Serve to be famously useful

Most agencies do marketing activity. They sponsor an event, get some swag printed, do an email campaign, or whatever.

But all with messages like “Need a thing? We’re the award-winning leading agency for things!”

Even if that does happen to connect with a prospective client, you then go through a tyre-kicking exercise of ‘show us what you can do’. You bring out case studies, references, sample work. The client then asks for spec work, and maybe you even do some of that.

This is them asking you to show them that, beyond all the words you put in your marketing, you can actually be useful to them.

So how about fast-forwarding all that dance, and making your marketing actually useful in the first place?

Then prospective clients don’t need a procurement dance to work out if you can be useful — they know you can, and they can just go more directly to buying.

Now you know your audience, you know what their needs, contexts, and motives are.

Serve your audiences usefully and you create a smooth on ramp into doing business with you.

Educate and inspire them. Guide them and advise them.

Do this usefully, and they’ll want more.

Famously

Level 1 is to do this to an extent people find useful.

Level 10 is to do it to an extent that people talk about.

You should be able to draw in new people to your audiences who say things like “So-and-so told me about your ____”, or “Your _____ was mentioned in a podcast/conference/article/book/etc”.