Why Good Marketing Agencies Are So Bad at Marketing Themselves

There are few greater anomalies in business than trying to watch a marketing agency market itself, I know as I’ve been there several times. It’s quite a moment to watch agencies that spend day and night coming up with ground-breaking ideas have the question turned back around on them, and then to watch as they go clueless on how to explain their own value proposition and differentiation strategy.

Yet for these agencies to survive they have to find unique ways to represent their strengths so that they can attract prospects. When we started Social by Definition we knew that by building a media platform where marketers could promote themselves we had to provide something that solved the core of why marketers had such a tough time getting recognition, here are just a few we came up with and ways we’re looking to solve them.

Being everything to everyone

The agency landscape is competitive and aggressive, for an agency to maintain a client they often have to remain versatile enough to claim new capabilities and offerings to meet client demand. But while this is a quick fix solution to revenue it’s a long-term recipe for disaster. There’s nothing worse than watching a social media agency announce a new website-build offering or to watch an SEO agency all of the sudden become an expert in experiential marketing, gross. When this happens agencies lose grasp of who they are and what they do well and you can’t market that which you do not know inside and out. At Social by Definition we try and make this easy by working with agencies on their core competencies and then matching that with readers or brand marketers in our community looking for those types of case studies.

Not enough noise

Secondly, agencies seem to be afraid to make noise. It’s one thing to come up with a dynamic social campaign for Pringles, but asking an agency what an experiential B2B campaign might look like for them will seldom create an appropriate response. Rightfully so, after all B2B marketing is a different beast than B2C marketing and requires a different mindset. But that doesn’t mean B2B marketing has to be boring. If you look at agencies like MRY, making noise could mean throwing the biggest party at SXSW or if you’re a vendor like Spredfast making noise might be a series of case studies and slide-share how-to decks. At Social by Definition we’re working hard to make sure your agency creates the type of noise on our site that makes the most sense to our readers. Whether that’s a case study, opinion post, or video integration, we’ll help you make the noise needed to reach the necessary clients wanted.

Too little time

Finally, while we could continue this list on-and-on, we’ll end at the dilemma of time. Working at an agency seems to be consuming to the point where if you blink a decade could go by. With so little time, how is one to find a moment to build a complex campaign around themselves when they don’t even know how they are? This ongoing dilemma leaves agencies void of opportunities and too much time planning how to get that feature in AdWeek as oppose to just fighting to get anything in AdWeek. We understand this at Social by Definition which is why for our agency partners we set up a series of offerings including a low cost/high return subscription model that allows them to craft content and posts that reach dream prospects on a monthly basis. We try to make the process manageable so that they have case study worthy content reaching client prospects on a monthly basis.

These are just a few ways we’re trying to match up uninformed marketers with information resources and solutions. With that said if you’re an agency or vendor looking to get recognition around a case study or new company feature, visit us at www.socialbydefinition.com and make some noise today so that you don’t your next opportunity tomorrow.