How the Modern Marketing Manifesto Can Transform Your Agency

In this episode of Agency Journey, Gray interviews Ryan Ruud from Lake One Digital about starting his agency, running a remote team, and his Modern Marketing Manifesto.

Ryan initially worked as a DJ and journalist before his love of technology and storytelling merged, and he went tint marketing.

After being a marketing employee and working with a financial services business, he leaped and began his agency.

Here are the main takeaways from the interview:

Build Around Your Lifestyle 

Lake One, Minnesota, is where Ryan likes to spend his free time. To do what he loves to do, he decided to build his agency to be completely remote, allowing him and his team to enjoy more freedom during the day.

This is a valuable lesson for many agency owners, especially new ones. Determine what the lifestyle is that you’re trying to create for you and your family.

The answer to this question, though it may not seem like it, will significantly impact the agency you build and the direction you want to move towards in your agency vision.

Be realistic about what you want to. Do you want money and fame, or do you just want its byproducts like freedom or recognition?

Using Your Sales Conversation to Improve Your Marketing

One of the biggest issues that Ryan and his team wrestled with when creating their new website was the services page.

To answer what to include, Ryan reflected on all the sales conversations he had been having with his clients and ones he had closed. He thought about the terminology they were using and how they explained the pain points they were looking for him to solve for them.

This is how he based the copy on his website. Listening to clients and how they are speaking about their issues.

This is valuable advice for many agency owners. Too often, we can talk about SEO, Inbound Marketing, Funnels, etc., but the prospect doesn’t see the problem in those terms. It’s more likely to confuse them, or they may have a bias attached to a specific term already based on something they’ve heard or a positive or negative experience they had with that tactic in the past.

By framing the conversation based on the solution they are expressing they’re looking for, you’re quickly entering the conversation currently going on in the prospect’s mind.

The Modern Marketing Manifesto 

After seeing the amount of confusion and chaos in marketing and explaining it to other marketers and clients, he formed the Modern Marketing Manifesto, which serves as a guideline for how the modern marketer should work.

1. Let Data Be Your Guide

Data should be how decisions are made, not on whims. If you’re going to improve the client’s numbers, you need to be guided by the numbers, interpret what they’re saying, and taking marketing actions based on these insights.

2. Create Insanely Great Experiences

With the amount of competition in marketing right now and the amount of money competing for people’s attention, you need to make sure that the interaction individuals have with your business is remarkable. It needs to be an experience that leaves a positive impression and keeps them coming back for more.

3. Be Kind

Treat your customers and teams with respect. You don’t want to invade their privacy, misuse their information, be condescending, or anything else. You want everyone involved with your marketing, whether it end useor your clients, to have a positive experience and feel valued and respected.

4. Fail Up

Not everything a marketing agency does is a home run hit despite how marketing blogs may seem. However, with each failure, an agency needs to view it as a learning experience to improve their processes and apply what they learned in the future to improve results better. There is no silver bullet in marketing, which is why it’s essential to have built up trust and established honest communication so that everyone is OK with lacking results. Of course, this only works as long as insights are gained and applied to make marketing efforts work better in the future.

If you want to connect with Ryan Ruud, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.