Why is agency marketing so feast or famine?

That’s the question that Claire Hutchings, founder of Chime Agency, has set out to answer. She studied 100 agencies’ marketing to see what was wrong.

Spoiler: there is a LOT.

How many of these marketing mistakes is your agency guilty of?

• Agencies still have work to do on their positioning. “74% of the agencies we looked at had crap positioning,” says Claire. Apparently, positioning is a critical hygiene factor in strong marketing. “The agencies with good positioning scored 40% higher across our matrix”.

• Agencies are still marketing in fits and bursts – it’s not a consistent machine. “As soon as a new business pitch or a big client project lands, the resource gets pulled because it’s not going to have a tangible, immediate impact.”
• Agencies are confused about what budget to give their marketing manager. “If an agency is hiring a marketing manager on £35k, there is a certain amount that that physical person can do organically themselves – but if they’ve got no budget to play with, it’s still really hard.”
• Small agencies are still over-reliant on their founders’ brands and network, which can be problematic when trying to scale or prepare for an exit. “Smaller agencies under 15 people are over-indexing on their founder’s brand. If they want to be larger or to exit, how do they extricate themselves from that?”

If you’re putting your agency’s marketing under the microscope in 2024, join this session with Claire, who will bring to life the common mistakes – and give you some ideas to fix them.