How to market a marketing agency in the right order

In my first class at design school, the professor asked us why advertising agencies don't advertise. We sat there without an answer, so he gave us his. What would they say? That they're better than those guys?

That question is still the best place to start on how to market a marketing agency. Pick a narrow market and a point of view, then attract buyers with proof and ideas they can see before they ever call you, backed by a simple pipeline system. Ads, outreach and outside help come last, because they can only carry a message you already have.

I'm Kurt Schmidt, founder of Schmidt Consulting Group, and I ran that order backwards for a while myself as president of Foundry, the custom software agency I helped grow from 3 people to about 50 and onto the Inc. 5000 twice.

Why is marketing your own agency so hard?

Your own marketing is a client with no deadline, so paying clients win every tiebreak. And an agency that can do almost anything ends up saying almost everything.

I haven't met an agency in years that doesn't call itself full-service. The worry behind it is that buyers won't understand what you do unless you list everything. It feels safe, because a wider net should catch more fish. In practice, full-service doesn't tell a buyer what you do. The right buyers slip through the net, and the ones who stay compare you on price because they can't tell you apart from the next firm.

Agency people are craftspeople who are very good at helping other people, and they flinch when you turn the mirror on them. The fix is to build your own marketing the way you'd build it for a client, with an owner, a rhythm that survives a busy month, and a short list of what the agency will publish this quarter. I learned where agency work comes from at Foundry. The work I brought in came from talks I gave, a book I'd published and people I kept in touch with. Paying an outside firm to run cold outreach is the usual shortcut. One agency ran eighty thousand dollars through it and never landed a meeting. Hiring a marketing agency to market a marketing agency is a double negative.

What sold us was expertise people could see before they met us. That's still true for every agency I work with, and it's the one part you can't hand to an outside firm. Your marketing's job is to put more of the right people in front of that expertise before they ever meet you.

What should a marketing agency do first: positioning or lead generation?

Start with positioning. Lead generation built on a vague position brings in the wrong conversations, and no outbound campaign can fix a message the buyer doesn't understand.

If your website says you do marketing for small and midsize businesses, a buyer has no idea when to call you. A marketing director at a regional bank knows exactly what to do with "we help regional banks get more loan applications from their websites." A point of view is the belief behind that sentence, the one you'd defend on a call, such as banks losing applicants at the form rather than at the ad. When the agencies I work with struggle with outbound, the cause is almost always the positioning, the offer, or both.

Narrowing feels like turning work away, and at Foundry it worked the other direction. After we focused on a couple of industries, prospects from outside them started calling to ask whether we'd done the same work in their space. We were talking about outcomes, and a buyer in a different industry could picture the same result for themselves.

Your client list often already holds the position you need. The clients you'd happily take ten more of tend to share something, like an industry or a kind of problem. Your position starts there, and that search is where my agency positioning work with founder-led firms begins. Once the position holds, lead generation for marketing agencies turns into a job the whole firm can share.

How does The Attraction Agency framework market an agency?

The framework in The Attraction Agency markets an agency in four steps: clarify your value, publish with purpose, let the work speak, and grow with authority. I wrote the book about this order of operations.

1. Clarify your value. Say exactly what your agency is for, so price stops being the thing buyers compare. You want one sentence a stranger could repeat to a colleague, covering who you serve, the problem you solve and what changes for them. A past client should be able to tell a friend exactly when to call you. If your team describes the agency three different ways, start here.
2. Publish with purpose. Publish work that shows what you know, so people trust you before they ever call. Tell stories about work you did in place of lists of work you do. Someone can pass along "they just launched a blog that lifted a mattress brand's conversions" to a friend. "We do content marketing" gives them nothing to pass along. A book does the same job at a larger scale. Most of my clients haven't read my book. It opens doors anyway, because people introduce you differently once you've written one.
3. Let the work speak. Step two shows what you did; this step shows how you think. Teach in public the part you'd normally save for the pitch, like what you'd check first and the mistake you see over and over. Your thinking does the convincing. A podcast where you interview the buyers you want is the easiest version, because an invitation to talk about their own work is a better first message than any pitch.
4. Grow with authority. Build a pipeline that grows as your reputation does. Keep a list of the people you most want to work with, put something useful in front of them on a steady rhythm, and note where every new conversation came from.

Each step works better once the one before it is in place. Publishing before your value is clear spreads a vague message further, and AI has made that mistake cheap to repeat at volume. Ten pieces that sound like any agency teach buyers to skim past your name. I go deeper on why attraction works in the attraction agency model.

Which channels work when an agency markets itself?

Work the channels where your buyers already spend time, one at a time. Pick one, run it for a full quarter, and judge it by the conversations it starts.

• Referrals and past clients. The people who already trust you are the fastest channel you have. In my experience the highest-paying clients come through someone who already knows the firm, and that has held at every agency I've worked in or with. Stay in touch after the project ends, especially with clients who've changed jobs. Growing beyond referrals covers how to make that a habit.
• Partners. Firms that sell to the same buyers can send you steady work. Partnership marketing for agencies covers how to set it up.
• Content with a point of view. Posts, a newsletter or a podcast that teaches what you know. I make the full case in why attraction beats chasing.
• Outbound. It works once the message is clear. Read agency cold email before you spend money on it.
• Events and speaking. Talks and podcast guest spots, the channel that has worked best for me.

Speaking works because an organizer has already vouched for you by putting you on the stage. Work has followed every time I've spoken, sometimes from the audience and more often from people who simply saw I'd been invited.

I also brought a salesperson to my talks. While I spoke, they noted who asked questions. Afterward they walked over and offered each of those people a one-on-one with me about their question. I got to stay the expert the whole time, and the people with questions could talk to me without feeling pitched.

To find stages, I read the event calendars at venues near me, like the Minneapolis Convention Center, and contact the organizers of anything that fits. These days my AI assistant does the first pass. I asked it once for speaking opportunities within driving distance. It filled out five applications, and an organizer wrote back the same day. Podcast guest spots work the same way and are easier to land. Pitch the host one specific topic their listeners care about, and send a short note on why you're the person to talk about it.

Should a marketing agency advertise itself?

Advertise once your position already brings in the right conversations, because an ad can only make a message louder. In my own feed, advertising for agencies could almost always run under any agency's logo, and buyers scroll right past it. Before you buy an ad, answer the professor's question for your own firm. What would the ad say that a competitor's ad couldn't?

I tested this on my own LinkedIn. When I paid to show a post only to small-agency owners, the targeting worked: in LinkedIn's own audience report, directors fell from 41% of the audience to 11%, and owners and founders took their place. Each view cost about five times what a broader boost had cost. The money changed who saw the post. The content still had to earn their attention, and my posts that did it best told a story about something that happened to me.

If you advertise, aim the ad at one offer for one market, such as a short guide written for buyers in a single industry. Show it to people who already know you a little, like past site visitors and newsletter readers, and judge it by the conversations it books. When I run ads for clients who've been around a while, the easiest audience to start with is a list of a few hundred people they already know, loaded straight into the ad platform.

Is marketing different for digital agencies?

Marketing for digital agencies follows the same four steps, with one extra pressure: buyers know how cheap production has become.

Your clients use the same AI models you do, and they know a solid audit now costs an afternoon. What they still pay a premium for is your senior people's thinking about their problem, so those people need to be seen teaching how they'd solve it.

Buyers who once wanted one firm for everything want precision today, or at least an example of you solving their exact problem for somebody else. Large companies already have dozens of suppliers, and a digital agency that does everything becomes one more name on that list. Show a buyer the exact problem you solved for a company like theirs, and lead with the result they're after, like more customers from the same site traffic.

How do you know your agency marketing is working?

A buyer who arrives already sold is the clearest sign. They've read your posts or heard your name from someone they trust, and the first call feels closer to a close than a pitch.

That's how my own calls go now. By the time someone books a call with me, they've already watched or read enough to decide, and the call is mostly about whether we fit. When someone arrives that way, the deal is yours to lose. Spend the first call confirming the fit and learning what they need, and keep the capabilities tour for later.

You'll see other signs too:

• More of your inquiries come from the market you chose.
• Discovery calls get shorter.
• Pricing pressure eases.
• Prospects outside your focus ask whether you've done the work in their industry.
• Referrals arrive from people who've never hired you.

Keep a monthly tally of right-fit conversations and where each one came from. I cover the other pipeline numbers in the agency pipeline work I do with founder-led firms. If the tally hasn't moved after a full quarter on one channel, rewrite the message and run the same channel again.

Key takeaways

• Decide what your agency would say in an ad before you buy any reach.
• Pick a narrow market and a point of view that a stranger could repeat.
• Make your senior people's expertise visible where buyers already spend time.
• Work one channel at a time for a full quarter.
• Run ads after the message already works.
• Judge your marketing by right-fit conversations and their sources.

Every good agency has an answer to the professor's question somewhere in its client list. Most of my work now is helping owners find that answer and build the marketing on top of it.

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