One of the biggest problems with getting new clients for your marketing agency is the overwhelm prospective clients feel when looking for a marketing agency.
Most marketing agencies look the same from the outside. Some have personality that shines through on their website, which is great, while many just have a basic website with generic, commoditized content.
If we need to be known, liked, and trusted as agencies and want to stand out from other agencies, creating content is a great way to knock out all three birds with one stone.
Looking at people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Alex Hormozi, and even Chris Walker (who served as a great case study for marketing your own agency recently), you can see that creating content can lead to huge ROI, but most agencies don’t create content. Those that do generally create substandard content that nobody really wants to consume.
We’re going to look at why most agencies don’t create content, how those that do create content are doing it wrong, and how you could make it easier on yourself while still creating great content that generates results now and in the future.
- Why Most Don’t
The fact of the matter is that most agency owners don’t create content because it’s a lot of work and it doesn’t usually lead to immediate, measurable results.
I blame direct response marketing, which has shown us that one can perform one action and generate revenue immediately as, well, a direct response.
Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins proved to us the benefits of tracking results and adjusting our efforts to maximize return on investment. We learned to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
The problem with that is that we can’t always measure what works with perfect accuracy. In fact, we’re often given incorrect information by the technology we use to measure the buy behavior of humans that rarely behave as we’d prefer.
So we have put more and more focus on quick results and less on building relationships and building a brand (relationships at scale). We do things that we can measure and that generate quick results and ignore things that could produce results over time.
We write stupid articles and posts about how SEO is dead, blogging is dead, display is dead, traditional marketing is dead, and other silly opinions that hold no weight outside of our heads and a couple of niche scenarios we may have seen.
The truth is, though, that we often struggle to grow our agencies with this mentality and we usually don’t start creating content because we either don’t know how to start, don’t have time to start, or are afraid of creating bad content that makes us look bad.
How Most Do
There are some, however, that recognize the value of an audience, a list, a following, or whatever you can generate from a lot of positive attention from the right people. They decide to do the hard thing consistently and they start creating content.
However, the type of content they create tends to be an issue in and of itself.
There are generally two categories of content most agencies produce. One type is super-generic educational content. This can be articles or videos that answer questions like “What is digital marketing?” or “How does Google Ads work?”
This type of content is meant to show the expertise of the agency and help those who are asking these questions, thus driving businesses that don’t have an agency to their website and getting a call to action in front of them in case they convert.
The problem with this type of content is that it only appeals to people who can’t afford to work with a marketing agency. Nobody is searching for this content with the intent to work with a marketing agency, they’re generally starting to grow their business if they even have a business at all (I’m thinking school papers…).
The other type of content is the type that answers questions like “What to look for in a marketing agency” or “Questions to ask your agency”.
This content is much better because it targets people who are already working with an agency or who are actively looking. However, the problem is that it’s always super biased. Some business owners are asking this question, but most agencies create content like this to make themselves look like the best option and other agencies look incompetent or scammy.
Business owners can see through this. The tone of “Nobody is doing it right except for me” bleeds through and it’s hard to come across as sincere even if you are trying to be objective and genuinely teach.
Agencies create other kinds of content as well, but these are the most common I see.
How You Could
So if most agencies don’t create content and the ones that do usually do it wrong, what’s the answer?
As I tend to do, I’m going to give you a framework to make it as easy and practical as possible to consistently create content that actually provides value to people and generates leads.
Step 1. Choose a Platform
One of the things that stops agencies from creating content is the overwhelm they feel when thinking about doing the work.
It’s not always as difficult as it sounds, though. Sometimes they’re thinking of writing long-form blog content or a disturbingly long newsletter… and they hate writing, so they don’t start.
But sometimes people who hate writing are great at video. Don’t want to script out a video? Just turn on a camera and start talking. You can always edit it. Don’t like how it’s turning out? Why not start a podcast and just ask people questions? You’re creating content and just talking to people. More of a teacher? Teach things to your team and have them film you, then use that.
The important thing is to get started and find a platform that you’ll consistently create content on. Consistency is your first target and quality will improve over time. Expect your confidence to be low at first, but when you get used to it, it becomes as natural as any other work you do.
Ideally, you’ll create content on the platform your market spends the most time on, but we’ll touch on that more later.
Step 2. Choose Content Pillars & Assign Intent
A quick way to make content creation easier is to narrow down your options. This is generally done by looking at your approach to marketing or your values and choosing 3-5 core topics, or “pillars”, that your agency is built upon.
The common mistake is to write content based on the services you provide, but that puts your content firmly under the commodity category. There’s only so much you can create on Google Ads before you end up running out of ideas or rehashing the same ideas in different ways.
Choosing your pillars based on values or your approach gives you much more content options while also filtering out all of the irrelevant or less valuable content you could create.
My content pillars, for example, are People, Processes, and Performance. I can create content about one pillar at a time, multiple pillars at once, or about how they interact with each other.
After choosing pillars, you should understand the different reasons to create content.
Content is often created with the intent to get traffic or followers. However, if you don’t know how your content helps the people who are consuming it, you’ll spin your wheels and your content will be hit and miss.
There are basically 4 primary reasons to create content:
- Educate your market about the problem you solve (what it is, how it affects them, how bad it is, etc)
- Educate your market about the solution you offer (what it is, how it changes their situation, how it works, how it’s different from other solutions, etc)
- Get people in your market to self-identify as a good fit for your solution (lead magnets, 2-step posts that offer to send content if they comment, etc)
- Prove that you’re a credible expert (case studies, testimonials, stories, examples of how you’re different, “I believe” statements, etc)
When it comes time to create something, having a pillar and a specific intent in mind really helps narrow your focus and overcome the dreaded “blank page syndrome”.
Step 3. Core Content & Discovery Content
Not all content appeals to everyone in the same way.
Look at YouTube Shorts. Many of them get lots of views because of how easy they are to consume. If someone finds them interesting or valuable in some way, they often click through to the channel to see what else the creators are making.
Some content works better as “Discovery content”. It’s the quick, easily consumed, valuable snippets of content that introduce people to you and your content pillars.
Other content, like this newsletter, functions more like “Core content”. It’s the comprehensive ideas and frameworks that often take on a longer format and that go deeper into the information to more fully address the intent.
A super quick and easy way to create a lot more content and get more out of it is to focus on creating core content 1-3 times per week, then to take snippets out of that for the discovery content.
Core content generally lives on the website, social profiles, and/or YouTube channels. Discovery content is generally not on the website, but can also be on social or YouTube as shorts, TikTok videos, or reels.
You’ll recognize that practice under the more common term “repurposing”. Create one bigger piece of content and use it lots of times in different ways.
If you’re writing, you can write one blog post, article, or similar long-form content piece. You can then use snippets as small as a sentence on some platforms like Instagram or X (formerly Twitter) or a few paragraphs for Facebook and LinkedIn.
If you’re creating video, be sure to keep most of the video centered around the middle of the screen so you can easily make clips in portrait format, then take snippets out for TikTok, Instagram stories, Facebook reels, YouTube Shorts, and then shorter clips in landscape format for LinkedIn, Facebook, and organic YouTube videos.
With this approach, you’ll have tons of content in no time.
Step 4. Schedule & Share
From here, you’re down to choosing when to create the content and when to release it.
The general best practice is to set up a content calendar where you assign each piece of content to a day and plan each month in advance. A good thing to add to this would be scheduling days to work on the content so it’s on your calendar. Agency life is crazy, so if you don’t block off your time, someone or something else will take it.
If you want to make things even easier when planning day rolls around, assign each weekday a content pillar. If you only have 3-4, prioritize Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as content creation days, with Monday being your last choice so you can let Mondays be Mondays.
Ideally, you’d get into a groove where you’re creating content 3-5 days a week and releasing content every day. As mentioned earlier, you can release the core content 1-3 days per week and the discovery content every other day.
Summary
Creating valuable content that educates your market, solves their problems, and proves your credibility is a great way to build trust with those who are aware of you, but not ready to buy right now.
It also gives you loads of resources to send to prospects, new hires, or even existing clients if they have questions about you, what you stand for, or particular aspects of your approach.