Paul Roetzer - The Marketing Agency Blueprint: The Handbook for Building Hybrid PR, SEO, Content, Advertising, and Web Firms

Contents

Praise for The Marketing Agency Blueprint

When I was a Marketing VP, I paid a PR agency, an ad agency, and a digital agency. Each one focused on building long-term campaigns that targeted my company's prospects and interrupted them to pay attention to a message. I would not hire those agencies today. In the always-on 24/7 world of the web, buyers use search engines and social media to look for products themselves and at their convenience. At the same time, the lines between PR and marketing have blurred to be unrecognizable. It's time for a new type of agency, one built to take advantage of the communications revolution, one that helps companies get in front of buyers when they are ready and eager to engage. In his engaging Marketing Agency Blueprint , Paul Roetzer shows you how to transform your firm to thrive in the real-time world we live in today.

David Meerman Scott ,
Bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR

It's about time. There have been countless websites, books, and events for marketers to adapt to the current marketing revolution, but never one for agencies and service providers. Well, this is it. The Marketing Agency Blueprint is a must-read for any group or individual providing marketing services to clients.

Joe Pulizzi,
Founder, Content Marketing Institute

Paul Roetzer's The Marketing Agency Blueprint paints a clear picture for the inevitable transformation of twenty-first century marketers, and then lays out a succinct roadmap for others to follow. If your goal is not just to survive, but to thrive and gain a competitive advantage in the midst of new media realities, this may just become your new marketing bible.

Dustin S. Klein,
Publisher and executive editor,
Smart Business Magazines & Events;
Coauthor/contributing editor,
The Benevolent Dictator

I've worked with Paul for more than 10 years, and am continually impressed with his vision and drive. My faith in him and his agency led me to take a risk and evolve my marketing efforts. I am an old-school numbers guy, and the proof is in the results. What Roetzer presents in The Marketing Agency Blueprint is the future of the marketing services industry.

Kenneth Paine,
CEO, Industrial Heat Sources and Hy-Tech Products

Marketing has gone through a massive transformation. This creates a significant opportunity for agencies. Millions of organizations need help in navigating these new, fast-moving waters. The Marketing Agency Blueprint is a practical, insider's guide that should be required reading for anyone building the next-generation marketing services firm.

Dharmesh Shah,
Cofounder and CTO, HubSpot

Inbound marketing ranks among the most powerful, quiet trends of the last decade. Paul's experienced this change firsthand and writes eloquently and actionably on how marketers and businesses of all stripes can earn amazing returns by investing in the channels of search, social, and content.

Rand Fishkin,
CEO, SEOmoz

Paul Roetzer is a young lion of marketing who realized early on how technology and new media make the traditional agency model as dated as an episode from Mad Men. Roetzer champions marketing as an evolving discipline where value creation is the basis of success. He sees modern marketing as a marriage of talent and analytics. The result is cost-effective delivery of great marketing that can level the playing field between large and small competitors. His ideas are proven through practical application in the marketing agency he founded. Roetzer's book is a seminal view of how marketing services can and will be delivered in the future. It is a must-read for the next generation of marketing professionalsand the customers they serve.

Gary Christy,
Brand Leader, Westfield Insurance

Copyright2012 by Paul Roetzer. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Roetzer, Paul, 1978-

The marketing agency blueprint: the handbook for building hybrid PR, SEO, content,

advertising, and web firms / Paul Roetzer.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-118-13136-7 (acid-free paper)

ISBN: 978-1-118-17688-7 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-118-17689-4 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-118-17690-0 (ebk)

1. Marketing. I. Title.

HF5415.R5665 2011

658.8dc23

2011032163

In memory of Mike and George.
And to my wife, Cheryl,
whose patience and unwavering
support have made it possible
for me to follow my dreams.

Foreword

When I started HubSpot in June 2006 with my business partner, Dharmesh Shah, our experiences with marketing agencies led us to almost entirely avoid working with them. In fact, we designed our original business model around selling our marketing software directly to end customers, and developed an internal marketing team that would not be dependent on agency assistance. Our decision to circumvent marketing agencies did not result from questioning their skills or capabilities, but rather from their failure to acknowledge the impending shifts in consumer behavior.

I felt as though many marketing agencies were, and still are, trying to cling onto the Mad Men marketing methodology. They want to sit in rich mahogany corner offices with 21-year-old scotch on ice, and brood over their grandiose and flowery advertisement campaigns. They rely too heavily on traditional outbound marketing techniques, such as television advertisements and cold calling, which allow them to safely distance themselves from the nitty-gritty operations side of marketing and direct contact with the end consumer. However, the detached Don Drapers of the marketing world cannot simply rely on creating deep and lofty brand awareness campaigns any longer.