E385: The reality of working at the big Madison Avenue marketing agencies.
I worked at one of them, doing SEO for some of the biggest companies in the world.
This is what I learned.
If you have any doubts about your own marketing being good enough or about you being able to take on big incumbents, listen to this.
The Product Hunt article mentioned in the episode: https://edwardsturm.com/articles/product-hunt-results/
00:00 The Reality of Big Marketing Agencies 00:47 Competing with Big Companies 01:11 Inefficiencies in Top Agencies 03:07 Opportunities in Unbundling 05:00 In-House Marketing 06:57 Practical Tips for Solopreneurs and Small Businesses 09:29 The Opportunity
#digitalmarketing #marketingagencies #marketing #business
The Edward Show. Your daily digital marketing podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
On today's episode of the podcast, I'm going to be talking about the realities of marketing agencies and why you shouldn't be afraid of big companies that can afford the biggest, the brightest, the scariest marketing agencies. I'm going to talk about the reality of enterprise businesses that have the top marketing agencies in the world because I worked at one of the top marketing agencies in the world for the biggest companies in the world. Companies like Procter and Gamble, companies like ADP, companies like Nintendo and Microsoft, all these companies. I'm going to share the reality of this because some of them that I hear a lot all the time, oh my gosh, you know what looks so sunny in here? And it is, but it's raining outside. It's a sun shower. It's amazing. Wow. What an incredible day. Something I've heard all the time. You've probably heard this too is, oh, this idea won't work because X, Y, and Z big company is already doing it. I've heard that so much, oh, we can't create a competitor to Slack because Slack exists. Can't create a competitor to Loom because Loom exists. Can't create a competitor to Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office is already so ubiquitous. And here's the reality with huge companies. These companies, they have some in house marketing, maybe even a good amount, but they also rely a ton on agencies and these agencies that they rely on, and some companies rely on agencies more than others. These agencies that they rely on do great work, but they don't talk to each other. The agencies don't talk to each other. The marketing is very inefficient. So I was doing search engine optimization at a huge marketing agency for huge companies, companies that I just named. And something that I would continually see is we would come up with amazing marketing campaigns and they would work so well if they could just be integrated with the advertising. But we barely spoke to the advertising agencies. Even the paid media section who was in our agency, the cross department strategizing, it wasn't what you'd want it to be. And I know that this is what goes on at all of the top agencies. The niches don't talk to each other, and they should. If there is an amazing advertising campaign going on, you can use that to do better paid marketing. You can use that to do better SEO. You can use that to get more backlinks, increase domain authority. You can ask the advertising agency to put in certain keywords into their advertising, try to incorporate these keywords because we're trying to rank for these keywords. We want bloggers to use these keywords in the copy that they write about the company. Others can look at SEO data and make more informed advertisements based on queries that people are landing on a website with. There are so many different things that can be done. So much with email as well with email marketing or SMS, so, so much. But as these companies grow, they get more inefficient. And the thing is that creates opportunity. And that's what I wanted to share on this episode of the podcast. It's how much opportunity there is at unbundling some feature from a huge company, unbundling that, becoming dominant in that, and then growing that back up to disrupt the main company that you unbundled it from. Because when I hear this idea can't be done because this incumbent already exists, I'm going to be honest, get a little bit, I get a little bit pissed off because I know that's not true. I know that that's a limiting belief. And I know that these huge companies are so inefficient because I know how the sausages made it and you don't want to see it. You don't want to see how the sausages is made. It's gross. It's a bit unsanitary. Now, I'll tell you who you actually have to be afraid of. You got to be afraid of the companies that are big, but still have all of their marketing in-house and that are constantly doing meetings with one another to strategize how they can incorporate their different campaigns with one another. That's who you should be afraid of. And that's what big marketing agencies should be doing. There should constantly be meetings between the agencies that companies are hiring to strategize and figure out how campaigns can incorporate into one another. But there is not. And when there is, it's few and far between. So what's the lesson in this? What's the direct actionable lesson from this? Number one, incumbents, most of the time, are not as scary as you think. And if you're just starting, the market is so huge. Certainly big enough for you to be happy and big enough for you to get a slice, a substantial enough slice that you can grow into something that scares the big company and then it'll just try to acquire you or you can keep going with it. So that's one. Two is there is so much power in incorporating different marketing efforts and keeping your marketing in-house, trying to hire people away from these agencies so that everyone comes to work together. If you have a huge company, if you have a big company, keeping everything in-house. You're a growing company, keeping everything in-house. Instead of getting agencies that just do the work for you, get consultants who teach your team how to do things. That will be way more efficient. Get expert consultants who teach your team how to do things and who's constantly keeping your team on their toes. But I wanted to share this because I think I have a pretty unique perspective. Having done SEO at, there's so many things that I learned at this company. So many amazing things that I learned doing SEO for some of the biggest companies. But one of them was just, and you know, you hear this from lots of people who work in big organizations was just the tremendous amount of inefficiencies. The amount of unnecessary, I say, there should be meetings and there should. But we had so many unnecessary meetings. That was not about any of this. And the meetings that we did have that were about this, they should have been way better directed. This agency is doing this campaign. What are some relevant keywords that they can incorporate? Give a list of 10 or 20, prioritize them. Even better would have been to actually have the people doing the implementation speak to each other so they could strategize. Normally the managers, they're just managing, they're communicating with the clients. But the people doing the implementation, those are the people at these agencies who the campaign is top of mind for the strategy is top of mind for the execution is top of mind for those people should be talking to one another. So doing everything in a house, people have more responsibilities. They have more on their mind. They know more and they're better able to figure out synergies between different campaigns. I can't even tell you personally, just with startups, the amount of times I've done one campaign in a different niche. But then I've related that to SEO or I've related that to paid media or I've related that to social product ton is an easy example. I constantly, whenever I do products on launches or beta list launches or put out press releases, let's just focus on product time, whenever I do product and launches, I'm thinking of keywords that I want in my product to launch because I know that keywords and images as well. I try to put in videos and images that would look good on social, that would look good on blogs, keywords that are important to me because I know if we do a good job with the product to launch, some bloggers are going to write about it or some people on social media are going to find it and make videos about it or posts about it. And so if the blogger writes about it, they include our keywords. If somebody on TikTok makes a video about it, we better control the narrative from the start. And we can also include keywords in the branding for the launch and the images for the product ton launch. If you haven't heard of product ton, it is the number one place to launch technology products on the internet. It works with an upvote system. Good products go to the top because they get upvotes. Products that aren't as great, they don't get upvotes and then they just go down to the bottom or stay at the bottom. I actually have a huge guide on my website about product ton. You just go to edwardsterm.com/articles and just apple F search page for product ton. I do this weird thing on my website. On my main articles page, I have all of my articles on one page. There's no pagination. And then at the top, I divide the articles into SEO organic social media, paid media and grab bag. So I have like different tags for each article. So if you want to read only my SEO articles, you can click on that. If you want to read only my social media articles, you can click on social media. And then within each of these sections, then I have the pagination. I actually, I shared this, this strategy on TikTok and Instagram reels for articles. And I got so many negative comments saying that it was going to hurt my SEO, but it didn't hurt my SEO at all. It didn't change anything in a Google search console. That's because the way that my articles page loads out. It's fast enough that it doesn't affect the user and it still loads all the important SEO information without JavaScript. If I had thousands of articles, I'd have to use pagination. But since I don't have thousands of articles, I can do it the way that I did it. All right. But that's attention. The point of this episode is the incumbents aren't scary. Anybody can take the pie away from anybody else, especially if you're starting. The opportunity is so huge. Learn something and unbundle it when you grow, have your different marketing efforts talk to each other. If you're just a solo prener, think about all the different ways your channels could work with one another. One more example, I'm constantly putting keywords that I care about in the descriptions for my daily short form videos, especially when those videos relate to my brand. And I'm using those keywords in the video content themselves. It's a quick example, but think about all the different ways that your channels could talk to one another. And remember that even behind the platinum doors of the biggest, scariest companies, there are so many inefficiencies holding them back and making you formidable to them. That's what I wanted to share. This is episode 385 of my daily digital marketing podcast. And it's a blue sky and there's still rain outside. What a cool day. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
