Agency leadgen events: a few learnings

I ran a whole bunch of semi-pioneering agencies until 2015. Since then I’ve been advising agency owners on how to grow fast. And the methods we use work consistently (my agencies either double or triple value or they sell for more and faster than expected). One of the things I advise agency leaders is to attract clients by teaching them how to do their job better.

It's not about arrogance. Quite the opposite, it’s leveraging your expertise to teach marketers how to do your kind of marketing better. By teaching people how to be better – or better, brilliant – standards as a whole rise, and by being seen as the experts you might get more work.

I do it myself. In fact I’m doing it myself right now: I have an event on the morning of March 7th at One Alfred Place, for owners, showing them how to grow their agency better, faster, safer. I am literally showing people how to do what I do for a living as a chairman. I’m being joined by Mary Keane-Dawson, the heavyweight ex-Ogilvy and TMG CEO, and Jo Evans, who’s sold more famous agencies than you can shake a stick at. We are doing all the teaching that day, to owners and leaders who actively want to learn.

What I’ve learned over the past few days in putting this conference on:

• Quora’s advertising department is still in baby-steps mode
• LinkedIn advertising has a .001% conversion rate
• LinkedIn posts generate traffic but few ticket sales
• Warm emails (me emailing people from my email app) get an enormously high conversion rate
• Lukewarm emails (from my own mailing list of contacts) get a nice response but lower conversion rate

Notice I haven’t bothered mentioning using lead generation agencies: ask me about that some time, when you have a few minutes and don't mind a bit of swearing.

So apart from this post I’ll be sticking with mining my email inbox from now on.

Meantime, do register for the event. It’s called How to Triple Your Agency’s Size. And tickets have been going much faster than I thought: at the time of posting there were only 17 tickets left. Get yours now, because you really don't want to miss it!