Practice what you preach

12May10

How many marketers and advertising experts actually practice what they preach?

Until recently it probably wasn’t a very viable option.

How many times has your media rep, who happily suggests where to spend your hard-earned advertising budget, actually “invested” his or her own funds in an ad campaign?

How often has your agency account manager had to feel the anxiety of committing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a campaign that could make or break their business?

For that matter, when was the last time you saw an advertising agency run their own highly-creative, cutting-edge 30 second television spot during prime time?

You haven’t, have you. Agencies enter awards and then drum up column inches in trade press. Its called PR.

Truth is that most of the marketing and advertising experts who businesses rely on don’t actually practice what they preach. And, to be fair, in many cases its not very practical to expect them to.

But the emergence of social media and inbound marketing means that a new generation of marketers has emerged who do have skin in the game, who do actually live, breathe and experience the highs and lows of the strategies they extol.

I have experienced this first hand. Our agency was originally a traditional full-service shop. We bought media spots for clients and produced their ads for them. But not for ourselves.

However, over time we began looking for other ways to grow our business, to promote ourselves, to attract more customers. We started blogging. We started using Twitter. We started creating videos and interviewing other marketers around the world. We started creating new marketing tools that helped our business.

Everything our agency now offers as a service to clients was borne out of our own experiences and efforts in growing our own business.

Our web design approach and philosophy is a result of constant experimentation and improvement.

Our Inbound Marketing system is the collective wisdom we have gained from creating an effective blogging, optimising, tweeting, and converting methodology.

Our advanced search engine optimisation tools evolved from our need to improve our own Google rankings so that we could be found online, increase traffic and generate inquiries.

Our use of social media has contributed substantially to the growth of the business and informed our advice to our clients accordingly.

In short, we finally practice what we preach. It’s a nice feeling.

Our inbound marketing approach has seen us evolve from a small agency servicing clients in our home town to one that has a growing roster of large national clients. Over ninety percent of our revenue now comes from outside of our home market and more opportunities arrive every week.

That’s what the internet, social media and inbound marketing can do for a small business now.

The most exciting thing is that we’re not alone in actually living and breathing our approach to marketing. Now there are hundreds of talented people and a generation of new agencies practicing what they preach.

You don’t need to look any further than the Age of Conversation series to find them. 171 of the brightest minds in marketing from around the world can be found in the latest book. Buy it. Visit their blogs, follow them on Twitter or Facebook or Linked in.

And if you are in need of some modern marketing advice, contact them.

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