What Are Your Secret Strategies Of Digital Marketing Agency Success?
The new economy means more competition for digital marketing agencies and a lot fewer customers in certain industries. It is tough to stand out against competing digital agencies unless you have a differentiating characteristic.
I was in a meeting not too long ago with a marketing agency owner who wanted to hit it big in business. They wanted their agency to explode positively. He was angling to win the biggest, best clients, to attract the brightest talent. That is admirable since many of us who own companies want the same thing in some fashion. So I posed a question to them - we will call them Bob for this example - which was fairly straightforward: What is your secret sauce? What separates you from every other agency? Bob hung their head and said, “Well, I guess we don’t really have one. We do what a lot of other marketing agencies do, so I guess the difference is in our employees?” I shook my head with disappointment.
Here is a bit of a history lesson tied in to digital marketing agency differentiation. In medieval Japan and some other nations, the headmasters of different martial arts schools would keep secret scrolls that listed out their secret techniques. These are their recipes for winning when other people didn’t want them to win. These secret scrolls contained the most important points, the most important knowledge, that the headmasters wanted to pass from generation to generation. They were like family cookbooks, only for survival techniques instead of family recipes. I asked Bob about their secret scrolls.
What is in them? What did they have that others did not? After all, anyone can write content or run ads, but surely there had to be some unique way that Bob’s agency did things. Bob said they didn’t have any. But they did. They just didn’t know it. Deep within the organization existed dozens of checklists, employee training courses, examples and slide decks - the works.
All the ingredients needed to replicate a lot of what Bob’s digital marketing agency did to grow, just not codified or organized in a way that made it easy to know about or pass on. That is not necessarily always a bad thing; headmasters of Japanese martial arts lineages often intentionally put wrong things into their secret scrolls so that if they ever fell into enemy hands, the thief would end up getting killed instead of saved by the knowledge. Only those personally trained by the headmaster would be initiated into the secrets; in marketing terms it’d be like them saying “Oh yeah, on page 32 where it says how to analyze cost per click, that is intentionally a typo, it is really cost per acquisition.”
Why does this matter for marketers? As you progress in your career, you need your own set of secret scrolls. You need your own collection of knowledge and wisdom gathered along the way that is uniquely yours, that defines who you are as a marketing practitioner. What are the things only you can do? How do you do those things? They could be as simple as a recipe or worksheet for deploying a Facebook ad. They could be as complex as custom code you have written to process marketing data in your own unique way. They could be as elegant as a compilation of PowerPoint slides that sum up all the frameworks you use personally. They could be as deceptively simple as your own spin on certain strategy frameworks.
Why do you need this? Your personal brand depends on it. Ideally, you want to get to a point in your career where people ask for you by name. You don’t have to be a speaker on stage or a noted author to do that. You just have to have something everyone wants, and wants you specifically by name. “Oh, I need to get Jill to fix my marketing organizational behavior problems” or “Oh, I need to get John Smith to straighten out my podcast strategy”. How does your personal brand depend on this? By having your own secret scrolls, you refine what you know over time. You improve it. You polish it and take it from “just something you do” to “this is the exact process I use to generate unbeatable results”.
Those secret scrolls of digital marketing mastery are your cookbook, and your cookbook evolves with your career. How do you get started? The same way the ancient headmasters did: by writing things down. By cataloging what you know. It doesn’t have to be fancy or elegant - a series of drawings in a notebook, notes jotted down in a journal, or even just a collection of slides. Once you start to build your own secret scrolls, it will become apparent just how much you know, and you will start to see the threads that connect your personal story, your personal secrets, together. And once you know your own secrets, every job interview, every sales pitch, every opportunity to shine will be easier for you because you’ll know exactly what you know, and how well you know it.
AI Uncovered For Masterful Marketing
So why is AI for digital marketing is still a mystery shrouded in an aura of mystique? Have you read report after report, article after article proclaiming its magical powers and wondered what exactly the big deal is?
With every software vendor and services provider proclaiming that they too are an AI-powered company, it’s more difficult to demystify artificial intelligence and its applications for marketers. What is AI and why should you care in 2023? How does it apply to your business? Later on in our blog posts you will get the answers you have been looking for. With all-new practical examples subscribers will learn many things mentioned below.
Key marketing problems AI solves, such as: Attribution modeling Forecasting Natural language processing for SEO and social media. Influencer identification and detailed explanations of what it will take to successfully adopt. AI for your marketing is all about how to prepare your career for AI’s impact. There are many ways your AI efforts will go wrong. Prerequisites needed to help your AI efforts to succeed. When you are done reading research material on the subject, you will have a strong sense of what is possible with AI and machine learning. When it comes to marketing, a blueprint for how to integrate it into your company, and perhaps even a desire to try it out for yourself. You’ll be able to see through AI sales pitches from vendors and talk a little bit of shop with data scientists and AI engineers.
The New Normal News For Business
Adjusting to the “new norm” following a global pandemic continues to be a challenge in the world of work for both companies and their teams. We’ve pulled together some points to keep in mind when preparing for an equitable return to the office. Our Role In LGBTQ+ Storytelling provides a compilation of resources for marketing and creative leaders to unlearn biases and keep brands inclusive through empathetic storytelling. Our Black and Asian American and Pacific Islander colleagues shared their stories and their work that drives meaningful change.
Magnet Media partnered with OneUnited Bank on the groundbreaking OneTransaction virtual conference focused on closing the racial wealth gap. The Women On The Move podcast, Magnet’s collaboration with JPMorgan Chase, was recognized by The Communicator Award for Best Branded Podcast Series. To highlight Adobe’s ongoing partnership with Teach For America, Magnet worked with Adobe for Education to create a virtual comedy event series with Joe Dombrowski. Magnet worked with the innovative Avenova team and a stable of inspiring micro-influencers to promote “science for sore eyes” content across Facebook and Instagram. Greenhouse’s founders published their Talent Makers book, and Magnet worked with micro-influencers to help promote strategic and inclusive hiring practices.
In Storytelling on Social, we shared effective frameworks for platform prioritization and social innovation and strategy along with insight into what’s working, where there's room for elevated creativity and measurement, and who's nailing it. In Co-Creating with Influencers, we offered insight into how brands and marketers can co-create with influencers to connect with their audience, measure success of their campaigns, and what platforms are best to reach their audience. In The Evolution of Events, we collected our expertise in creating a brand experience that is unique, memorable, and engaging. How are you re-envisioning your event cadence and formats to replace the in-person experience in a meaningful way? What’s the right strategy for your business? And what should you measure to track success?
Clubhouse Super Host Swan Sit and LinkedIn's Ife Babatunde shared how brands are winning on social media and how to build successful narratives that succeed at scale. For our World Book Day 2021 celebration, we invited some of the most influential authors in business and marketing to discuss what we want to take with us into the future to continue positive growth. At our quarterly CMO Dinner, we welcomed Annie Auerbach, HarperCollins author of FLEX, to discuss critical topics as it relates to the new world of work, hybrid schedules, and global teams.
Digital Marketing Differentiation Conclusion
Keep all of these tips and industry updates into account to ensure your digital marketing agency and business survive and thrive in the new normal!
