What I Think ‘Good’ Agency Marketing Looks Like.

A few months back I wrote about why hiring a senior salesperson usually isn't the fix for new business woes.

I also ran a webinar recently making much the same case - that the shiny, idealised rainmaker who supposedly walks in with a black book and starts delivering leads of exactly the size and industry you've always wanted just isn't real.

I won't repeat all of that now. You can check out the webinar here or other Field Notes here.

The short version is that agency sales doesn't run that way anymore, the incentives aren't aligned to the way agencies actually get bought, and given the choice I'd invest in a stronger, more robust agency brand over a salesperson's personal brand every time. The salesperson can walk out the door tomorrow. The brand can't.

What I didn't do, in the webinar or the earlier email, was explain what I actually think good marketing for an agency looks like. So that's what I want to get into this time.

A few numbers to set the scene

You might know these numbers better than I do. I'm including them anyway, because most agencies don't market as though they believe them.

The first is from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: at any given moment, only around 5% of a B2B market is actually in-market and ready to buy. The other 95% aren't. If you've got a salesperson hunting for a deal, or you're just running Google ads, you're fishing in that 5%. It's a tiny slice, and you're ignoring the rest.

It's worse than that, too. A lot of the time, when someone in the 95% finally moves into the 5%, they've already got a shortlist in their head - a shortlist that was built while they weren't looking for a new agency.

There's a Bain study from a couple of years back suggesting the brands in a given category's top three for unaided recall have around an 81% likelihood of making a buyers shortlist. A competitive pitch is usually three or four agencies (hopefully no more, but horror stories abound). So if you're already in someone's top three before they start looking, you're likely to be in the room. If you're not, you may never get the call at all. The work of getting there happens while they're still in the 95%, not when they hit the 5%.

None of this is ground breaking. The problem is that most agencies still market as if the 5% is all they care about. They drink the "right message, right place, right time" Kool-Aid and expect to catch a lead at the exact moment they're ready. Buying doesn't work that neatly, so the real question is how you make sure your target market knows you exist, and keeps remembering you long before they're ready to talk.

A note on positioning and brand

I'm not going to get into positioning and perspective in this email. Having a distinctive brand with a sharp point of view matters enormously, and there's a lot of good thinking on it by people smarter than me. I did a webinar with Alex James a month or two back that dug into a lot of it, and David C. Baker is well worth reading too.

But there's no use having the best perspective and the most distinctive brand in your category if your target market never sees it.

Building a marketing ecosystem

The way I think about it is as an ecosystem you build for yourself, rather than a funnel. I'd have called it a flywheel up until a week ago, but I've since been told that a ‘flywheel’ is close to the opposite of what people mean when they use the word (shout out Acquired podcast for giving me something new to be irritatingly pedantic about).

It runs across three broad stages.

Awareness

How do people even find out you exist?

For agencies, I rate paid social a lot here. LinkedIn especially, including thought leadership and thought leadership ads, which aren't cheap but tend to work. I still rate Meta too. The usual objection is that business owners aren't on Instagram or Facebook looking for an agency, which is true. They're on there for their own life and interests, so meet them where they already are.

PR belongs here as well, getting into the trade press your target market actually reads, and I think it's criminally underrated. So do networking, events and speaking, as long as your market is genuinely in the room.

Across all of it, three questions to keep asking:

1. Are you reaching the right people
2. Do you control the message
3. Are you showing up often enough to be noticed

One article a month and calling it done won't cut it. Somewhere around five to seven brand exposures a month is the kind of frequency I'd aim for.

SEO and organic social sit in here too, just doing a bit less of the heavy lifting.

Authority

Now they know you exist and you're in their peripheral vision, the job is to give them a reason to take you seriously.

PR does a lot of work here, and it's where small and medium independents underinvest the most. Look at what the larger agencies do: they're in the industry press constantly, with thought leadership from senior people and a steady drumbeat of new wins. That isn't luck. It's deliberate, because it creates an impression of momentum, capability and leadership, and momentum is attractive to clients and staff alike. Indies are bad at this, and fixing it doesn't cost a fortune. A PR freelancer, a consultant, even one of the self-service platforms can move the needle.

This is also where original research, thought leadership, case studies, testimonials from recognisable brands, sponsoring or running events for your market, speaking on the right panels and showing up at the trade shows all earn their keep. Being present in their world signals that you're plugged into it.

And newsletters, like this one. I don't write this purely out of the goodness of my heart. I enjoy it, but the real reason is that plenty of people here have interacted with my business at some point without being ready to buy. When they are ready, I don't want them Googling (Claudeing?) "business consultant". I want them typing my name.

Conversion

Testimonials, referrals, Google ads, warm outreach.

This is also, funnily enough, where a salesperson can earn their keep. When you can see someone has come to a few events, opened a run of your emails and downloaded a resource or two, a well-timed tap on the shoulder makes sense.

But that's the easy bit. All the hard work is everything upstream that made them worth reaching out to in the first place.

Feed the database

One thing ties the whole ecosystem together: all of it should be feeding your contact database. If we accept that 95% of the market isn't ready today, then the job is to nurture that 95% - more exposure, more frequency, more chances to build authority, and retargeting lists across social and display if you want to push it. The point is simply to get people hearing about you, and to keep them hearing about you until the day they're ready.

Okay, now what?

None of this runs itself, and that's where most of us come unstuck.

The practical starting point is ownership. It can't be you, the founder, because you've already got more than enough on your plate. And handing it to the team as one more account tends to mean it slides down the list behind the paying clients.

A fractional or part-time senior marketing lead, even a couple of days a week whose sole job is this, makes it far more likely the whole thing actually gets executed the way you intended. I'm intentionally recommending a fractional senior hire here rather than a junior - for this sort of work I am much more interested in great thinking, project management, and accountability, rather than just sheer hours per week at a good hourly rate.

The good news is the numbers still usually work. As I've mentioned before, ~five percent of revenue is a reasonable guide for marketing spend, and that's often not far off what agencies were prepared to pay for the senior salesperson anyway. In a lot of cases it's enough to bring in that senior lead part-time, with budget left over for execution.

From there, keep it simple. Pick the two or three channels where your market actually is, commit to enough frequency to be noticed, and keep going for long enough to make an impact on them. None of it is a quick win.

The agencies that get remembered are the ones doing the unglamorous, consistent work long before anyone's in that 5%.