are starting to fire their agents. This is bad for your agency, obviously.

Not to worry! Even if your current clients figure out their media buying needs, at least you still have the “big idea” to provide value, right?

Similar to media buying automation, figuring out what a market wants is getting increasingly easy thanks to tools like Answer the Public and BuzzSumo (among many, many more).

Your clients don’t need your market intuition, specialized market research, or your network to find fairly specific information about their target market. While the “big ideas” might not be as good or polished as yours, they could be a lot cheaper.

Even so, your media buying expertise and “big idea” acumen could save your agency, right?

Wrong. While automation and easily accessible tools may not ELIMINATE the need for “big ideas” and active media buying, it will almost certainly COMMODITIZE it.

Smart marketing agency expansion requires you to position your firm as a partner in growth, and not merely an agent for small businesses.

If you are seen as someone who comes up with a big idea, my fear is that you will be commoditized and replaced at some point.

If you are seen as the lever puller who ensures that traffic campaigns happen, my fear is that you will be commoditized and replaced at some point.

We are not agents. We are not negotiating contracts with big media buy companies. You are a partner in growth.

As Marcus Murphy said, “If small business is the backbone of the world economy, marketers are the backbone’s backbone.” I believe that is true, but only if marketing agencies are partners in growth.

How do you become a partner in your client’s growth?

You need to teach your clients about, and seek to own, their customers’ entire journey… the entire Customer Value Journey.

Do your clients see you as someone who merely helps others become aware of their business? As someone who just does their retargeting? As someone who just does their search?

Or… do you teach them that a relationship with the customer is a multi-step process, and marketing is involved with each and every stage of the process. As a result, if they want a continuous, seamless flow throughout the process they need to work with one agency to manage the process.

Are you teaching them that? They’re not going to figure it out on their own.

Can you do my facebook for me?

Can you handle my email marketing?

Can you get me ranking on Google?

If you say yes because you want that money, you will become a commoditized lever-puller only as desirable as the person who comes up behind who sounds like they can do the same work for a little bit less money.

You must teach them that it’s about a journey. It’s a process. It’s a relationship.

The key is that you need to TEACH. If you merely do the thing that the clients ask for, you are missing out.

Start teaching your clients (and their teams) about the Customer Value Journey, and position you and your agency as a true PARTNER in growth.

STOP IT! #3: Stop Trying to “Scale.”

Stop trying to go out, hire a billion people, and scale with a bunch of employees. It’s probably not what’s best for you.

Size is a liability. Hiring increases fixed OVERHEAD, which shifts the focus away from serving the clients you already have, and toward the ACQUISITION of new clients.

It’s a chicken and egg. You got all of these clients that you need to serve, so you need to hire a bunch of people… then guess what? Now that you have all these new employees you need more clients.

Why Not Just Outsource?

Outsourcing is a way to scale responsibly, right? If you think that you’re going to hire a huge team in India or the Philippines and everything is going to go swimmingly without you having done it before, it won’t. We’re not saying to avoid doing that… we’re saying that it’s not the answer TODAY.

Outsourcing still digs into MARGINS and makes maintaining STANDARDS difficult, if not impossible. If you want to make your clients feel understood, outsourcing makes doing that impossible. 

The sad result is a reduction in specialization for the sake of scale, which leads to an increase in commoditization, which leads to mechanization… at which point your agency becomes a replaceable cog in a heartless machine.

This doesn’t have to be your result. You don’t have to become this for the sake of scale. The problem is that if you’re left to your own devices this is what you might become.

Who has the solution to becoming a “heartless machine?” Believe it or not, Hollywood has the solution to your marketing agency’s growth.

While Hollywood is the pinnacle of the heartless machine, if you look at how they model their business there’s a lot to learn.

The Three Types of Marketing Agency

There are 3 organized models that you get to choose to run your agency from nowadays:

How The Hollywood Model Works

Most Hollywood studios, if you were to look at the revenues that they generate versus the number of people that they have on full-time staff, are proportionally tiny when compared to other corporations. Why?

“A project is identified, a team is assembled, it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task, and then … the team disbands.”

Adam Davidson, Co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money”

This method of managing projects could be the future of your marketing agency.

Here are the key roles of Hollywood productions.

Role #1: The Producer (aka the Client)

This is the person funding the project who expects a positive return on investment. Chances are they’re just putting up the money, handing it to the director (which we’ll go over next), and focusing on their next problem to solve.

Role #2: The Director 

This is the person who owns the entire journey and coordinates the process. They’re your Steven Spielberg—and you know they’ll hire the right people to make the best movie (or in your case deliverables) as possible. Their job is to make sure the right employees are working on the project and the right freelancers are hired.

Role #3: The Star

The spokesperson/face of the brand. This is the Star that gets people interested in what your agency is delivering. Just like everyone runs to go see the next Leonardo DiCaprio film, you want a face of your agency to be someone that people know, like, and trust.

Role #4: The Specialists

The Specialists are outside teams/consultants brought in to perform specific tasks. Think of Miles Finch from Elf—he’s a best-selling children’s book author who gets paid to come in and help ideate a better story for Greenway Press’ upcoming children’s book. These are your freelancers/gig workers who you have on retainer or hire per job to do their magic.

Role #5: Supporting Cast

These are the people who help the project’s progress, without necessarily having the specific skill set of the freelancer/gig worker. While the Director focuses on the macro project, they’re focused on the micro.

Which Roles Do You Provide in the Hollywood Model?

From a role perspective you need to be a Director, or a Specialist working with a Director.

The smartest marketing agencies will not build a massive IN-HOUSE team, but instead will learn to work with OUTSIDE specialists, as well as the client’s own team.

So again, stop trying to “scale.” Start building your specialist network.

There are agencies that have your clients, and they DON’T want them. Your crazy client is another person’s dream client.

Start training and up-leveling the “supporting cast” that is already on your clients’ payroll. Let them grow their overhead so you don’t have to.

If you are working with clients with good marketing team, you don’t need as many people on your team. That is the key/secret to scaling your agency. Don’t scale your payroll, encourage your client’s to scale theirs. They’ll be encouraged and incentivized to do that because you’re going to be growing their top line.

How Do You Get Started with the Hollywood Model?

You become a Certified Partner. You get instant access to an amazing network of marketers that will help support and train you in becoming the Director or Specialist of your choosing.

If you are interested in scaling your marketing agencies there are lots of options like the one above. If you’d like to see the breakdown on how we help agency owners scale to $336K a year…part time…join us for this webinar here.

The post The Hollywood Model: Run Your Marketing Agency Like A Movie Studio appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Editor’s Note: This post was pulled from one of Roland Frasier’s Traffic & Conversion Summit talks.

There are 5 things you can do in your business to grow really fast. 

#1: Co-Branding with Product Integration Partnerships 

Tap into a businesses network of customers to build your own customer base. 

• Dominos partners with Days Inn & Travel Lodge and put Domino’s cards in each hotel room 
• Rolls Royce partners with Country Clubs
  • Rolls Royce doesn’t pay them anything, the benefit for the country club is the experience they can give to their customers 
• Casper and West Elm Furniture Company
  • They’re the mattresses on all of the beds because West Elm doesn’t sell mattresses 

Increase the value of their business to their customers (like Rolls Royce) or have a fee to promote it (Dominos), or have a revenue share. You can also look for companies that are already in these partnerships and make a better deal for them. 

• For example, another mattress company could give West Elm Furniture Company more revenue share and replace Casper

#2: Tap The Curiously Powerful Effect of Butterfly Leverage 

Butterfly leverage is all about finding ways to make more money off of one product or service. 

What are all of the ways you can monetize something that you’re doing? Each time you’re going to do something, look for other opportunities to monetize. 

For example, you can turn one event into several events and create a 7-figure ROI. T&C did this with Richard Branson. 

• Hire Richard Branson to speak at T&C 
• Offer a private reception with Branson at $15,000/ticket
  • $300,000 in profit that goes to Richard Branson’s foundation (we didn’t have to pay out-of-pocket to get him here) 
  • Anyone who got a ticket becomes a War Room prospect (20 prospects added) 
• Offer a private business lunch with Branson
  • We offered a win a seat at lunch with Richard Branson contests 
  • Got 1,522 pixels
• Business Lunch Live Podcast Episode featuring Branson
  • Led to 2,372 podcast subscribers 
  • Put us in the Top 200 Worldwide Charts 
• Sold 619 T&C tickets via Sir Richard Branson coupon code
  • $330,000 in revenue 
• Sold 728 more via speaker announcements
  • Every speaker at the show wanted to be identified as sharing the stage with Richard Branson 
  • They all emailed their list to show this off 
  • $720,000 in revenue 

The end effect of all of this was an additional $1.5 million dollars. 

#3: Structure To “Sell The Eggs” And Keep The Geese 

This allows us to sell one part of our business without losing all of the momentum we’ve created over the past few years. Essentially, we’re spinning off of our operation assets and keeping our platform. 

For example: T&C sold a domain name, an attendee list, and a trademark to Clarion Partners. We kept the sponsorship sales company, the media company (DigitalMarketer), our mastermind (War Room), and our staffing company (no employees went with the sale of the company). 

Our next step in the event world is to partner with Brendon Burchard to acquire half of his Expert’s Academy. Our leverage was to bring our sponsorship company, media company, and event staffing to the partnership. What did we do? Took T&C out of the picture and replaced it with Expert’s Academy. Next year, we can do the same thing with a different event. It’s not a formula of selling our eggs but keeping our goose. 

Clarion Partners is already interested in buying that event. We have a machine that can turn itself on to event after event to create new assets. 

Structure like this so you never end up without a platform. 

#4: Scale Most Impactful Activities, Eliminate Least Impactful Activities, And Verticalize 

First think about the kinds of businesses that you have. There are 4 types:

When you systemize and analyze what you’re doing like this it helps you make good decisions around what to focus on for leverage in the future. 

Questions to ask yourself: 

• What are the most impactful activities you enjoy right now? 
• What least impactful activities can we eliminate? 
• What additional vertical can you expand your most impactful activities into? 

#5: Grow Through Acquisitions 

There are 4 steps to acquire for growth. 

Step 1: Decide which types of businesses to acquire. 

• Acquire your competitor to get them out of the market 
• Acquire media
  • Facebook group 
  • LinkedIn account 
  • YouTube account 
• Acquire for a team 
• Buy a company with products or services 
• Consolidate the supply and distribution chain 
• Acquire intellectual property (IP)
  • Customer list

Step 2: Buy businesses for nothing down. 

8 Business Purchase Strategies: 

• Owner carry
  • Buy a company for $X if they will carry back the financing and let you pay it back over time 
  • You can add the option of giving interest 
• Earn-out
  • Based on the performance going forward you can get additional money for the company you sold 
  • If you’re buying the company it reduces the risk 
• Swaps
  • Swap stock or assets in one company 
• Asset-based lending
  • Buy the company but have the company pay for itself through assets they already have 
• Split equity
• Self-liquidating payments
  • Payment equal to what you know you can make back 
• Baseline
  • Offer the first $3 million that comes in as the baseline and after you do your magic, everything on top is split 50/50 and after 3 years if the 50/50 is equal we throw away that baseline 
• Pipe wrench
  • If you contribute more than 10% of the customers to another company
  • Don’t build their brand for them 
  • Give me equity in your company 

Step 3: Find the exit multiple for each profit center. 

Find the multiple for your industry and pivot your business to the highest multiple possible. Here’s a #V/sales business valuation chart that shows what multiple your business is: 

Step 4: Reposition toward the highest exit multiple. 

Which exit multiple creates the greatest exit value? For example, 584 

DigitalMarketer’s looks this: 

Our multiple went from 0.91 in 2014 to 7.73 just by changing what we did.

The post Achieving Unicorn Growth: 5 Rapid Customer Acquisition Strategies Guaranteed To Drive Massive Results appeared first on DigitalMarketer.