How Agencies Can Be Better at Marketing Themselves

Sei-Wook Kim (00:04.301) In this episode, we talk about how agencies should think about marketing themselves and share six examples you can take inspiration from. Peter Kang (00:27.401) All right, Sei-Wook. One of the mistakes that agencies often make when it comes to marketing themselves is that they're always taking a short-term and reactive lens. A lot of agencies are up to here with client work, just trying to keep up with things, the team and making sure the work gets done. So by the time marketing enters their minds, it's because the leads have started to dry up and they realize, hey, maybe we should start doing some marketing to generate some leads. This might be some reactive quick, hey, let's post some stuff on LinkedIn or let's send out some cold emails and hopefully the leads will pick up again. But when you think about marketing from this angle, it's very easy to get frustrated because you start sending out some cold emails and you don't get leads right away and you're like, marketing doesn't work for us. For this episode, we really want to talk about flipping that mentality and taking a different lens to marketing. Sei-Wook Kim (01:39.959) Yeah, and the important thing to think about here is what is marketing, right? Why should an agency market themselves? At the core, it's about building reputation and awareness of who you are and what you do with the specific target that you're after. Ultimately you're trying to connect with that specific audience, and as a result it may lead to new business opportunities, but marketing is definitely just putting in the work to achieve that goal. Peter Kang (02:13.852) Yeah, and one thing you and I always talk about is the way to get the true power of marketing is to think about it as a long-term investment. It's not like a slot machine where you can just put in some coins and leads will come out right away. It's something that you have to keep putting the effort into, and then over a longer period of time, like a lot of things in life, it starts to compound and you see the benefits from it. Sei-Wook Kim (02:41.366) Yeah, it's just like exercise where you're trying to get the result. It won't happen overnight. You're going to put in the reps every single day, and then you may see the results six to 12 months later. But if you're expecting the immediate result, you might get disappointed or discouraged and stop doing the activities. It takes time to see the result. Peter Kang (03:03.751) Yeah, absolutely. With marketing there are tiers, like most things there are levels to this. When we think about the basic level of marketing for agencies, there are many things agencies are probably already familiar with. Sei-Wook Kim (03:24.544) Yeah, some basic things — just posting on social, on LinkedIn, your different channels that you may exist on. Things like, if you have your own blog on your site, putting out thought leadership, case studies on your own site. Things like sending out newsletters on a periodic basis — a monthly newsletter, a quarterly newsletter — in different forms, maybe sharing some of those case studies that you wrote on your site, sharing some news about the company. Jump in with some others. Peter Kang (04:04.773) Yeah, basically we have a whole list of these things: webinars, attending conferences, hosting events, even running paid ads — some people have some success with that. We talked about cold outbound campaigns that could be by mail or LinkedIn. Even applying for awards as well, that could be very specific to your category or just some of the more well-known awards if you're in the advertising space. And yeah, generating some buzz through PR, getting some earned media in trade publications is another way. These are all different things, and like many things you can go pretty deep and be very ineffective or very effective. We see the full spectrum of this. You get some of these, let's call them more formulaic posts — generic, like hey we did this project for this client, and it's just a screenshot that doesn't really do much in terms of engagement or getting people interested. And then you have some folks that are very talented at telling compelling stories via their social posts and are able to consistently generate a lot of buzz. I think of a few agency folks that do this really well. Our own Lucas Ballasy at Barrel does a good job of generating really good content on LinkedIn, targeted at CPG leaders. Another good one is Josh Lohman at Goldfront, who's really good at these LinkedIn posts. There are levels to this stuff — you can get a lot of juice out of even doing the basics. Sei-Wook Kim (06:01.066) And the basics — we covered a lot of different areas and most agencies do some of these, and it may not be consistent, but with all of this you just need to decide what can you do and what are you prioritizing. There are definitely costs associated with going to an event, sponsoring an event — these things can cost a lot of money versus a lot of things you can handle internally. But doing all of these basic activities, if you hit the right person at the right time and they remember who you are, then when an opportunity comes along they may think about you. Peter Kang (06:38.47) Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we talked about the basics and defined what marketing is, but today we really want to get into six specific examples — some from our own experience, some we've observed — and then go into how and why they might be effective. Part of the reason we want to do this is to just show what's possible, because sometimes a big part of marketing is to do something that stands out and is different. This is a good way for us to get into the nitty gritty of what are some ideas that folks could take away. Sei-Wook Kim (07:18.942) Yeah, so the first example is something we did years ago, which is a 24-hour website challenge where the team all got together and we basically made a website for an animal shelter nonprofit in Brooklyn. Through that journey we shared the progress in a kind of live-stream, live-blogging way, showing everything that we did — a project that could typically take months compressed into 24 hours, getting all the team involved in a really exciting moment. It really showcased what our team was able to do, but also showed what we cared about — supporting an animal shelter — and we used it as an opportunity to talk about it across various different channels. Peter Kang (08:07.461) Yeah, and I do want to give you credit because we were inspired by the agency Zurb, who we saw doing this and thought, hey, we could do a version of this for ourselves. This was a while back. The nice thing is the team really enjoyed it, because you take a process that usually takes weeks if not months — we did the branding plus the website design and the build — and the client was great, because the client from the nonprofit was with us this whole time, in it with us. It was really fun, like a hackathon kind of environment. It was just really cool to see. I think the thing we did well was really document every aspect of it in terms of really high quality photography, some video, and then being able to tell that story over and over again afterwards was nice. It makes for something different — it's not something you see all the time. Sei-Wook Kim (09:13.289) Yeah, and it was a whole branded experience. We had a logo for this event, a site leading up to it, the event itself, and then the post documentation. It was a whole experience and there was a lot of buzz around the work that we did. Peter Kang (09:29.249) Yeah, absolutely. Cool. The next one — we're calling it open source software. Maybe you could dive into what we're actually doing here with software. Sei-Wook Kim (09:43.507) Yeah, so we've done this a couple of times over the years. We've created a JavaScript plugin that developers could use for front-end filtering and animation. This was back when there weren't a lot of these resources out there. We invested the time with one of our engineers to put it out in the world and create a site, update it, create release notes, and really spent the time to provide this to the developer community. Peter Kang (10:17.699) Yeah, and the one thing I want to say about this is it's taking an internally developed component that was saving us time, because the other developers were all using it within the org and finding a lot of value in it — like, oh cool, I can save a lot of time using this. And so it's going that one extra step of, hey, let's package this up and share it with the world and show that others can get value out of this. In that moment of generosity, or whatever you want to call it, that becomes a marketing activity as well, because now we're showcasing the technical chops of our engineering team. That also generates a lot of goodwill because we put something out into the world that's useful for other folks. In turn, we ended up getting some really great recruiting motion going — engineers want to work at Barrel because they're like, oh cool, you guys are putting out some really cool stuff, I want to be part of a team that does this. And then on the opportunity side, you start to get credibility with more technical folks on the client side who are like, yeah, I remember using that plugin, if these guys are the ones that made it they should be able to do some other cool stuff for us as an agency. It just hits so many different angles that sometimes you think, putting out open source software — okay, that's technical. But it could be a big marketing activity. Sei-Wook Kim (11:51.502) Cool. The next is doing a recap — an annual year-in-review microsite. We've done this for years at Barrel and it's really an opportunity to showcase the work that we did, put a narrative around the culture of the agency and how the team grew. It's being able to package a whole grouping of work and share that with our clients and the community. It's also a fun experience for the team themselves to look back at all the work that we did, and then create an entirely different creative experience to showcase that to the world. Peter Kang (12:36.309) Yeah, and it's crazy because we probably have 17 or 18 years worth of recaps cataloged over the years. It's really fun to see these evolve. One of the things that I think is just underrated is it's hard to get a sense of what gets accomplished in a year just from a website. If you're able to package that in a very interesting way, it becomes a worthwhile asset that you can market on social, in your newsletters — it just gives you more stuff to talk about. Sei-Wook Kim (13:15.814) Yeah, and one thing we also ask people to do is put it in their email footers — beneath all their name and contact information, like "check out our 2024 year in review." Whoever gets the email, that's another way they can see a creative look at the work and the capabilities. Peter Kang (13:33.098) Right. Cool. The next one is around building a community. Specifically, this was a while back — we had a series of meetups geared towards the digital PM community. We called it DPM — digital PMs. We hosted these at our office, and these were for folks who were interested in the space. At the time, digital project management was still not a fully developed field, and this was even before product management became a huge thing, so there was kind of an overlap there. I remember the caliber of people that showed up was incredible — people working at all kinds of startups across New York City, different founders, different agency folks. It was pretty incredible because even years later we get notes from people being like, yeah, I remember coming to your office when you guys hosted these things, and by the way, I work at this brand now and have a need for a website, can you guys help me? This is something we didn't intend as a let's-get-more-leads play, but just by engaging with the community and adding a lot of value, we were able to generate opportunities for ourselves. Sei-Wook Kim (14:57.442) Yeah, it definitely helped raise our visibility in the New York City agency and tech community, because essentially we're giving back — giving a home to what we'll call an underserved part of the ecosystem — and also providing a resource. It's almost like a free knowledge share: here are best practices, I'd love to know how this agency does things or how this tech company handles this aspect. It just brought people together, and to your point, 10 years later we're still in touch with people or they just remember that we held these series of events. Peter Kang (15:54.784) Cool. So the next is thinking about physical publications — moving from a lot of what we talked about more in the digital space. Sei-Wook Kim (15:55.162) Yeah, some kind of mailer or direct mail piece that is really well designed and features interesting content. You might have some examples of things you've received. Peter Kang (16:07.54) Yeah, definitely. One example is some coaches who write and self-publish books and send them in the mail — that's one example. Another one that comes to mind is our friends at the van group, who publish periodically a really beautifully designed magazine. They bring together partners from the Shopify tech ecosystem and get others to guest-author some pieces as well. They put together thought leadership around topics that are very relevant to their ICP, which is brands in the luxury or beauty space. It's really well done — I've signed up to get a copy myself in the past. It's just different, because we're so inundated with virtual and electronic forms of communication that when you have something physical that you can hold and flip through, you remember it differently and you end up leaving it on your coffee table or your counter. It's just something that makes you stand out. To the extent that you can invest in something physical that's well-designed and memorable, I think it's worth an experimentation. Sei-Wook Kim (17:26.872) Yeah, and those examples — you can send to a whole range of people: other agencies that could be partners, clients or potential clients who see capabilities. To your point, if someone leaves it at an office, a lot of people could see it and interact with it in a different way than an email sitting in your inbox that's directly to you. Peter Kang (17:49.631) Yeah, cool. We'll do one more. This last one was an example from about 10 years ago — and this is how memorable it is, because I still remember it from over 10 years ago. This was a coffee shop that was built by the digital agency HUGE in Atlanta, 10-plus years ago. It was a public coffee shop. They decided they were going to create this really cool, well-designed coffee shop with tech-enabled POS and other systems that were new at the time. It was like half R&D and half, hey, our crack at the hospitality side of things. I think it was a hit in the sense that they got tons of PR, it was a great way to showcase their capabilities, and it helped them land clients who then wanted to tech-enable their own spaces. It's a big, ambitious campaign of sorts — if you think about it in that lens — coupled with the fact that it is R&D and the team is getting those reps and building out capacity by actually building their own coffee shop. I think that was brilliant, and if you want to make big bets, these are the kinds of things you want to think about. Sei-Wook Kim (19:18.058) Yeah, the cool thing about that one is even if you're not in Atlanta and not able to physically experience it, if you Google "coffee shop HUGE," there are tons of articles, tons of press, people just talking about the agency, the space, what they could do. That in itself is something that people remember for the long term. Peter Kang (19:39.516) Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Just to wrap it all up — going back to what we talked about in terms of marketing as a way of building your reputation and awareness and staying top of mind — it boils down to: you really need to have an orientation towards experimentation, because it's not something where you do ABC and all of a sudden it starts to work. It's a moving target. You've got to continue to try different things. What do you think are the key elements folks should think about when they think about marketing? Sei-Wook Kim (20:17.155) Yeah, for marketing it's a lot about consistency. It's not an on-off type of thing where you do it when you have time or in between different aspects of your client work. Marketing is: what are the activities that you continue to do that reach the audience that you want to reach? And how do you do it where you're adding value? It's not just a throwaway piece or throwaway information, but if you can add value and make it memorable, then when the moment comes where they need help from someone like you, they'll remember you and reach out. Peter Kang (21:01.384) Yeah, absolutely. And like most things, you don't need to go for the home run — you could start with something smaller and build some momentum there. But then at some point, yeah, you could try to take a bigger swing. It's all about just keep trying, see how things play out, and continue to learn. Sei-Wook Kim (21:26.658) Yeah. And just to think about measurement, because that's a question that comes up often — how do you know all of this is working? The best way we try to think about this is that usually the results will lag quite a bit beyond the effort that you put in. You might put out emails, run campaigns, do an event, and see the results six to 12 months later. But if you just have a motion of asking your prospect how they heard about you — either through a form or on the initial call — you can measure over time: wow, they keep seeing me, or they saw me at that one thing, or a friend saw an email and forwarded it to me. You can track over time the effectiveness of the various campaigns. Peter Kang (22:15.47) Yeah, definitely. And nothing works just one-off — as you mentioned, it's about the combination of all these things and the consistency of all these things. As we wrap up, our word of advice to everyone is just keep trying stuff. That spirit of experimentation is something that will do well for you in the long run. All right, well, thank you for tuning in. Till next time, see you. Sei-Wook Kim (22:40.194) Thanks.