Insights

This week’s post is a personal story with a practical lesson for any agency thinking about its office, so indulge me.

An organisational chart shows where departments sit and who manages who in your business. I’ll often ask to see an org chart or organogram at the beginning of an engagement because I can immediately guess what some of the firm’s challenges are likely to be.

SWOT - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats - is the industry standard for situational analysis. I learned about it in secondary school which, in hindsight, was probably the first clue that it’s not fit for purpose.

Most agencies have been told they "didn't understand the client's industry" at some point. Here's an example of what relevant experience means to a client (and why it might not be what we think).

Early in each pitch presentation, most agencies remind everyone in the room why they’re in the room by summarising the brief. This is how to do it properly (and why it's perhaps the most important slide in your deck).

Since it’s no longer sensible to base your agency’s content strategy on search volumes, I thought I’d share a tactic that Branded3 used to plan content for its blog (which, at one point, received a million visitors per year).

While the agency is trying to establish the budget (which it doesn’t actually need to know), it makes a series of costly mistakes in the first phone call with a prospective client. Here are the first 5 that are likely to come up.

Many agencies seem to revolve around one particular team, which feels like it gets all the praise - and the easiest ride. Let's talk about why that happens (and if it's really a problem).

Last week, I wrote about how hard attribution can be for a marketing agency. This week’s post is about what happened when that same client got back in touch after we’d started our own agency - and why we turned them down.

It isn't as simple as "new business makes the intro and then we close it". Marketing generates the leads...it's new business' job to collect. Here's what you need to know about attributing outbound.