3 Ways to Increase Agency Billings

Over the thirty years I’ve run my agency I can’t remember a tougher time for finding more sales. Whoever I speak to I hear the same thing, sales are down, profits are down and new clients are hard to come-by.

Over those three decades at Truly Deeply we’ve tried many things to grow sales - most have borne no fruit. However three strategies have paid dividends and have combined to provide a sustainable, long term business. Those three strategies in order of smallest to greatest impact have been:

01. Select an Area of Expertise

In a category full of generalist agencies, specialization and expertise are your sharpest weapons to cut-through.

More than any other factor, clients are looking for agencies who understand the context in which they work, who their audiences are and how to effectively market to them. When a client is weighing-up an agency they are looking to understand how much value they can add - or more specifically what insights they can bring that will contribute to more sales and higher margins for their businesses. Head-to-head, a specialist agency will beat a generalist agency every day of the week.

And here’s an important kicker to the concept of being a specialist; the generalist opportunities you currently get will still continue to knock on your door after you have positioned yourself as a specialist, but now they will be the icing on the cake rather than the crumbs you try to survive on.

02. Build Your Reputation with a Blog

When it comes to winning clients in the marketing industry, reputation is your most valuable weapon. The more people who see your agency as having expertise in their area of business the more relevant word will spread and more opportunities will come your way. Further still, understood expertise will mean you are asked to competitively pitch less often, and when you do you are more likely to have an advantage over other agencies who may be perceived to have less relevant and specific expertise.

When it comes to building reputation, our experience has been that nothing beats publishing regular articles through a blog on your website. At Truly Deeply we have a brand blog that is read by around 350,000 people each year. We often find ourselves perceived to be a much larger agency than we are and it is the center piece of our content marketing system which is built around our branding expertise.

Regardless of what type of agency you run and what industries you have a degree of expertise, by consciously writing an article or two each week focused on your area of specialization is pound-for-pound the best possible way to build your reputation in a way that will convert into new client opportunities.

03. Add Brand Strategy to your Agency Offer

All of my experience leads me to firmly believe that a business with brand strategy is always a better business than without. Whilst many agencies will consider this and maybe throw a little energy behind it, most understand providing clients with Brand Strategy is easier said than done.

Having spent more than 30 years in this space I understand as much as anyone that ‘there’s Brand Strategy, and then there’s Brand Strategy’. In my time working with clients across almost every conceivable category I’ve seen more than my fair share of inept attempts by agencies claiming to provide a Brand Strategy service. Thankfully most clients are now sufficiently able to tell the deference between professional Brand Strategy and the Mickey Mouse variety based-on questions like “if you were an animal” and “what’s your favorite colour”.

The challenge for agencies wishing to extend their service offering to include Brand Strategy is how to up-skill their capability to the requisite level. That level being a sophisticated enough methodology and competency to provide their clients with a clear, considered and meaningful strategic outcome.

So, how do agencies best add genuine Brand Strategy capability to their offering? There are three options:

01. Hire a Brand Strategist. This is a good plan if you have the certainty of workload. There are plenty of great strategists out there and they are a highly valuable (if highly expensive) resource to have in your agency;

02. Partner with a Brand Strategist or Brand Strategy Consultancy. This is a less risky alternative as you can tap into their services as needed, but you’ll find it difficult to capture much margin on top of their project fees; or

03. Build your capability through Brandvas’ expert Brand Strategy system. Capturing more than 50 years combined experience from some of the smartest brand minds in the country, Brandvas is the only tool of it’s kind in the agency world that can lift an agency with marketing smarts into a genuine brand strategy consultancy.

David Ansett, Brandvas Founder
David is also the founder of Truly Deeply, one of Australia’s most respected branding agencies. David’s 30 years of brand experience have seen him work across almost every conceivable category and with a huge number of brands from obscure start-ups to household names.