Smart Agency Masterclass With Jason Swenk: Podcast For Digital Marketing Agencies

Tired of relying on referrals? Teaming with right strategic partners is an effective way to scale your agency. The trick is knowing how to find, leverage and maintain the right strategic partnerships. In this episode, we’ll cover: How agency owners can get out of their own way of agency growth. Finding, approaching and maintaining beneficial strategic partnerships. As a serial entrepreneur, Vincent D’Eletto has learned all about rapidly scaling startup businesses. He owns multiple revenue-generating websites, as well as WordAgents.com, a content and ghostwriting agency. Vincent shares the best ways to find, leverage and maintain highly beneficial strategic partners. And, I know what you’re thinking but I’m not talking about just having other businesses refer you out. Real strategic partners are much more than just referrals. When strategic partnerships are done right, both partners can generate some serious revenue! Systems & Processes Win (Again) Hands down, the fastest way to grow and scale is having

Frustrated by Agency Prospects? Are you sick and tired of agency prospects blowing you off after presenting a proposal? Frustrated when they string you along or send mixed signals? Wondering what you could do differently? You are not alone and this is a hurdle that many digital agency owners face when it comes to new clients and potential agency prospects. I have put together a video with advice on how to deal with getting proposals blown off by agency prospects, excuses clients can make and how to make it stop happening. Here's exactly how to handle it next time... Shannon asked: “I need help finding a better way to close a deal! ...I had a great first call with a prospect who said he was ready to go. I put together the proposal and set up another call to present it. After I went through the entire proposal, the prospect said he wouldn't be ready to do anything for another 3 weeks. So I scheduled the next call for 3 weeks out and again he says he's not ready to pull the trigger. This is the third time in a r

If you’re looking for new ideas to generate new agency business and attract new clients, you might want to hear what today’s guest tells us about branded web TV and influencer marketing. In this episode, we’ll cover: How to use branded web TV for agency new business. 4 Steps to positioning your agency or client as an influencer. Mark Fidelman founder and CEO of Fanatics Media is here to tell us -- branded web TV is the next big thing. According to Mark, video content is heading away from one-offs in favor of series or episodes. As an agency you can use this influencer marketing strategy for building new agency business, and as an innovative idea for your clients. Why Branded Web TV? At Mark’s agency they’re seeing an upswing in the popularity of branded web TV series. You might be familiar with Celebrities in Cars Getting Coffee or YouTube’s First We Feast. These are examples of branded series’ where viewers get a small dose of entertaining content while also being marketed to… and that’s where Fanatics Med

If you're struggling to transition one-off project clients into repeat business or retainer clients, this episode is for you. Learn how you can scale your agency by getting clients to stop viewing you as a commodity. {0:33} Geoff asked:  “How do you ensure that your clients come back for repeat business?..." "In my content management business, we start new clients off on a trial project, followed by one month's content. If they like all of that (and they do in 90+% of cases), we set up an arrangement whereby they order content from us every month. We've experimented with a lot of different writing services: blogs, landing pages, sales emails, product descriptions, direct response copy - even translation services this week. The service that people come back for month after month is blog posts. There is a constant need for content, and this is a market we get a lot of repeat business from. The problem I'm having right now is that clients are very sluggish when it comes to reordering content at the beginning of

If you want to grow your agency like some of the big guys but you’re not sure how to get there, you’ll want to check out this episode. Our guest has grown four (almost five!) 8-figure businesses. He shares ways to increase your profitability so you can grow and scale too with the best growth model for your agency. In this episode, we’ll cover: 2 tips to building an 8-figure agency. The right way to create a growth model after the big agencies. 2 ways to increase profitability and eliminate scope creep. Today’s guest is on in the process of building his 5th eight-figure business. Vinnie Fisher is the authority on profitability and growth. He’s an attorney by trade but left his law career to fulfill his dreams as an entrepreneur. Currently, he is the founder and CEO of Fully Accountable, a back office accounting and HR solution for service-based businesses. Vinnie shares the two big secrets he attributes to his 8-figure success with the right growth model, plus how an agency can become more profitable. 2 Tips

Profiling Ideal Clients to Attract New Agency Business If you are pulling generic data and basing your entire client persona off of it, you’ve got to catch this interview. To attract and qualify new agency business you need to be profiling ideal clients. This episode is all about how you can really zero in on how to start profiling ideal clients and your client’s clients. In this episode, we’ll cover: What “attitudinal segmentation” is and why you need to be doing it. 2 problems with the way agencies are strategizing now. 3 ways of profiling ideal clients and getting better data on your prospects. Our guest today is Susan Baier, founder of AudienceAudit.com has spent 30 years in the marketing space. She’s worked both agency-side and client-side as a strategist until eight years ago when she founded her agency specializing in attitudinal segmentation and research. Susan tells us all about using custom research and data to avoid being a “me too” agency. Profiling Ideal Clients: The Key Factors WTF is "Attitud

Solutions for Staffing Issues Are you trying to grow your agency while keep a tight lid on staffing? Busy chasing freelancers, all the while worrying they might go rogue or MIA? Over and understaffing can cause a ton of stress, but so can relying too heavily on freelancers. Today’s podcast guest has a solution for those staffing issues and more. In this episode, we’ll cover: Solutions to common agency owner struggles and staffing issues. #1 staffing mistake agency owners make. One service that makes agency owners’ lives easier. Today’s guest is Ryan Crozier, founder of Agency Boon - an agency that provides creative agency talent to U.S. agencies. In other words, it's the agency that helps agencies. Like many agency owners Ryan stumbled into the agency business. However, Ryan’s story has a different twist. He was a U.S. missionary in Romania where he started a nonprofit. He discovered his team’s creative talents and started farming out those talents to make ends meet for the nonprofit. They began assisting U

What Do You Need to Do to Quit Losing Clients Have you ever lost a client even though you’ve done great work for them? Puzzled as to why your “bad client” is so bad? This episode is all about what clients really want, from the woman who literally wrote the book. Learn all about maintaining good client relationships, how to quit losing clients, plus managing and training an amazing account service team that helps grow agency business. In this episode, we’ll cover: Why great work isn’t enough to keep clients happy. What clients actually want from their agency. 3 ways to make agency clients’ lives easier. Hiring and managing a team that grows your agency. There’s no such thing as a bad agency client... only a bad prospect or a bad process. In this episode my guest, Chantell Glenville, goes in depth on the bad agency processes that are killing your business. Chantell spent a number of years working both the client side and agency side of the business. She’s the author of best-selling book “What Clients Really W

Legal Protection: Which Areas of Your Agency Need It? It’s not a matter of if but when a legal issue arises for your agency, are you prepared? My guest today is an Intellectual Property attorney who focuses on helping marketing agencies with their legal protection to ensure all aspects of their agency stays protected. In this episode, we’ll cover: What legal mistakes to avoid. Which areas of your agency need legal protection. 3 contract loopholes you need to watch for. Your agency’s biggest asset (other than your team, of course) is your intellectual property. This episode features Sharon Toerek, attorney at Toerek Law and founder of Legal+Creative. Sharon shares the processes to have in place in order to cover your ASS(ets). :) As an attorney specializing in marketing agency law, Sharon tells us exactly what mistakes to avoid and how to plan for potential sticky situations. 2 Big Mistakes to Avoid According to Sharon, one the biggest mistakes she sees from marketing agencies is not understanding, undervalu

Budget and time. In any digital agency or even business for that matter, these are a couple of aspects you need to always keep in the forefront of your priorities both internally and with clients. So here's a question for you. Does your team understand the budget and it's limitations that you set on a project?   Do you have a hard time getting your team to stick to the client's budget and timing? In this episode of Ask Swenk, I take you through a couple of key points of thing to do to get your team on board of maintaining budget limits that have been set. And most of all, ensure your agency can save time and make more money while doing so.   {0:21} Matthew asked:  "We have trouble with the creative people on our production team staying within budget on projects. Any ideas on how to keep them accountable for budgets and timelines? I have tried everything I can think of with no luck."   Pricing Correctly From the Very Beginning. This can doom the project from the beginning if done incorrectly and this can be i

Stop Doing Things You Suck At & Improve Your Team Leading Skills Want to improve your team leading skills? Just can't stop doing the things you're no good at? If you’re looking to break through the plateau of running a solo agency, this episode is for you. Today’s guest is Pia Larson is the Chief Imagination Officer of Fingerprint Marketing, the digital agency she founded ten years ago. Pia shares stories and lessons learned about successfully building and leading her team. In this episode, we’ll cover: Solutions to 3 challenges every agency owner faces. The difference between being a leader and being a boss. How to stop doing the things you suck at. 3 Challenges Every Agency Owner Faces + Their Solution Are you constantly chasing clients? The agency business is about relationships. And Pia says her company vision included long term clients. However she felt like she was always chasing the next client, which left her no time to build relationships with existing ones. When you can’t focus on current cli

Do you have a hard time marketing your marketing agency because you're too close to it? Do you question your own branding and creative, even though you do a killer job of it for your clients? You're not alone. Here's how you can step outside of your business, market to the right clients and really crush it in sales! {1:07) Rob asked: "I'm really struggling with marketing my own agency. We are crushing it with clients but when it comes to marketing my company we get smashed in the face by a huge wall. I've started the process again looking to re-design my website, create e-books and automate emails but then I get to a point where I've got a finished design and I start to doubt everything before finally hating it. I'm now considering outsourcing it to a close friend with their own agency in another town... Any thoughts on overcoming this?" Marketing Your Own Marketing Agency First and foremost, don't create e-books. It's hard to look at your agency outside the box of your marketing agency but one step that can

How DigitalMarketer Increased Traffic by 1125% Do you think your content strategy is the obstacle in brining increased traffic to your agency's website? If your agency’s content marketing strategy is blogging - and just blogging - you’ve got to catch this episode. My guest is Russ Henneberry, Editorial Director at DigitalMarketer and he’s here to tell us how he has increased traffic on their front end by 1125%. That’s not a typo - you read it right - 1125%!!! In this episode, we’ll cover: How you can enjoy increased traffic with a content strategy. The 3 elements to a successful content marketing funnel. How to uncover your marketing agency’s black box. Russ is All-Pro at the content marketing game. Prior to working at DigitalMarketer, he was on the content team at Salesforce.com. He  also launched a blog for a well-known marketing SaaS where he grew visitors from 0 to 120,000/month in under a year. Content is where it’s at in digital marketing. The problem is too many people think content just means random

You aren't alone if you've considered transitioning into a SaaS company; or launching a separate company to sell SaaS. The challenge is educating your team, your clients and yourself on how to go about it. In this episode, we’ll cover: Reasons why you might want to develop a SaaS product. 4 steps to developing and launching a SaaS company. How to roll out your SaaS product and transition your agency. If you’re thinking about developing or selling a SaaS product, this is the episode for you. My guest is Ethan Denney, founder and CEO of ConvertFlow. Ethan took his company from a service-oriented digital agency to a product-focused SaaS company. He shares the story of his agency’s transition including the steps he took to get there. Why develop a SaaS product? As a digital agency, Ethan’s company was focused on driving site traffic and lead generation. However, they found many clients needed site redesigns and lot of other, deeper services were more involved. These issues often decreased profitability and incr

How to fire yourself from a key role in the business and transition from Agency Owner to Agency CEO. You built your business on skill and passion. You're the best at a certain aspect of it and giving that up can be really difficult. I can totally relate!  Here's how to  say 'yes' to the right things and 'no' to the wrong things so you can scale. Lisa asked: "In the Agency Playbook, I watched the video on leadership where you outline the roles of an agency owner. Creative direction was not on that list. Here's the thing -- and I'm not being arrogant -- but my company has grown because I'm best at being creative. I've experimented with backing off on smaller projects. But it's obvious the projects I work on are more creative and innovative than the ones I don't touch. My question is, how do I successfully back out of the Creative Director role and shift into the (boring but important) role of a CEO? Or should I stay in the Creative Director role since my agency relies on my talent for it's success?" I relate to

If you're struggling to build the agency or creating the agency vision that you want or having issues taking it to the next level, it could be a lack of clarity. In this episode, we’ll cover: #1 Struggle of building an agency team How to create and communicate your agency vision An on boarding process that sets expectations from day one. Today’s guest on the show is Danny Gonzalez, co-founder of Perception, the digital agency he and his partner built over the past fifteen years. Danny talks about how they communicate their vision in order to attract and keep top agency talent. You’ve probably seen some of Perception’s work if you’ve watched Iron Man 2 or Batman vs. Superman. They’re the team responsible for the fictitious technology your favorite superheroes use. They also develop real-world tech solutions (for us non-superhero types), such as UX and UI designs for automotive and technology companies. Pretty cool, right? #1 Struggle of Building a Team The most difficult thing about building a team is gettin

Today I'm answering some great questions about taking a one-man, or very small agency to the next level. Here's some great advice for building your business and agency scaling to a sustainable level and creating the role you want to be in. Agency Scaling: From One-Man to Next Level {0:22} Jeff asked: "I'm currently offering: site design, development and support, SEO, hosting/domain management, digital marketing, social media management, email marketing and some video production. First, I know that's a LOT to offer as a one man shop. Most of this has grown organically from WP website clients who asked for additional services. What advice do you have for me as one person who is building this business and doing all the work? Is partnering with white labels a good move? If so, how have you done that? Is outsourcing a better move? If so, how did you get started with outsourcing? Given that I'm on a tight budget, is there ONE software platform I should buy for marketing and running my own business? Something you j

Increase Business: How One Digital Agency Doubled Business in 4 Months If you're trying to grow an agency, you know you're going to need a foot in a door strategy to increase business and get you to the next level of success. The trouble is, you're selling the wrong service first. In this episode, we’ll cover: #1 strategy to increase business with new clients for your agency. Why you need a Foot in the Door offer. What makes a great Foot in the Door offer? My guest on the show today is represents every reason why I love my work. Todd Earwood is the founder and CEO of MoneyPath Marketing. We first met when Todd attended one of my two-day workshops. A few months later he called me to share the success story on how his business doubled in just 4 months. Todd shares with us the #1 reason his agency was able to increase business so drastically and how he’s on track to do 3X business within 6 months of the workshop! MoneyPath Marketing targets SaaS companies and like many agencies they have a hard time getting th

What to Consider in Your Hiring Practices What do you do when during a phase when you are hiring new team members, you discover they hope to eventually own their own agency? In this week's episode, I cover some important questions about hiring practices. Should you hire someone who tells you in the interview that they hope to someday run their own agency? If they're otherwise qualified, should that be a deal breaker? Also, if you find a great new hire but they don't live close, should you pay for relocation? {0:30} Jack asked:  "Say you're interviewing candidates for a sales position at your agency. When asked what they want to be doing in five years, the candidate says they want to run their own agency some day. Is this a deal breaker? We both know how hard running an agency is! Chances are, they won't be. But even if they did -- should that be an issue? I'm thinking it's kind of inevitable in our industry and I'm leaning towards being OK with it but I'm curious about your perspective." {3:13} Aaron asked: "

Looking to land those bigger retainer clients for your agency but don't know how to get there? I've got you covered in this week's episode. In this episode, we’ll cover: Why you might need to work for free. 5 steps to landing bigger retainer clients. How to implement the foot in the door strategy. How to stack the deck to gain more new agency clients. My guest today is Justin Brooke, founder of IMScalable and also known as “The Traffic Guy.” He’s got an awesome story about how he went from not being profitable, to working for free, to landing a couple huge retainer clients. In this episode, Justin shares his strategy for how to land the big clients you want and leveraging them to land more big retainer clients. Why You Need to Work for Free If you don’t have a success story or case study to use in your sales pitches, you might want to consider this strategy just get you one... Justin says he spent a couple years being unprofitable. However what he realized was that he needed one really great success story t