Creating Your Agency's Competitive Advantage

Do you feel stuck on how to unlock your agency's growth potential? Are you struggling to communicate your agency's competitive advantage in order to stand out? Most entrepreneurs hit a point where the old strategies don’t work anymore. There’s when growth requires a different skill set to take your agency to the next level. Today’s guest has centered his career and agency around figuring out the secrets to rapid growth. He shares some of the common mistakes he sees clients making, and how you can prepare your team for quick growth.

Mark Patchett is the founder of Growth Shop, a digital agency specializing in growth marketing. His agency provides brands with a proven methodology that removes the guesswork with the firepower of a team that will help them grow. They’ve helped build brands like Victoria Beckham Beauty and hundreds more. Today he’ll break down his thought process around growth and how to understand your position in the market.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

• How positioning creates a competitive advantage.
• 3 mistakes that prevent you from understanding growth.
• Preparing your team for rapid growth.
• Using reviews to understand your position in the market.

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Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design, and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

Podcast Takeover!!

Get to know your Smart Agency Guest Host: Dr. Jeremy Weisz is the co-founder of Rise25, an agency that helps companies launch and run podcasts profitably. He followed Jason’s podcast and eventually joined the mastermind and has been a guest on the podcast before. Today, he’s helping Jason bring something new to the Smart Agency podcast audience by interviewing a special guest and getting a new perspective to the show.

 

How Positioning Creates a Competitive Advantage

Positioning is a tricky beast. Mark's competitive advantage is that his agency team has actually built companies in the past. Most performance agencies do some Facebook ads and maybe ad creative. However, when you have experience building a  company you know this is just a fraction of it. Having in-depth knowledge of entrepreneurship means Mark's team can take the conversation beyond just Facebook.

Furthermore, his agency offers a platform where clients can see all relevant data in one unified view. Clients get an executive view with all the key data in order to pinpoint why their business is performing well or not.

3 Mistakes That Prevent You from Understanding Growth

As someone who’s looked under the hood of many big companies, Mark has seen some of the biggest mistakes they make when it comes to understanding growth:

1. Not understanding attribution across different platforms. They may say Facebook isn’t working because they’re not making as much as they’d like to from it. However, once they learn about the blended metrics they understand it might be doing more than they think.
2. Neglecting conversion rate optimization and positive reviews. Their clients learn if they increase the conversion rate, lifetime value, and average order value by 26% they’ll be making more money without spending more money.
3. Assuming customers understand the brand. In these cases, they use a reverse elevator pitch. Basically, as soon as someone lands on your homepage, without even scrolling, they should be able to tell exactly what you do uniquely. Most companies don’t pass that test.

Using Reviews to Understand Your Agency's Position in the Market

As part of their onboarding research, Mark’s team uses what he calls one of the easiest hacks in marketing. Instead of expensive brainstorming sessions to answer the question “Who are we?” companies should be looking at their customer reviews.

For starters, export all your reviews and run a Wordlab analysis. You’re looking for positive and negative reviews so you can extract common themes. How are your customers talking about your brand? What’s resonating with them? They will be things that stand out or patterns you'll find.

Next, do the same thing with your competitor's reviews to find out what they're doing well and not. Learn what your clients really care about and use that information to build your next ads instead of doing expensive consulting activities.

Preparing Your Agency's Team for Rapid Growth

Not everyone is ready for fast growth and it can break a business. Rapid growth can be exciting for many, but client service and operations people usually just see it as a tsunami coming at them.

To prepare client services for the onslaught of new business, his team does a lot on the automation front. There are options like AI chatbots that get great results. However, the biggest hurdle is in delivery. Most client service problems are under control if your product is good and on time. If you really want to grow quickly, you’ll find money comes out as quickly as it’s coming in.

The key is to plan for growth and be proactive, rather than reactive.

Hiring People with the Ambition to Start Their Own Business

At his agency, Mark handles a team of people working from all over the world. Their core values are “smarter, faster, happier”; which stands for being able to build big things while getting better at it and enjoying the process.

This goes back to his days working at venture-backed companies where the mission was hitting the goal, or "crash and burn." As a result, people dealing with that type of pressure were completely burned out. It was that negative experience that helped Mark discover the kind of culture he’d create at his agency.

Mark still handles all first-round interviews where he gets a good sense of someone’s ability to fit in with the agency's culture. He learns this fairly quickly by finding out how they deal with problems in their lives. Next, he has the candidate work on a paid test project where they get access to anonymous data. They mostly look for entrepreneurial people that have the drive to start their own businesses. This may seem counterintuitive, but Marks sees it as helping build phenomenal talent that can later become a client or the agency could even invest in their startup.

 

Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?

If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see what you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to Agency Mastery 360.  Our agency growth program helps you take a 360-degree view of your agency and gain mastery of the 3 pillar systems (attract, convert, scale) so you can create predictability, wealth, and freedom.