Sell with Authority

Own and Monetize Your Agency's Authority Position

Drew McLellan, Stephen Woessner

• Publisher: BookPress Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781947305083
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

If your agency's future is tied to making stuff, then you're destined to be on a perpetual financial roller coaster. Someone will always make stuff less expensively than you can. We're entering the era of the authority. While you may already be sick of the phrase thought leader, the truth is there aren't that many of them in our industry. Thought leaders don't write content that any other agency could claim. Thought leaders don't write about anything and everything and thought leaders don't compete on price. And their time is now. Experts are afforded the highest level of confidence and trust because they have a depth of knowledge that can't be denied or easily replicated. Why wouldn't we capitalize on that, as opposed to writing generic marketing tip posts that look like every other agency's content? Agencies are at the cusp of a huge shift, and if you take full advantage now, you're going to be tough to catch. You can own an authority position that will future-proof your agency.

Chapter One:
How Did We Get Here?

(Drew)

Content. When did that become a thing? Stephen and I have both been in the business for more than 25 years, and back when we started our careers, no one was talking about content. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t creating it.

The industry has evolved a great deal since the first agency over-serviced their client in about 1800 (given the chaos of advertising in the early days, no one has been able to pinpoint precisely when it became a paid profession). One thing has been a constant—since day one, we’ve helped our clients capture and tell their stories in a way that makes an impact.

Back in the golden days of advertising, agencies were boldly creating content that makes what most agencies do today look rather elementary. In many ways, this new era of what agencies can and should be bringing to their clients (and doing for their own agencies) is taking our industry back to its roots.

Let’s look at the trajectory of advertising since the Mad Men days. Back then, agencies gave away everything they created in exchange for media commissions. That’s how they made their money. Remember, the landscape looked very different. Today, the vast majority of agencies are privately owned, independent, local, and regional, but a century ago, the world of advertising was comprised of large corporate agencies primarily based in New York, L.A., or London. Although they weren’t being paid directly for the strategy or creative they produced, those agencies were creating content. Big, bold, culture-changing content. Often, they were also creating an audience from scratch because they needed placement opportunities for their clients.

In some ways, the freedom of not having to worry about how much a tactic would cost or how much time it would take created bigger thinking and fewer boundaries.

Benton & Bowles was an agency based in New York that was launched in 1929 by William Benton and Chester Bowles. They actually invented the radio soap opera so they could create sponsorships and ad placements for their clients who wanted to target homemakers with their message. By 1936, they were responsible for three of the four most popular radio shows on the air, including As the World Turns. When television arrived, Benton & Bowles replicated their radio success and launched a TV version of this, their most popular show, in 1956 for their client Proctor & Gamble. P&G sponsored or advertised on that show until it was canceled in 2010. Somewhere along the way, the network bought the show from Benton & Bowles, but they negotiated P&G’s exclusivity as part of the deal.

Even back then, agencies understood that no one sought out advertising. But if you gave them something they valued, they’d gladly accept the advertising as part of the package. This concept of storytelling was part of the agency’s DNA, and many of the agency alumni went on to build on that foundation. Shepherd Mead started at B&B as a mail room clerk and worked his way up to Vice President of the company. On his weekends, he wrote the book How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which would later be turned into a Broadway hit. Dick Wolf, the creator of the Law and Order television series, also got his start at Benton & Bowles.

When we talk about memorable ad campaigns, most of them came from this era. They were filled with memorable characters (the Marlboro Man, Mr. Whipple, and the Jolly Green Giant) and earworm jingles (Wrigley’s Doublemint gum, Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, and Chevrolet General Motors), and they used these elements to get the audience to connect with the stories and products they were pitching.

Somehow, that sense of storytelling with just a smattering of advertising got watered down between the mid-80s and the early 90s. By then, agencies were no longer surviving on commissions alone. We were being paid piecemeal, like a retail store. This was the start of the laundry list of deliverables tied to agency hours. Clients were beginning to pay for creative execution, markups, and in sporadic cases, strategy.

For most agency owners working today, this is when we got our start. It’s the model we grew up on, but it’s also the model that began to commoditize what we do. It moved us from dealing with business owners and CEOs and put us on the slippery slope toward procurement and the considerations of agencies as vendors as opposed to business advisors or partners.

On the public relations side of things, it was a little different. Back in the 20th century, PR was really about pitching stories to the media. There was always an element of crisis communication in the mix and some event creation and management, but all in all, it was primarily about influencing the stories that other people told about their clients.

We crossed into the 21st century, and the Internet became more accessible and more commercialized. We began building rudimentary websites along with our traditional creative. Most agencies are still giving away their ideas to get clients to sign off on the list of deliverables, but it’s getting a little tougher to make money on media commissions and markups. At this stage, agencies have become doers rather than strategic thinkers, but because we had the skills, software, and media connections, we were still able to charge a premium for our services.

PR agencies continued to tell and shape their clients’ stories, but now they didn’t have to rely on others alone. They had the first digital version of owned media.

Very few clients had the appetite to invest in developers at the dawn of the Internet age. It was way beyond their comprehension, so agencies enjoyed a very profitable window of time because we knew something the client didn’t know and didn’t want to learn.

Our world changed when being findable online became a thing. Suddenly the brochureware websites we’d been creating weren’t the sum total of what was possible when it came to creating a digital presence. Google, Yahoo, and other early search engines started to hold us accountable for the words on those websites and their relevance to audiences’ queries.

One of the most beautiful benefits of the digital emergence is that agencies suddenly found it a little easier to sell ideas and strategies. The channels were so new that clients depended on their agencies to help them figure out how best to use them. We brought value to every conversation, and we were educating our clients in every meeting. That’s a dominant position to be in, as we will discuss throughout this book. Being the teacher who is not only smart, but also willing to share those smarts, is a hard-to-beat strategic position.

This shift also re-ignited the idea of creating content, but in this iteration, content that was helpful and search-engine-optimization (SEO) friendly. At first, we started SEO practices just to please the Google Gods and land our clients on page one, but we quickly discovered that consistent content creation encouraged community growth, referrals, and connections that eventually rang the proverbial cash register.

Google Adwords, the emergence of social media, and digital ads added a complexity to agency work that kept advertisers flush. We were able to merchandise the need to have a digital presence and help clients dip their toes in that water. This was also the time when the phrase “content marketing” was coined by Content Marketing Institute’s founder, Joe Pulizzi. The work being done was still pretty basic, but clients and agencies discovered the power of the overall strategy, and suddenly everyone was talking about it, recommending it, and selling it.

And then the recession hit. It was brutal, beating up agencies in a variety of ways. Budgets were slashed, and many agencies were deeply discounting their work just to survive. As clients cut back their budgets and by necessity took some of that work in-house, they got more comfortable developing marketing strategies they’d previously been paying agencies to do.

As the recession ended, the agencies that survived found that the landscape had dramatically changed yet again. The world had become more comfortable with all things digital. The mystique of the Internet had faded, and it was more mainstream, which meant agencies had a tougher time charging a premium for some deliverables.

On top of that, clients had been bootstrapping during the recession and had come out of the recession believing that it was possible to bring some of the work in-house or hire individual freelancers to develop some of the deliverables that they’d previously been paying agencies to do. Even more challenging, the Internet had created a DIY smörgåsbord of tools. Clients could upload and distribute their own media releases, hire a graphic designer, or create a basic website, infographic, or social media post.

Suddenly, the type of work we’d built our agencies on had been commoditized. Even if we earned the opportunity to do the work, we’d trained the clients during the recession that we would work for a marginalized price. Once you lower your prices, it’s pretty tough to raise them again, even when the economy bounces back. Our world was picking up the pace, and there was always some “new thing” emerging, whether it was mobile, ads on Instagram, or Tik Tok. We could temporarily charge a premium for a period of time, but as the latest new thing became more the norm, our ability to be the only expert in the room quickly faded.

That’s the loop we’re in now as agencies. If our future is tied to only making stuff, we’re going to be on a perpetual roller coaster financially. That’s always been a facet of agency life, but now the dips are going to come faster and run deeper until the next new thing emerges. Then we’ll enjoy the temporary spike before the next stomach-flipping drop.

It also completely reduces our agencies to vendor status. We won’t be invited to the C-suite table, and we won’t get to compete based on our smarts. Instead, we’ll be forced to compete on speed and price.

We’ve got to figure out a way to get paid for something more than making stuff. We were on that path before the recession, and now, the urgency is greater than ever. We don’t want to be mere monkeys in the back of the room, banging out deliverables for pennies. Clients are demanding returns-on-investment (ROI) for their marketing spend, and without a strong strategy, we all know how that works out.

An even greater threat to our existence is the concept of cranking out content simply because the scope of work calls for five blog posts this month. Churning out generic content influenced Google 20 years ago. Today, there’s simply too much out there. If we can’t use content strategy to truly differentiate, then what we produce just becomes unproductive noise. And if it’s yet another list post or some other fluff piece, the client can go to one of the many online writer factories and buy the same thing for a fraction of our cost.

This is the state of our world today, and this reality is as true for our agencies as it is for our clients. We, too, have to be findable, and once we’re found, be easy to distinguish from the other agencies out there. Generic content isn’t going to get us there.

We know that on the surface, it looks like we’re painting a gloomy picture, so it might surprise you to hear that we’re super psyched that this is the fork in the road. The opportunity for agencies is enormous—if we step into it.

We are entering the era of the authority. While you may already be sick of the phrase “thought leader,” the truth is there aren’t that many of them in our industry. Thought leaders don’t write content that any other agency could claim. Thought leaders don’t write about anything and everything, and thought leaders don’t compete on price.

And their time is now.

For the last two decades, the global PR agency Edelman has conducted research that examines who and what consumers trust and how that trust influences their buying behaviors. They recently released the 2019 Trust Barometer, and the results are incredibly telling about whom consumers trust today and whom we see as a credible authority. This is a worldwide study with 33,000 consumers from 27 countries participating.

One of the biggest takeaways from this year’s study is that consumers assign a high level of trust to people they believe are “just like me.” When you think about the influence that ratings, reviews, and influencers have with their audiences, you begin to see the power of that belief.

But this research isn’t about the celebrity influencer. This study is documenting the rise of the common man influencer. It’s noteworthy because it gives statistical validity to the idea of “real people” as influencers and the impact they can have on behalf of a brand.

The research asked participants to rank what attributes made an influencer believable and trustworthy. The relatability of the influencer was nearly twice as important as the influencer’s popularity. In other words, when consumers could see themselves in an influencer, they were far more likely to follow and trust that influencer. It’s not about having millions of followers; it’s about being someone you can relate to and connect with. For this very reason, if you’re an agency, and you’ve been avoiding putting together a content strategy where you share your depth of expertise in your niche with the world, you need to re-think that decision.

Want to know what made an influencer even more compelling to the research participants than relatability? The one attribute that ranked higher than the trust we have in “people like me” is the trust we have in highly educated experts. The only three groups of people we trust more than people like ourselves are company, industry, and academic experts.

I want to make sure you saw that sentence: the only people we trust more than ourselves are experts. Experts are afforded the highest level of confidence and trust because they have a depth of knowledge in a specific industry or niche. So why in the world wouldn’t we capitalize on that, as opposed to writing generic marketing tip posts that look like every other agency’s content?

Agencies can’t fake it anymore. We are at the end of the era when it was acceptable for agencies to promise effective content and produce something generic. If we can’t do it for ourselves through a method we can monetize, and we can’t do it in a way that uniquely defines us, we aren’t going to be able to credibly sell our content for much longer.

Why would a client hire us to do what we can’t do for ourselves? They’ll either hire someone else or take the job in-house. We can’t be generic, or we’re going to get lost in the noise.

Beyond that, we’re leaving money on the table. We can be influencers ourselves. We can earn the trust of our prospects so that we shorten the sales cycle and actually attract the best client candidates right to our door!

Here’s the upside of where we are today. We’re all in this together. Very few agencies have propelled themselves out of this perpetual loop, so there’s time for you to choose a different path for your agency and your clients. You can be one of the early adopters if you’re ready to boldly step out.

We’re at the cusp of a huge shift, and if you take full advantage now, you’re going to be tough to catch. You could be a Benton & Bowles-like trendsetter, which will put you back into the C-Suite and give you double-digit profitability. You can own an authority position that will future-proof your agency.

Are you ready to be part of this next generation of breakout agencies?

Chapter Two: Three Essentials to
Becoming an Authority

(Drew)

If you were asked to think of an authority on any subject, who would come to mind? What about them designates them as an authority? What’s true about them? And what does someone have to do to earn and keep the title of authority?

• They have a focus area or subject-matter expertise.

• They don’t just repeat what everyone else is saying.

• They have a public presence where they share their expertise.

• They don’t stray from their area of expertise—think specialist versus generalist.

• They aren’t equally attractive to everyone. In fact, they probably bore most people to tears.

• They’re significant—which is different from prolific—in terms of content creation.

• They don’t create any generic content that someone with far less knowledge or experience could have just as easily written.

• They’re perceived as an educator in some way.

• They have a passion for their subject matter.

• They have a strong point of view, which is the foundation of all of their content.

A true authority has something specific to teach us, and they want to be helpful or illuminating. They’re eager to share what they know because they have a genuine passion for it, and they don’t fear giving away the recipe to their secret sauce (or so it’s perceived). That confidence and generosity is contagious. Their expertise is something specific groups of people (their sweet-spot prospects) are hungry to access. Call them an expert, a thought leader, an authority, a sought-after pundit, advisor, or specialist. They’re all words for the same thing—a trusted resource who has earned that trust by demonstrating and generously sharing the depth of their specialized knowledge over and over again.

One way to recognize an authority is the ability to define them in a single sentence, like Simon Sinek. He’s “the why guy.” Brené Brown is “the dare-to-be-vulnerable woman.” They’ve so narrowly and so carefully defined their expertise that we can capture it with a word or phrase. Does Simon Sinek talk about other thi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: How Did We Get Here?: (Drew)
• Chapter Two: Three Essentials to Becoming an Authority: (Drew)
• Chapter Three: Go Narrow to Monetize: (Stephen)
• Chapter Four: Defining Your Point of View: (Drew)
• Chapter Five: Be More Than a One-Trick Pony: (Stephen)
• Chapter Six: Creating Cornerstone Content: (Drew)
• Chapter Seven: The Pros and Cons of Talking: (Drew)
• Chapter Eight: Writing as the Hub of Your Cornerstone Content: (Stephen)
• Chapter Nine: Extending your Reach and ROI: (Stephen)
• Chapter Ten: Your New Business Blueprint: (Drew)
• Chapter Eleven: Build an Audience from Scratch: (Stephen)
• Chapter Twelve: How to Monetize Your Content: (Stephen)
• Chapter Thirteen: Yes, You Can Get it All Done!: (Stephen)
• Chapter Fourteen: Agencies Doing it Well: (Drew)
• Chapter Fifteen: The Big Close: (Drew)
• Appendix A: Slice and Dice Recipes
• Appendix B: Tools for Getting it Done