What are your plans for the future?
Too many marketing firms are chained to the past.
The agency of the future, like the company of the future, has to be agile and lean. Where the buzz a few years ago was on restructuring (read: downsizing), today it’s on increasing productivity and improving performance. More and more firms are tearing down their walls, transforming old vertical department-oriented structures into horizontal, client-focused units that improve speed and profitability.
There is a whole wave of new technology, tools, and techniques that allows firms to phase-in new ideas, new ways of working. To build the most effective and successful agency of the future, you must find new ways to make your agency work better, quicker and smoother. Most agencies have untapped potential buried within operational areas, hidden within their own four walls.
Unleashing Your Potential – 4 Keys:
- Your Vision: What is it that you want to achieve? Setting a vision of the future you want to create is crucial to guiding everything your agency does.
- The Problem: What are the huge client challenges you believe is your purpose to help them solve. What are its root causes?
- Core Values: They form your culture. Creativity, solution-focused, fast – whatever values you feel are crucial for your agency to flourish should be clarified.
- Short-Term Goals: What is your clear call to action? Short-term goals help prioritize and keep you away from creating over-ambitious work plans that won’t be met and won’t realistically contribute to your long-term vision.
Many agencies create a strategic plan, but fail to execute it. Setting goals for your agency are worthless without actually holding yourselves accountable to them.
New Directions For Ad Agency Growth.
Increasing competition, blurring of traditional lines, and vanilla agency brands have led to a reemergence of agency new business activity.
- Most agencies have (re)hired New Business Directors
- Responding to more RFPs, many far below their normal range
- Working hard on any over-the-transom leads
Many efforts miss the key to long-term success by driving for short term gains and focusing only on “the pitch.” Main leadership effort must be on outreach (building awareness and relationships).
- Creating leads is job #1
- Vital to agency growth
- Without outreach, agency allows the past to determine future clients
- Agencies not creating new [or any] impressions
The new business wars are starting to heat up; clients are starting to look for marketing partners to help them reinvigorate their growth strategies. The new year is just around the corner, and now is the time to take a hard look at your firm and come up with a plan for growth.
An outside-in look by us starts the process from which everything else flows. It’s a clear-eyed look at your agency from consultants who have worked with thousands of other agencies. Most importantly, it’s straight talk about where to go and how to get there.
Photo by sheiabah
