How can your agency go even faster without breaking?
Internet killing the agency star
The creative services industry is being disrupted by the very things the creative services industry warned every other industry about: Online competition, omnichannel customers, digital automation, the decline of in-person interaction and a shortage of talent. This time who’s going to help?
Some of the coolest, smartest agencies are locked in a cycle of grind because they haven’t answered the big and increasingly urgent question:
What do we do about the internet?
Faster! Faster!
Agencies help clients do things they can’t do on their own. Digital transformation in the creative services industry means customers can do more things with less help, even no help.
All agencies need a mix of proactive and reactive clients. For every pound they spend, some clients require more work, some less. Proactives are being drawn online by its immediacy, novelty, economy and self-service empowerment.
Canva, SurveyMonkey, Shopfiy, Logoly, Google, HubSpot, CopyAI, Adobe, Salesforce, even Upwork and Fiverr….the list of alternatives for an agency grows everyday.
Booming tech is indeed moving fast and breaking things, in many case agencies and their teams. Last year 3/4 of creative service professionals reported deteriorating mental health due to over-work and burnout.
Headaches and Heartbreaks
Most agencies pride themselves on taking a unique approach to each client. The internet is rendering a fully-bespoke offer unsustainable as increasingly it’s only attracting harder to serve clients. CEO of Love agency, Trevor Cairns described the traditional pitch process as “winning means losing”.
All that glitters is not gold
There is hope for agencies. Tech widgets can never fully replace talented and dedicated agencies who engage with their clients as people not platform users.
To get there agencies need to be easier to understand on the internet, reduce their time-to-quote and streamline their operations around profitable services.
The answer is products
To win back their territory, agencies need to offer services that look and feel a bit like products.
Agency products: authentic, agency-branded services that work well online at capturing those proactive buyers, anticipate clients’ needs, make resourcing easier, bring back sustainability, offer the potential of growth and might even rise into globally recognised icons and symbols of your agency’s underlying genius.
You probably knew that already.
“Most agency owners will relate to the ambition to productise their offering so they can scale without adding more people. The challenge is it is notoriously difficult and risks just adding to the pile of things to do.”
Agency Marketing Director
Start small
The good news is, if you start small, it’s not as hard as it sounds and doesn’t involve dismantling what makes your agency great today. Lots of agencies are already doing it. Like Savanta and these guys.
It’s just about starting something small on the side and helping it grow.
A little box
Imagine you’re a Ball. A lovely, round ball.
The new product-businesses created from scratch, specifically for the internet, the ones getting all the interest and growing the fastest, are Boxes. Hard edged cubes.
You don’t have to become a Box.
Right now, you don’t want to be a Box.
What you need to do is create a little box next to your ball, give it a name and help it grow.
The little box will make your ball work better. And as it grows it becomes something valuable in itself.
If the box grows really big then that growth might give you a defined edge or two or six.
In the future, if you get there, your agency may be a bit more boxy. Whatever shape it becomes, it will still be the same agency, just sharpened-up and future-proofed.
To thrive in a digital age, creative agencies don’t need to become boxes they just need to create their own little boxes and turn them on.
Get started at your own pace
Our approach is to take what makes your agency great and help you create and manage your first little boxes, your agency products.
You can start on your own by using some of the DIY materials on the site - slides, ideas, guides and tools.
Of course we’d love to do it with you and get started together.
And from there who knows? Maybe you’ll create another. And another. And perhaps they’ll become so big they explain how your agency scaled.
And one day, you might even end up helping other people make agency products so they can benefit like you did.
In case you didn’t realise, that’s me.
Make a box to go with your ball.
What we offer
Create Agency Products is everything an agency needs to discover, create and manage its products and product strategy.
Signature agency products take the grind out of agency growth.
Create a tangible offer that’s easier to buy
Move focus from cost to value
Clarify the job to be done
Appeal to varying budgets
Avoid direct comparison with competition
Reduce perceived risks of working with you
Protect your intellectual property
Simplify your business and reduce agency grind