How We Created Our Marketing Agency Offers

This is a summary of this week’s podcast episode! If you’d like to hear the full story of how everything came to be, you can listen to that episode here.

Why did we choose to launch agency offers?

• We’ve created a lot of content as photographers and frequently find people unsure how to use a gallery of photos once they have them
• We’ve talked to enough biz owners that
  • Started a biz because they’re passionate about something, marketing is just a means to doing that thing
  • Marketing changes “so fast” that they can’t keep up
  • They want to be hands-off as long as it’s performing towards their goals
• As our business has been shifting over the past year, we’ve found ourselves frequently having marketing strategy conversations with people, leading us to ask ourselves: How can we turn those conversations into consistent ongoing income?
• The lessons you can learn from this:
  • Pay attention to the conversations you have frequently
    • What do people ask you about frequently?
    • What’s the bigger need behind the question?
  • Understand the needs of your current & potential clients (we’ll touch on this more later on)
  • What are you interested in and need today?

Why now?

• We tried an agency before (story for another day) but our biggest takeaway from the experience was to be VERY specific on fit. We (Jo & Lyndon) don’t want to create every post, but the strategy is chef’s kiss
  • We’d previously identified an interest, but knew the stars had to align for it to work
• Because an opportunity presented itself
  • In a conversation with Taylor (@thesundaysocialco) we realized:
    • Entrepreneurs would either come to us (Jo & Lyndon) for marketing strategy and then have trouble executing OR they would come to Taylor for social media management with no plan or clue on what or why they needed to be posting.
  • This is a perfect match – we love strategy – she loves creating – making a wholistic done for you offer
• The lessons you can learn from this:
  • At least a couple times a year take time to dream
    • What are the crazy moon shots you can/want to take?
    • Stop thinking about the how, just think about what it is
  • Then talk to people, pour into your community, network, and pay attention to the passing comments that can make your crazy moonshot become possible

Okay cool, you have an idea and now feels like the right time, how’d you do it?

• In a little over 2 months we went from inception to launching
• Man that’s a really long time – it was the holidays and we were launching other things first
• the phases
  • Brainstorming
  • Refining
  • Building out tools & processes
  • Market Research
  • Small Scale Launch

Brainstorming:

• Since this is a bundle you can think of this phase as “dating”
• Over 2-3 90 min calls
  • What do each of us want out of a package?
  • From our experience with our clients, what are the needs we’ve all seen?
  • What would be the roles & responsibilities when it came to actual delivery?
  • What is the rough draft of what offers would look like?
  • What are the 3ish types of customers we want to target with 3 tiers of offers?
  • (Q: do we directly quote our original packages?)
• The lessons you can learn from this:
  • It’s really easy to skip over this and jump straight to the offers
  • I’d recommend just thinking about what would make this a “good” offer for you – or how will you define success

Refining:

• During our conversations, we started a questions list of any open questions that would take time, or research to answer – basically anything that would slow us down and didn’t require everyone it got put into the question list
  • Assigned these out
    • What specific boundaries do you need in place moving forward? How can you set those client expectations from the get-go?
  • We had a shared note we could collaborate on
• Start throwing out numbers based on our rough drafts of what would be worth our time to deliver on the packages
  • Starting with time commitment + an hourly rate to build up rough prices
• Defining what is necessary to launch
• The lessons you can learn from this:
  • Start narrowing down your brainstorming based on what you learn as you start to get specific

Building out tools & processes:

• Social media requires a lot of ideas & with a handoff between strategy & creation we needed a way to keep track of everything
• Tay already was working on a Notion template for social media management
• We had a rough idea of what our needs were when it came to our solution
  • Place to list out content ideas
  • Be able to add photos, videos + finished graphics
  • Ability to write captions
  • Ways to look at subsets of the list based on what still needed work, review, ready to post, and analytics
• We collaborated to build those out
• Application
  • What questions enable us to screen for who would be a good fit that we could make a big difference for
  • Building out a Honeybook application form
• Contracts
  • Minimum of 6 months
• How we’d split payment
• The lessons you can learn from this:
  • Searching help docs are you best friend – tools are often more powerful than you think, so before you settle for a less than optimal work around do a little bit of looking or ask an expert (or friend)

Market Research:

• I’ll (Lyndon) be the first to say we should have done this earlier 🤷‍♂️
• As one of our homework questions was defining our ideal clients and a couple of example account
• We started reaching out to the ones we had a connection to – would they be willing to answer a few quick questions that would help us understand the needs of
  • What are your favorite parts of social media & what are the most stressful or cumbersome parts for you?
  • How does social media fit into the bigger strategy of your business?
  • If you were looking for a social media manager/strategist, what would be the decision criteria for deciding on who to invest in?
  • In an ideal world, what would be your perfect social media solution & experience?
  • How involved would you want to be in:
    • Strategy
    • Content Creation
    • Posting
    • Engaging with your audience
    • (& what does being involved look like to you?)
• Changes we proceeded to make
  • Unbundled engagment – it became an add on since it wasn’t important
  • We added a strategy only Tier
  • We expanded our tier 3 to have more posts and multiple accounts supported
  • We added a requirement for clients to have branding photos + content already or include the quarterly branding session add-on, to be working with high quality assets
  • Added a social media audit to the onboarding phase
• Then we did some referencing pricing validation
  • We were on par with the peer group of quality
  • But their marketing was a lot simpler with “starting at” then it becomes custom, rather than 3 destinct offers
  • We kept the prices the same but narrowed down to just our middle tier
• The lessons you can learn from this:
  • Have a hypothesis when you build out questions for market research, but don’t lead people into an answer
  • Open ended questions are better than yes or no

Small Scale Launch:

• Today we’re going public with launching our Marketing Agency (yay!!)
• We’re opening up 3 spots and as of recording this we’re sending out a couple of private invites
• We don’t want to scale too fast – we’re going to make changes to the offer once we have a month or two of learnings
• For all we know we won’t book any clients – and that will still be a learning, because then we can start asking questions and iterate on our offers

This story is just beginning – it’s both exciting and scary to put it out into the world, but you know us we’re already applying this framework to the next thing – we’re entrepreneurs, it’s what we do!

You can check out our Agency offers & apply to work with us here.

If you’d like more information on our coaching packages, you can find more details & inquire here.

We’d love to work with you!