About the Blog
The Marketing Agency Insider blog serves up a mix of original and curated content, industry news, interviews, case studies and more on the marketing services industry.
Tracy (DiMarino) Lewis
Tracy Lewis (@Tracy_J_Lewis) is the community manager for Marketing Agency Insider, and a senior consultant at PR 20/20, where she is involved in client services and account management activities.
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“required reading for anyone building the
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Client Services Series
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Forecasting: How to Manage Account Staffing and Workload
Growth for growth’s sake is not a sound business practice. Instead, it’s better to take a calculated and controlled approach to scaling your agency.
If you grow too quickly than you risk not having the right leadership team in place, stretching your current team too thin, processes that can’t scale to accommodate and the inability to meet payroll.
Forecasting gives you a firm pulse on your agency’s capacity. This ensures that accounts are properly staffed and workloads distributed, as well as helps you make smart hiring decisions—when the time is right.
Read MoreBaer, Rose and Roetzer Team Up for Content Marketing World Agency Workshop
A 2013 Content Marketing Institute study found that B2B marketers spend 33% of their marketing budgets on content with 54% planning on increasing that spending next year. Forty-four percent of respondents outsource at least a portion of this work.
As a result, content marketing offers a large growth opportunity for agencies to differentiate themselves and grow theirs and their clients’ businesses. However, agencies that provide strong, multimedia content services are rare.
Do you sell content marketing services, or are you looking to move into the market? If so, then the Content Marketing World workshop, “Building Your Content Marketing Agency / Consultancy,” is a can’t-miss event.
Read MoreCulture Drives Success: Is Your Agency Delivering Happiness?
We recently had the chance to hear Jon Wolske (@zapposinsights), culture evangelist for Zappos Insights, discuss company culture at a PRSA Clevelandevent.
Zappos has been on Fortune’s 100 best places to work for five years running. Its strong culture has been a driver of employee productivity, quality customer service and brand strength. Below, we share some of the lessons learned from the talk, and how you can apply them to your agency to fuel an environment fit for success.
Read MoreDiscipline: It Belongs in Your Agency
This is a guest post from Josh Wood (@ruckusmarketing), founder and CEO of Ruckus.
Healthy client relationships develop when you match curated client experiences with disciplined internal processes for deadlines and account management. These relationships, based on business principles, will weather occasional storms and deliver on the ultimate goal: revenue for both your agency and clients.
Read MoreHow to Price Your Digital Marketing Services
Earlier this month, I sat in on the Optifiy webinar, How to Price Your Digital Marketing Services. Rob Eleveid (@RobertEleveid), CEO of Optiify, and Jon C. Stone III (@jcstone3), CEO of Revenue Architects, presented.
This post highlights some of webinar’s key takeaways. Before we start though, keep in mind that your pricing will evolve with your business, and it should be continually refreshed based on changing market factors, service offerings and historical data.
Read MoreSmall Agency Agile: 5 Tips to Run a High-Impact Retrospective
This is a guest post from Jack Skeels, co-founder of AgencyAgile.
Agile is all about learning. Learning requires feedback. But, some of the most valuable feedback you can get—how an agile team thinks it is doing—is often overlooked or ignored. Running an effective retrospective can help infuse learnings (from positive and negative events) back into the agency's processes and projects, helping everyone deliver projects better, faster and happier.
In this article we'll give you, as a project manager or producer at a smaller agency (less than 50 people), a simple, introductory model for how to run an effective team or project retrospective, and key tips on how to be effective and efficient.
Read MoreAgency Business Development Challenges & Solutions
This is a guest post by Kathryn Neal Odell (@sales_onsite), managing partner for Sales-Onsite.
How do you fix “the agency business development problem?” We went to the source and asked some marketing agency executives and business development managers about the challenges they face and how they overcome them. In this post, we curate their thoughts on the topic.
Read MoreAgencies Should Not Be Islands
This is a guest post by Peter Gerritsen, president of TAAN Worldwide.
Every agency must use a combination of outsourcing, cooperation, collaboration and partnerships to deliver superior solutions for clients. If you are not hip-deep in these relationships, you will be left behind. Going it alone is a big mistake.
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