Do Something With Your Marketing: Agency Retainer Models

In this week's Do Something with Your Marketing, it's a special for uh my friends and colleagues who work in agencies. Um I used to love the agency life, and in many ways, Trust Insights is still uh somewhat of an agency in the sense that uh we are not directly producing a uh consumer benefit or we work with other businesses in a B2B model. The reason I love the agency structure in the agency life is that it actually goes back to something that Mitch Joel told me way back in 2012 when he said that working in-house at a brand, you never really get to use all your capabilities because most companies, other than the largest ones, don't use every trick in the book. Some companies, for one reason or another, focus on certain marketing tactics, certain data tactics, and we never really uh for those brands, never never go outside those boundaries very often. At an agency, you have lots of clients, and part of having lots of clients means that you have lots of interesting, very diverse experiences.

So over here you may be doing email marketing, here you may be doing social advertising, here you may be doing regression analysis, here you may be building AI models. Over here, you may be uh doing some uh uh B2B uh channel management. But when you have so many clients in so many different agencies, it really is a uh a way to experience the breadth of any field, whether it's marketing or data science or analytics or AI, you get to do it all uh at one point or another in a relatively short amount of time. So that's one of the reasons why agencies are great to work at, because you get that experience. Now, you also get some other things with that experience, like running around with your hair on fire and working, you know, three times as many hours as you expected, but that comes with the territory.

Um, you can't uh you can't drink from the fire hose without getting wet. However, what we've seen over the past few years, and especially in the last couple of years, is companies as they start getting more cautious, as they start getting more risk averse, have begun really pulling their their stuff in house, trying to build things in-house, trying to uh reduce their costs, and uh understandably so. Um, you know, a mid market PR agency is probably gonna cost you like 20 grand a month. Um, you know, that's not the biggest ones, and it's not like the individual consultant, but you know, those those solid mid market agencies, it's expensive. Uh ad agencies can be uh you know 20, 25% of your ad budget ad spend, and that gets real expensive real fast.

So for those folks who work at agencies or who are responsible for making leadership decisions at them, you may be a little uncomfortable saying, well, this this especially if you're facing economic headwinds in your market or your industry, this is not a plan for success. So, what's the o the alternative? Well, think about what a retainer is, which is the model that most agencies use. Most agencies use a retainer, which i it would more properly be called sort of buying hours in bulk. Because a retainer, strictly speaking, if somebody pays you money just to retain your services, they pay you money just so they can have the right to pick up the phone and call you.

That's that's the a true retainer, and there are very few of those left in the world. So, what's the option to hours in bulk? Well, there's a bunch, but the one I want you to give some thought to is subscription. Right? Think about that term.

Think about the kind of world we live in now. We have a subscription to everything. Our movies, our television, our music, uh, our books, we have subscriptions everywhere. Uh, you have probably given some thought to like, well, you know, I I cut the cord for my cable company, now I'm paying three times as much to like 20 different companies when you roll it off. You got Hulu and Disney Plus and YouTube TV and Spotify and iTunes and all these uh different companies that you're you're selling at 10 bucks a month to each of them.

And in terms of being able to uh take advantage of the way people think and the way people consume, you may want to give some thought to that. What happens when, for example, Netflix puts out a new show? Uh do you you pay a subscription to the service to have access to the platform and then the content they just back the truck up and pour the content on your desk, right? Um you don't have to extract that value piece by piece from Netflix. They literally just say, here it is, enjoy.

And you get to decide whether you want to watch uh the new season of House of Cards, or you want to watch the movies that made us or the toys that made us or any of these these shows that are there, they produce it and you consume it with that subscription. And we're very comfortable with this when it comes to software, right? We use SEO tools and social media tools and all these different things, and we pay a subscription fee to those things, and then we get to use the tool for you know whatever level we're paying at for as long as as we're we're there. What could you do with that idea when it comes to running an agency number one the first thing you have to get rid of is the idea of hours right hours Netflix doesn't charge you by the hour right an SEO tool tr doesn't charge you by the hour it charges you maybe by the capability of what you're allowed to have um you know Amazon Prime uh doesn't charge you by the hour uh none of these tools none of these subscriptions uh none of them have a unit of measure being an hour the unit of measure is the stuff you get for paying that feed entry so what do you have to offer a company that is not ours right is it labor is it outputs is it intellectual property is it data what is the thing that you give to somebody and that they can literally you know pick up a a shopping basket and and buy stuff from and I I want to emphasize that software as a service model is really important because a lot of folks will say particularly on you know business folks will say well Netflix is a consumer product you know Amazon Prime is a consumer product but businesses don't use that but businesses absolutely do use you know Amazon Prime for businesses businesses absolutely do use software subscriptions businesses absolutely do use uh a bunch of different things that allow us to subscribe and uh essentially partake of the offering as it's available so what could you do in your business model that would pivot away from hours to here's the stuff that you have access to here's the the library of knowledge, the the expertise and things like that. When you start to think in the along those lines, two things happen.

One, your business can scale a lot better because you're no longer selling an hour of something, right? And if you want to make double the money, you have to sell double the hours. You're selling something, whatever the thing is, and two, you get to go on vacation, right? Because you're no longer uh on that model of if I'm not working, I'm not earning. Now I recognize this sounds a lot like you know some of those passive income pitches and and and you know a lot of people saying like make money and you sleep.

No, you still have to work. You still have to do something to earn the money that people want to give you but give thought to what it is that you're producing. One of the reasons why people have gone so heavy into books and online courses and this and that is that they realize they that's how you scale right you have uh pe let people have a subscription and they can then consume the content as they like and you reserve hours and time only for the most uh bespoke elite things like mastermind groups and stuff like that. And even those uh you're not necessarily guaranteed to be getting uh you know uh the person you may be buying access to a team or community as a result so in your agency if you are an ad agency what is it people can buy a subscription to is it running the ads sure is it getting some help sure it may also be a a huge creative library that you have access to uh that you've created of of past uh campaign ideas right you have created that intellectual property and I guarantee you by the way somewhere in your hard drives or are your servers, there's a library of presentations from all the pitches that you did that you never won. And you're like, ah, stuff this thing here, right?

That is content that you can include in the subscription for your current clients. Like, hey, here's this thing, here's this idea. Take the idea, you know, we'll work with the team, we'll freshen it up, put your logo on it instead of this company that we pitched that we didn't win, and and there you go. Uh, if you are a PR agency, what is it that you're selling subscription? Could you sell a subscription to?

Is it just picking up the phone and calling people? No. That's part and parcel of the work. But maybe it's the database itself. Maybe it's the notes and interactions, the the expertise that you bring to that industry.

Like if you know the cybersecurity industry, like the back of your hand, you may have a mental database. So, like, this is exactly what this person wants to hear about all the time. So it letting somebody else in on that is maybe worth part of the subscription. Uh what you may have the media database, you may have past pitches, past media pitches. You may have data on those pitches, like, hey, these pitches succeeded in getting coverage, you know, four times more than all the other stuff that we've done.

So maybe it's time to offer that up. If you are an SEO agency, uh, what are the pieces of content? Well, this the software tools, the IP that you've created behind the scenes that the the duct tape and the chewing gum and the glue that makes your different tools work together, that's something worth selling a subscription to because for there will be some companies like, yep, I want you to do it for me. Cool, got it. That's really expensive.

You can also buy a subscription that is sort of somewhat done for you, but you gotta do the you know, you it's like a recipe book. Uh here's the recipe, you go cook it. When you think about pivoting from the word retainer to the word subscription and offering those subscriptions to people of the stuff that you've already created, the stuff that you've already built, you may have opportunities that are lower cost for companies that say, like, nope, I just can't afford to pay 20 grand a month for this thing. Uh, you may have opportunities for reaching different markets, and you may even have the opportunity to you know to add automation based on that rich data you've already captured. So give that some butt um for those folks who work in the agency world or have worked in the agency world in the past, even if you're in-house, these ideas of s of databases and leveraging your past content, leveraging past content from agency partners can also apply to you.

So that's what we want you to do for uh this week when you do something with your marketing. Stop thinking about retainers and hours. Start thinking about subscriptions and intellectual property and leveraging the stuff you've already worked hard on and making it work even harder now that it's done. As always, please leave your comments in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.