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I don’t know about you, but I miss taking classes. I miss taking notes, studying, and most of all, learning a ton of new skills. That’s not to say I don’t learn a lot on the job here at HubSpot — because I absolutely do. But sometimes, there’s nothing quite like listening to a lecture, taking notes, and doing homework. Given the frequency at which new technologies and software are developed, it can be overwhelming to try to keep up your knowledge by only reading blog posts and ebooks. That’s where self-paced online learning comes in. I’ve taken a few awesome courses and certifications through HubSpot Academy, including an inbound marketing certification and a content marketing certification. These classes helped me be better at my job, so I started making a list of other classes I could take to learn more skills. When I finished the list, I realized that you, dear readers, might have similar skill gaps, so I wanted to share it in a blog post. Below is a long list of free online courses you can take to beef up your skill set. These offerings vary in time commitment, but many are self-paced so you can work on your own schedule. The topics these courses cover include: Content Marketing Social Media Marketing SEO Marketing Email Marketing Other Digital Marketing Courses Want to learn more about brands and organizations that offer the courses on the list below? Scroll to the end of this post, or click here, to jump to a section on where to find affordable online marketing courses. Free Online Marketing Courses Inbound Marketing Certification — HubSpot Academy Content Marketing Certification — HubSpot Academy Internet Marketing for Smart People — Copyblogger Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content — Coursera The Strategy of Content Marketing — Coursera Copywriting Blunders: Do You Make these 10 Common Mistakes? — Udemy Content Marketing for B2B Enterprises — Udemy Content Marketing — QuickSprout Social Media Certification — HubSpot Academy Developing an End-to-End Instagram Marketing Strategy For Your Business – HubSpot Academy Social Media Marketing — edX Diploma in Social Media Marketing — ALISON Blueprint — Facebook Social Media Analytics — quintly Social Media Week of Webinars — Buffer Digital Marketing Course — Google SEO Training Course — HubSpot Academy SEO Training Course by Moz — Udemy Advanced SEO: Tactics and Strategy — Udemy SEO — Quicksprout Email Marketing Certification — HubSpot Academy Email Marketing — QuickSprout Make a Website — Codeacademy Learn Javascript — Codeacademy Learn Ruby — Codeacademy Learn Python — Codeacademy Learn HTML & CSS — Codeacademy Learn to Code Awesome Websites — General Assembly What Digital Advertising Is & How to Do It – HubSpot Academy Paid Advertising – QuickSprout Creativity – Canva Wordstream PPC University Photoshop 2020: One-on-One Fundamentals – LinkedIn Learning InDesign 2020: Essential Training – LinkedIn Learning Content Marketing Courses 1. HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification – HubSpot Academy 2. HubSpot Content Marketing Certification – HubSpot Academy 3. Internet Marketing for Smart People – Copyblogger 4. Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content – Coursera 5. The Strategy of Content Marketing – Coursera 6. Copywriting Blunders – Udemy 7. Content Marketing for B2B Enterprises – Udemy 8. Content Marketing – Udemy Social Media Marketing Courses 9. Free Social Media Certification – HubSpot Academy HubSpot Academy’s free online Social Media Certification offers eight lessons — from developing a social media strategy, to social media listening and moderating, to content strategy, digital advertising, and crisis communications. You’ll learn how to build an inbound social media strategy that delights your customers and grows your bottom line. 10. Developing an End-to-End Instagram Marketing Strategy For Your Business – HubSpot Academy 11. Strategic Social Media Marketing – edX 12. Diploma in Social Media Marketing – ALISON 13. Facebook Blueprint – Facebook 14. Social Media Analytics – Quintly 15. Social Media Week of Webinars – Buffer SEO Marketing Courses 16. SEO Training Course – HubSpot Academy 17. Google Digital Marketing Course – Google 18. SEO Training Course by Moz – Udemy 19. Advanced SEO: Tactics and Strategy – Udemy 20. SEO – QuickSprout Email Marketing 21. HubSpot Email Marketing Certification – HubSpot Academy 22. Email Marketing – QuickSprout Web Development and Site Design 23. Make a Website – CodeAcademy 24. Learn Javascript – CodeAcademy 25. Learn Ruby – CodeAcademy 26. Learn Python – CodeAcademy 27. Learn HTML & CSS – CodeAcademy 28. Learn to Code Awesome Websites – General Assembly Other Digital Marketing Courses 29. What Digital Advertising Is and How to Do It – HubSpot Academy 30. Paid Advertising – QuickSprout 31. Wordstream PPC University 32. Creativity – Canva 33. Photoshop 2020: One-on-One Fundamentals – LinkedIn Learning 34. InDesign 2020: Essential Training – LinkedIn Learning Where to Find Free or Affordable Courses HubSpot Academy HubSpot Academy offers certification and training courses to teach people how inbound marketing and HubSpot software work. Classes are often taught by marketers at HubSpot and are made up of video lessons, quizzes, and tests. Most HubSpot Academy classes are available free of charge, and if you pass the certifications, such as the two below, you get a nifty certificate and badge to share on your social media profiles. Check out mine on LinkedIn: Copyblogger Copyblogger is a content marketing company that creates content about content (so meta). Its blog provides a ton of great resources about digital marketing, and this class, “Internet Marketing for Smart People,” is made up of ebooks and emailed lessons and other course materials. Copyblogger espouses four pillars of content marketing success, which it delves into over the course of this class. Coursera Coursera offers MOOCs (massive online open courses) created and taught online by universities such as Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California system. These courses start at various times throughout the year, so browse the catalog to see when one lines up with your schedule. Below are a couple courses that are perfect for content marketers — here’s what a module

Posted by BritneyMuller Google houses the world’s information, and it’s their goal to serve the best answers to searchers’ questions. That means that understanding what your target audience is searching and why is more important than ever — but how do you effectively analyze and fulfill true search intent? In this brand-new Whiteboard Friday, Britney Muller shares everything you need to begin understanding and fulfilling search intent, plus a free Google Sheets checklist download to help you analyze the SERPs you care about most. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re going to be uncovering understanding and fulfilling search intent, and this is a really important topic to understand and better prepare your content around. I want you to think about this idea that Google houses the world’s information. They very likely know what the majority of people searching X are seeking, and they’re going to continue to get better and better and better at that. Understanding search intent What I would suggest you do and what you arm yourself with is this idea of really leaning on Google to better understand the intent behind any given search. You’re probably very familiar with the informational, navigational, investigational, and transactional-related intent types, and you can pull this information, like I said, directly off the SERP. Analyze: informational, navigational, investigational, transactional? You’re probably very familiar with the informational, navigational, investigational, and transactional-related intent types, and you can pull this information, like I said, directly off the SERP. Is there a featured snippet?  Is there a knowledge graph? You can pull that sort of information.  Are there site links?  Is it navigational in nature, people just trying to go to one destination?  Is there a comparison table?  Are they perhaps investigating? Transactional, are there tons of ads?  Are there lots of product pages showing up in the results?  Is there a shopping carousel?  You can pull intent types directly from the search. What’s interesting though is any given SERP doesn’t necessarily have one intent type. In fact, it likely has a couple of nitty-gritty intent types that Google themselves haven’t quite totally figured out. I want to pull back the curtain on how Google is actively trying to get better at understanding intent within questions and answers within content. They put up a competition to a bunch of data scientists to determine if anyone could build a model that can accurately weight these various intents with the content.  Question information There’s question information that they wanted the model to predict around: Is this fact-seeking? Does it have multi-intent? Is it not really a question? That’s my favorite. Is it well-written?  Asker intent understanding Body critical Conversational Expect short answer Fact-seeking Has commonly accepted answer Interestingness to others Interestingness to self Multi-intent Not really a question Opinion-seeking Well-written Question type Then they’re also trying to understand the type of question. Is it a definition? Is it instructions? Is it spelling, which is most of my searches?  Consequence Definition Entity Instructions Procedure Reason explanation Spelling Answer information Then they get into answer information. Is the answer intent helpful? Is it plausible? Is it relevant? Does it satisfy the question?  Helpful Level of information Plausible Relevance Satisfaction Answer types They even drill a bit deeper into answer types. Is it instructions, procedure, well-written?  Instructions Procedure Reason explanation Well-written Again, you see these sort of themes occur. So it’s important it’s not just these four. It’s great to know these and sort of run with them a bit. But put these in your back pocket and know that it goes a lot deeper and it’s a lot more complicated than that. Search Intent Checklist Let’s dig into this checklist of sorts. The idea behind this is that there’s a Google sheet that you can have today, make a copy and tweak however you’d like, that walks you through really this first process of understanding the intent and then fulfilling it. Make a copy of the Search Intent Checklist Once you do this a couple of times, you’re not going to need this checklist. This will become second nature to you. Let’s just walk through what this looks like.  1. Uncover the SERP intent First, what is the primary SERP intent? For my example, I have phonetic alphabet, informational. Secondary intent might be investigational for the types of content people are looking for. 2. List any SERP features and other SERP notes I list the SERP features that I notice in the search results. I’m really just making mental notes of what I’m seeing. So for this particular SERP, there were a lot more visuals than I expected, and so I made note of that. That kind of surprised me. I also made note this is the order of the features that are showing up. 3. Read, consume, and take notes about the ranking URLs The next thing you do is to read and consume all of the ranking URLs. This is so, so important if you’re serious about ranking for a particular keyword. You should actively be consuming this content and making notes about topics and entities covered.  What sort of multimedia are they using? What are the layouts?  What does it feel like?  You can really start to have a better checklist of what does that content look like and what are those expectations.  4. Scan ranking URLs’ Domain Authority with MozBar Then, ooh, my favorite secret hack is to activate MozBar for the search result page. You can see the Domain Authority and the backlinks for every single URL on a SERP. A lot of people don’t know you can use MozBar directly within Google search results, and it’s fantastic. What I use this for, if I want to rank for something like this, I would just evaluate all of the organic DAs, and I would really evaluate that range and see

The tough part is over — your budget’s been approved for the next quarter. But now, another challenge looms how to spend that money. You might be a little lost about how best to allocate your budget. Consider the resources and tools your team needs to do their jobs well. Additionally, leave a little room for celebrating your team for their wins — both big and small. So, how do you accurately plan out that perfectly balanced budget? Whether you have “use-it-or-lose-it” funds left over from the quarter, or are putting together a budget for the first time, here are some guidelines for allocating that money effectively. 1. Test new versions of calls-to-action that are performing poorly. Estimated cost: $50 per call to action In your analytics software, sort calls to action by click rate and conversion rate. Then, redesign ones with the lowest performance and test them. One way to do this is by performing an A/B test, which will show you which design your audience prefers. Perhaps a simple design change is in order to attract more visitors, like choosing a different photo. Or, maybe tweaking the wording can strengthen the connection you make with leads. This test will be useful in identifying the best ways to further prospects along in their buying journey. 2. Identify improvement opportunities on your homepage. Estimated cost: $150 Install heat map tracking software, like Hotjar or Crazy Egg, on your homepage. This software will show where people are clicking and how far they are scrolling down the page. Image Source These tools will help you determine if your audience is finding the content you want them to see the most. You’ll gain a good idea of if you need to restructure your webpages to be more effective. 3. Revise landing page copy. Estimated cost: $150 per page There’s always room for improvement on your landing pages. Start with pages that have conversion rates of less than 20% and rework the language to tune it into your target persona’s needs. If you are unsure which language will resonate with your audience, conduct keyword research and perform A/B tests. Additionally, do a little social listening. These methods will help you understand how to connect with your audience on multiple pages. 4. Find SEO keyword opportunities on your website. Estimated cost: $250 SEO keywords help you use language that improves rank on search engines and boost acquisition. For instance, if you spot a couple of offers that aren’t performing as well as you’d hoped, research the keywords surrounding that topic and revise your offers accordingly. Find software that has built-in SEO tools, like HubSpot’s CRM. These tools optimize your content to get found on search engines. 5. Do a social media engagement analysis. Estimated cost: $250 An analysis of social media messages will reveal which received the most engagement. Find out what worked best for your business. If you find that one or two channels are outperforming others, you can begin to infer how to plan for its use next quarter. Maybe you invest more into successful messages or deactivating underperforming accounts. Or maybe you’ve found that there’s a huge YouTube audience you’re missing out on. Look at your analysis and decide if YouTube is worth investing in moving forward. Check out this resource for growing a YouTube audience in a little over a year for quick tips. 6. Conduct a usability test. Estimated cost: $350 A usability test gives real feedback from potential customers. Similar to the results you get from a Net Promoter Score, you’ll figure out what customers are and aren’t liking about your web pages. Using the results from a usability test, figure out how to revise the content on your website to be more user-friendly. For instance, if you find that your product pages aren’t effective, you can mark this as a place to work on for the next year. 7. Try ad retargeting to boost performance. Estimated cost: $500 Ad retargeting catches those visitors who almost converted into customers. They bridge that gap so the process is completed. Retargeting ads give you the chance of hooking in a previously interested lead with a new, personalized offer. Ad retargeting can give your acquisition numbers a boost. Look for ad retargeting options on social networks like Facebook, so you can build and revise ads within the channel. 8. Experiment with social media advertising. Estimated cost: $500 Social media strategies should be evolving as customer behavior evolves. When you hit a block with planning, mix up your strategy. Try a new channel or a new approach with a network you’re already using Advertising with social media takes some experimentation. Knowing your audience and conducting social listening gives you an idea of how and where to reach your audience, but knowing which copy, format, and design will be a hit calls for some testing. 9. Invest in employee knowledge. Estimated cost: $500 Because marketing is an ever-changing industry, investing in learning opportunities makes your team well-equipped to excel in their day-to-day tasks. Training can come in the form of ebooks, blog posts, or webinars. Additionally, scope out courses online that will give team members a deeper understanding of the industry. For example, HubSpot Academy offers courses about content marketing, social media marketing, and sales, in digestible, interactive lessons. Courses update as needed, so you don’t have to worry about getting a certification for an outdated skillset. 10. Celebrate your success of the past quarter. Estimated cost: $500 Remember to allocate some funds to celebrate your colleagues and their wins for the quarter. This doesn’t have to be a huge blowout party, but it could be something small, like sending colleagues a care package, that will remind your team their hard work is appreciated. Come up with superlatives and present them in a year-end meeting. Awards like “Best Movie Buff,” or “Funniest Marketer” build up morale. 11. Perform customer research. Estimated cost: $500 Customer research is important. You may have done previous customer

If you are looking for an SEO checklist that will help you to increase your site‘s organic traffic and rank on Google, you have just found it. We have put together the ultimate checklist that you need to follow to drive SEO success in 2020, covering 41 best practice points and tasks that you need to know about.

What are lead magnets and why should you use them on your website? Find out how to attract more leads for your business and get inspiration from these 12 ideas.

Posted by Portent This blog was written by Tim Mehta, a former Conversion Rate Optimization Strategist with Portent, Inc. Running A/B/n experiments (aka “Split Tests”) to improve your search engine rankings has been in the SEO toolkit for longer than many would think. Moz actually published an article back in 2015 broaching the subject, which is a great summary of how you can run these tests. What I want to cover here is understanding the right times to run an SEO split-test, and not how you should be running them. I run a CRO program at an agency that’s well-known for SEO. The SEO team brings me in when they are preparing to run an SEO split-test to ensure we are following best practices when it comes to experimentation. This has given me the chance to see how SEOs are currently approaching split-testing, and where we can improve upon the process. One of my biggest observations when working on these projects has been the most pressing and often overlooked question: “Should we test that?” Risks of running unnecessary SEO split-tests Below you will find a few potential risks of running an SEO split-test. You might be willing to take some of these risks, while there are others you will most definitely want to avoid. Wasted resources With on-page split-tests (not SEO split-tests), you can be much more agile and launch multiple tests per month without expending significant resources. Plus, the pre-test and post-test analyses are much easier to perform with the calculators and formulas readily available through our tools. With SEO split-testing, there’s a heavy amount of lifting that goes into planning a test out, actually setting it up, and then executing it. What you’re essentially doing is taking an existing template of similar pages on your site and splitting it up into two (or more) separate templates. This requires significant development resources and poses more risk, as you can’t simply “turn the test off” if things aren’t going well. As you probably know, once you’ve made a change to hurt your rankings, it’s a lengthy uphill battle to get them back. The pre-test analysis to anticipate how long you need to run the test to reach statistical significance is more complex and takes up a lot of time with SEO split-testing. It’s not as simple as, “Which one gets more organic traffic?” because each variation you test has unique attributes to it. For example, if you choose to split-test the product page template of half of your products versus the other half of them, the actual products in each variation can play a part in its performance. Therefore, you have to create a projection of organic traffic for each variation based on the pages that exist within it, and then compare the actual data to your projections. Inherently, using your projection as your main indicator of failure or success is dangerous, because a projection is just an educated guess and not necessarily what reality reflects. For the post-test analysis, since you’re measuring organic traffic versus a hypothesized projection, you have to look at other data points to determine success. Evan Hall, Senior SEO Strategist at Portent, explains: “Always use corroborating data. Look at relevant keyword rankings, keyword clicks, and CTR (if you trust Google Search Console). You can safely rely on GSC data if you’ve found it matches your Google Analytics numbers pretty well.” The time to plan a test, develop it on your live site, “end” the test (if needed), and analyze the test after the fact are all demanding tasks. Because of this, you need to make sure you’re running experiments with a strong hypothesis and enough differences in the variation versus the original that you will see a significant difference in performance from them. You also need to corroborate the data that would point to success, as the organic traffic versus your projection alone isn’t reliable enough to be confident in your results. Unable to scale the results There are many factors that go into your search engine rankings that are out of your hands. These lead to a robust number of outside variables that can impact your test results and lead to false positives, or false negatives. This hurts your ability to learn from the test: was it our variation’s template or another outside factor that led to the results? Unfortunately, with Google and other search engines, there’s never a definitive way to answer that question. Without validation and understanding that it was the exact changes you made that led to the results, you won’t be able to scale the winning concept to other channels or parts of the site. Although, if you are focused more on individual outcomes and not learnings, then this might not be as much of a risk for you. When to run an SEO split-test Uncertainty around keyword or query performance If your series of pages for a particular category have a wide variety of keywords/queries that users search for when looking for that topic, you can safely engage in a meta title or meta description SEO split-test. From a conversion rate perspective, having a more relevant keyword in relation to a user’s intent will generally lead to higher engagement. Although, as mentioned, most of your tests won’t be winners. For example, we have a client in the tire retail industry who shows up in the SERPs for all kinds of “tire” queries. This includes things like winter tires, seasonal tires, performance tires, etc. We hypothesized that including the more specific phrase “winter” tires instead of “tires” in our meta titles during the winter months would lead to a higher CTR and more organic traffic from the SERPs. While our results ended up being inconclusive, we learned that changing this meta title did not hurt organic traffic or CTR, which gives us a prime opportunity for a follow-up test. You can also utilize this tactic to test out a higher-volume keyword in your metadata. But this approach is also

By 2027, the live video market is expected to surpass $184 billion. And brands are taking notice. By the end of 2018, marketers were using live video as part of their social media strategy. Since then, this number has likely grown as brands continue to use a number of online platforms to stream virtual events, Q&As, and other content that their audiences will value. Although brands are jumping on the live video bandwagon, you might still wonder if live video is really worth investing in. After all, creating any video costs your company time and money. Additionally, measuring the ROI of a live video can be tricky. Before you decide to implement live video planning and production into your strategy, you’ll need to learn more about this content’s consumers, how often they watch this content, and which platforms they primarily use to stream it. Learning about your prospective audience’s live video behaviors will allow you to consider a strategy that offers them valuable content while meeting them on the platforms they’re already on. To give you insight on how often and where general internet users watch live video, I conducted a survey of more than 400 people using Lucid software. In the survey, I asked two questions: “How often do you watch live videos?” and “Where do you watch live video most often?” How Often Consumers Watch Live When I asked consumers how often they were watching live video, I didn’t expect a large percentage to say they were consuming it more than once or twice weekly. As a marketer and social media user, I was expecting that only a few people would regularly stop everything and devote time to watching streams on fast-paced online platforms. However, when I looked at the results, I was surprised by how frequently consumers were actually watching live videos. According to the data, 57% of those surveyed watch live video at least three times per week, while only seven percent said they never watch live video. Data Source While the result above is fascinating to think about, you should keep in mind that this is just a survey of one small group of consumers rather than a representation of the global internet user population. Additionally, just because our pool of consumers regularly watches live content, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re watching branded content. Although you should take this result with a grain of salt, the data above, combined with mounting research that shows how live video is growing, signifies that this format might be more than just a trend. . Although you should consider your budget, audience, and the time involved in a live video strategy before your create or plan content, this result indicates that you might want to keep this tactic on your radar. Where Consumers Watch Live Video Now that you know live video is capable of generating solid viewership, you might be wondering where the best place to stream your first video actually is. You’ll want to pick a platform with a high user base, but you’ll also want to make sure that the site you choose has an audience that aligns with the audience you want to engage with.. When you start by picking the best platform for your brand and audience, you can learn what it takes to be engaging on this site, and adapt your content from there. But, simply choosing a platform can be easier said than done. At the moment, almost all of the top social media platforms — including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and now even TikTok — have live streaming features. Additionally, emerging platforms like Twitch.tv have gained notoriety for primarily hosting live content. To help you identify a few platforms worth looking into, I asked the same Lucid participants. “Where do you watch live videos most often?” While the results about how often consumers watched live video surprised me, I wasn’t as shocked when I discovered where they were watching their content. The platforms with the biggest audiences, and the most mature live streaming tools, took the lead. These platforms were YouTube (48%), Facebook (20%), and Instagram (13%). Data Source One thing that did surprise me was that fewer people were viewing live videos on Twitter. Although the platform isn’t primarily known for live streaming, Twitter’s company was one of the first to invest in it with the 2015 acquisition of Periscope. Although some platforms were less popular than others in this poll, you shouldn’t necessarily rule them out. For example, if your most engaged audience is already on Twitter, or your followers love your B2B content on LinkedIn, you could consider testing those platforms first since you might already have a great sense of what those audiences will engage with. Or, if you’re selling a B2C product, you might want to focus on the bigger, broader networks like Facebook or YouTube since they have a large range of audience demographics. As you plan your next live video event, here’s a look at what other brands are doing on popular live video platforms. The Top 3 Platforms Consumers Use to Stream Live Video YouTube As the world’s second-largest search engine, YouTube’s more than 2 billion-person user base is incredibly broad. This means that almost anyone will log on to YouTube and search its content for a number of different reasons. Aside from being one of the oldest and biggest online platforms out there, YouTube’s also offered a live stream feature, called YouTube Live, since 2011. YouTube Live allows users to broadcast live content to viewers. With this live video feature, you can share unfiltered moments, as well as allow the audience to participate with real-time comments and reactions. Live videos on YouTube are recorded, appear on profiles and feeds like any other video upload, and can be watched even after the stream has ended. Below is a great example of a live video launched by Adobe as part of its Sketch Party series. During each Sketch Party stream, Adobe

It’s a defining human impulse — the desire to quantify the world around us. And given the pending 2020 U.S. Census, it seems a fitting time to contribute. Recently, my team did just that: Like our astronomic ancestors under ancient skies, we looked outward and began to count. What did we count? Every marketing agency in America. Sort of. Truth be told, it would be foolish to declare an exact tally. Our source was online listings, so there’s plenty of margin for error. Some agencies get gobbled up by competitors two weeks after you count them. Others shutter in the real world but endure online. And some never existed; they were always empty shells, built by hustlers with an UpWork account, pronouncing their “team” ready for your next big project. What I can say is this: America is home to at least several thousand marketing agencies. We trawled 6,000 listings, and analyzed 600 websites and LinkedIn company profiles, to cover as many disciplines as possible. Those include: Advertising Branding Content Marketing Design PR SEO/SEM Social Media Web Design Web and App Development We gathered a number of measurements, too, including: Agency size Agency age Agencies per capita Top disciplines Hourly rates Gender distribution in leadership Homepage hero images Company names Company taglines You’re encouraged to read the full report. Below, I’ll share our four key takeaways from the state of marketing agencies in America in 2020. I encourage leaders and contributors alike: sit back, take a breath, and think big thoughts about your trajectory in the agency universe. 1. Preserve What’s Special as You Grow Our analysis found 77% of agencies have 10 to 49 employees, and 18% of agencies have 50 to 249 employees. I wonder how many in the smaller range wish they could get to the next level, and how many big agencies long to be small again? Like rock bands, do agencies graduate to playing arenas, only to find themselves slumped over a shrimp buffet backstage, longing for their leaner, grimier club days? It raises the fundamental question: What do we lose as we grow? Small agencies should anticipate the challenge and make a vocal commitment to certain values that can be threatened when scaling. Big agencies should take stock. What’s been sacrificed — agility, focus, community? Pick something that once defined you, that you want back. Make it a 2020 goal. 2. Anticipate Lifespan and Legacy On average, a dog will live 10 to 13 years. As for a marketing agency? Not much longer. In America, 61% of marketing agencies are between five and 19 years old, after which the population drops off significantly. Why is that? Think about what influences an agency’s lifespan. How much is external versus internal? Are agencies barely outliving dogs because markets and technology tend to evolve beyond their original mastery? Or because 20 years roughly aligns with the sweet spot of a human career and visionary founders struggle to make their businesses outlive them? In either case, there’s lots to anticipate and act on at various points in the lifespan of an agency. Be mindful of where the heart is in your agency — its center of energy. If it comes from a single charismatic founder, beware. The heartbeat of an organization should be sustained by many people. Take an unflinching look at the evolution of markets and technology around you, since the beginning. Just because you mastered something that was new five years ago doesn’t mean you’re positioned to master what’s around the corner. A long life depends on lots of planning (and a little luck). 3. Don’t Just Hire Women — Empower Them to Lead This topic is a monster, and certainly deserving of much more attention than I’ll give it here. But I’d like to share a candid note about how our agency was founded, and what it means for gender equality in agency leadership. The founders of Digital Third Coast are both men. They worked together at an early iteration of a digital marketing agency, early in their careers. They left that agency and ventured out to start their own business. For the purposes of our analysis, we classified our agency as having “all men” in leadership. In this case, the highest identifiable tier of leadership is “owner”, and there are two owners, both men. Our owners are conscientious, fair, and progressive. They value contributions of women as much as men, they hire women regularly, and they give women opportunities to lead in our organization. But none of that changes where they started. When they were at their previous agency, they looked around and found each other, among other men. The numbers are abysmal in the agency world, as they are in so many other sectors of business. But female leaders don’t materialize out of thin air, and we won’t reach a state of equality through promotions alone. If we flipped a switch and suddenly every marketing agency in the country with 250+ employees had all-female C-suites, these numbers would barely budge. This is a small business problem, not a corporate problem. We need an industry, economy, and society where young women feel empowered tostart their own businesses, just as our owners once did. A challenge for agency leaders: right this minute, are there women in your organization who are working and growing with other women, in substantive ways, who may one day feel empowered to venture out on their own? There should be. 4. Make an Authentic First Impression On a (slightly) lighter note — can we end the scourge of stock model photography? Please. In a world defined and dominated by user-generated content and the unprecedented intimacy and access of social media, agencies should not be representing themselves with sterile stock imagery. The homepage hero image is an enormous opportunity. Marketing agencies in America do various things with it. Most show people, objects, or places. You might see a light bulb, a group of people standing around a table, or a city