The pressure for agency relevance is constant, but the path forward is not always clear, and the stakes are incredibly high. How do you know when to pivot?
Carol Morgan, founder and president of Denim Marketing, addresses those questions in Social Pulse: Agency Edition. She’s successfully navigated industry transformations including two major agency rebrands, the great recession, and technological shifts as the author of books on social media marketing in a leader within the National Association of Home Builders.
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When did you realize your agency needed to make a significant change?
Carol Morgan: Well, it’s interesting, so way back in the day, we were a PR-only shop.
So, this is 2006. I remember it clearly. I was driving North on 75, and I had just pitched something to our local daily paper. They had basically informed me that they didn’t consider it news, and I just started thinking, “Wow, they don’t really consider this news, but my client considers it news.” Newspapers were contracting, there were fewer reporters, and there were fewer papers that started in [the] early 2000s.
I realized I needed to find a different way to get coverage for my clients, so I started looking for opportunities to do something different. At that time, there were these online PR sites that were free PR. We started placing our clients and news releases on those sites, and then I started thinking, “What else can I do?”
I realized that we had these city-specific niche bloggers. Most of them were realtors. I guess today we’d call them micro-influencers, right? But they had blogs, and they wanted to talk about the new home communities in their area. So we started pitching press releases to them.
That’s when I realized that the industry was going to start changing, and I needed to look at ways to become less analog, you know? Hello again, this is 2006. We were still printing and mailing press releases to reporters way back in the day. I think that was the first wake-up call for me.
Mike Allton: Yeah, and it’s important to be mindful of those kinds of situations because you could have put your head in the sand and ignored what was going around you and kept trying to chug on for years and years and years, but then you become a blockbuster. And you haven’t pivoted when you needed to pivot and have no choice but to shut your doors. And you’ve been through two major rebrands.
What would you say was different about each situation, and how did you approach them?
Carol Morgan: Well, I would say one was planned. And one was out of necessity, which makes very different situations.
So, the first one was in 2008, and we’ll talk more about it later in this interview, I think, but I joined forces with another agency. We decided we wanted to provide a one-stop shop solution and offer all marketing services to clients, which was a brilliant idea at the time.
But roll forward about eight years, we decided it was time to part ways with that agency. It was a mutual decision, but at that point, my agency needed a new name and a new vibe. Both of those situations are really different.
How do you tell the difference between something worth pursuing versus just a temporary fad?
Carol Morgan: Depending on what it is, if it looks like it has some traction, then we’ll try to test it for a month or two or three. We might just test it as Denim as the agency and just see if we think it will work for us or see if it’s got any implications or grit for any of our clients that we think might work for them.
If it does work, we’ll offer it to clients and incorporate it into our marketing mix, but that’s been one of the hardest things, especially with the rise of social media and all the different social media sites and then all the different things you can do on social media sites is figuring out what’s worth doing and what’s not.
How is your agency using AI?
Carol Morgan: Well, we’re using artificial intelligence, at least for what I would call creative sparks. It is absolutely fantastic for brainstorming. So we’ll use it for brainstorming. Or if you get in a rut with your writing, sometimes you’re like, “I want to say this a different way.”
You’re just plugging a sentence or two in there and saying, giving me some variations or some options. Again, it’s more for that creative spark versus getting it to do all of our work. But the reality is—and you know this—we’re all using it every single day, and almost every single program we use online. It’s integrated into everything. So we’re embracing it and looking for ways that it can help us be more successful for our clients.
Check out the insight in these past episodes of Social Pulse: Agency Edition.
What are some agency relevance strategies that helped you survive the recession?
Carol Morgan: We can talk about the recession and COVID because they’re both really interesting from our agency perspective. So, fortunately, I guess if you say it’s not fortunate obviously, but the Great Recession happened shortly after the birth of what we were then calling new media.
So we had already taken a really heavy turn toward blogging because [of] what started after I started pitching bloggers and sending them our stories. I finally woke up one day and thought, “Wow. I should start a blog. It should be real-estate-focused.” I launched the Atlanta Real Estate Forum in 2006. People thought I was crazy. (That’s a whole other segue in another story.)
But we started posting client stories there. So as social media sites started coming along Facebook and Twitter if you’re looking at ’07, ’08, we started looking at those and trying to figure out ways to use those to help our clients, which again was very SEO-focused back in the day because that’s what we all knew.
That focus on social media during the Great Recession helped us to remain relevant because what it did was give us a service that we could offer to existing clients and new clients that they knew nothing about, but knew that they needed during that difficult time to help try to find ways to get more eyes on the site and more people to their product.
How do you maintain their morale and the confidence of your clients when you’re changing the structure of your agency?
Carol Morgan: I think that’s a great question. I think the biggest thing is transparency and communication, keeping both your agency’s internal team involved in the conversations as well as keeping the client surprised about what changes you’re going to make and how it affects them because, at the end of the day, everyone wants to know what’s in it for them? “How does this affect me? How does this affect my job? How does this reflect my relationship with my agency?”
That’s the biggest thing we did and did well with these changes, especially with the last rebrand. I literally set my entire internal team down and said, “Okay, I’ve got some choices. I’d like to lay them out on the table and find out what your thoughts are.” So they were with me from the beginning on the rebranding and naming of the agency, and it was interesting because, again, think about this.
I literally involved my entire team in it to make sure they were on board. And that was phenomenal because they were on board and they were behind me. It’s how we made it through that change so successfully.
How do you evaluate new tech and decide which ones to implement in your agency?
Carol Morgan: So, similar to trends, we work to evaluate them and determine if they’re a fit for our agency.
So, for example, right now we are shopping for a new agency management software and have trials going on three different platforms. So what we do is make a list of must-haves, what our deal breakers are, if we’re using an existing platform, and [if] there are things that we love about it, we put that in the list. If there are things that we wish it did, we put that on the list. Then we evaluate based on those criteria to see what’s the best fit for us.
The challenging thing with software is it’s really hard to find one that does everything you want it to do. But you can usually find something that’s pretty close and will at least meet all of your must-haves, but might not meet all of your want-to-haves or would like-to-haves.
What are the platforms you’re looking at for your agency?
Carol Morgan: There’s one that is in the lead, and we’re just waiting to see if their new rollout has the one last form. It’s not really a form, it’s a report that we need for our clients. We need it internally. So we started with like 10 of them and narrowed it down to three.
What was interesting about it is a lot of them wouldn’t talk to agencies that didn’t have 10 or more employees or 20 or more employees. As a result, some people decided to step away entirely. Then there’s one option we’ve revisited on and off and even used in the past, but it’s far too robust for our needs—there’s just too much going on with it. Work on the jig. You probably know that one.
We had narrowed it down to three and then it pretty quickly became two, and right now it’s just one. If they can come up with a report, we need it.
How are you measuring how much impact you or your clients get different social media networks?
Carol Morgan: Yeah, it’s a lot. So we create a month in reports every month and we measure traffic month over month and year over year. [We] look for patterns and anomalies and things that we can improve. So from Google Analytics, we’re looking at leads, completed contact forms coming in from social media as well as events, and looking at all the overall social media traffic back to the site. So which social media platforms are sending the most traffic? How much time do they spend on-site? And then ultimately, again, those completed leads and completed events. Then on the individual sites in our social media programs, we look at impressions, engagement, and reach.
What we want to see is what are people engaging with and what is making them step up and interact with our clients. And then we do a thorough report on all of those each month. What’s the most popular post that month in terms of impressions, engagement, and reach both organically—and then obviously paid ads?
So, we drill down pretty far into that to try to see what’s working and what’s not so that we can have a comprehensive program to move forward with what to do next.
How do you keep up with the latest trends, new platforms, and new technologies?
Carol Morgan: I mean, you’re going to probably laugh at my answer, but I would say that the biggest thing I turn to is just listening to what’s out there in the news, on podcasts and blogs and in the news of what’s coming—but then having the curiosity and willingness to embrace that technology.
I think the biggest thing I’ve seen through my 25 years and operating and owning an agency is so many people are change-adverse. They’re very scared of what’s coming and not willing to embrace it. I guess as a Gen Xer, I didn’t grow up with a smartphone. But, I did grow up with a very progressive father. My dad used to sit in the basement of our house after he got home from working at his law firm, and he would literally build computers that flip switches to get them to turn on. I learned a lot about technology and looked at it as something that could help us like my father. And it’s funny, it’s something that he’s no longer with us, but I look back and reflect on the life lessons that he taught me several years ago and realized the biggest thing he taught me was not to fear to change or fear technology [but to] figure out ways to use it to work smarter and work faster.
Just like being an early adapter and starting to blog in 2006 and then being an early adapter to new media, which is now social media, lots of folks didn’t understand it, but I guess I just saw what he had done and knew that it was a risk I needed to take to move my agency forward. I started a podcast in 2011 and I mean, nobody was podcasting back in 2011. And I just had a friend who was a podcaster who was like, “You should try this. I think you’ll like it.” So, I’m still running that podcast I think we’re approaching 1200 episodes now. Something crazy like that.
What changes to marketing agencies today that we should be open to?
Carol Morgan: I mean, I think AI and Big Data are the two biggest things that are, and not just on the horizon, they’re here now, and they’re going to continue to evolve. Figuring out what you need to know about that and how to work it into your agency—I think that’s going to be as big of a change, if not bigger than the onset of social media and the onset of the internet.
Now that said, I also think that there’s lots of room out there for a small boutique, niche-focused agencies to be really successful. You don’t have to be a jack of all trades. If you are a master of two or three things and have a niche audience that needs those two or three things, then you can make that work as well,
Thank you for reading about how agency relevance in this latest episode of Social Pulse Podcast: Agency Edition on Apple, powered by Agorapulse, where each and every week we’re talking to marketing agencies like you going through many of the same struggles you’re going through and sharing their stories, subscribe to find in each episode, inspiration, motivation, and the perspiration that go into growing and scaling agencies like yours.
