It’s time for marketing agencies to get bold.
As PR 20/20 CEO Paul Roetzer asked in his presentation at HubSpot’s INBOUND 2015 conference:
What if you could accelerate success in business? What if you could transform marketing performance for your clients in 30, 60 or 90 days?
This type of thinking isn’t preoccupied with improving traffic, leads or sales by an incremental percentage. It’s obsessed with moving the needle substantially in a short period of time.
This is 10X thinking—and it could change the way your agency works.
What is 10X Thinking?
The concept of 10X thinking is used frequently in Silicon Valley by transformative, high-growth companies to exponentially improve results. It’s best described in this Wired article on Google CEO Larry Page:
“Larry Page lives by the gospel of 10X. Most companies would be happy to improve a product by 10 percent. Not the CEO and cofounder of Google. The way Page sees it, a 10 percent improvement means that you’re basically doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.”
In a client services environment where marketing agencies must prove their worth more aggressively than ever, 10X thinking isn’t just ideal; it’s essential to reap the rewards in the market right now.
So how do you 10X your agency? The book Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, by billionaire tech entrepreneur and 10X thinker Peter Diamandis, offers a great place to start. Read on to discover three ways you can begin force multiplying your results today.
1. Throw Out Your Old Mindset—It’s Costing You Money and Opportunities
The old limitations, gatekeepers and barriers to entry in most markets have been largely swept away by rapid technological advancement. The playing field has dramatically flattened, but many people are still using an old playbook. Consider:
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Someone turned down by a major publisher can make millions of dollars self-publishing digitally on Amazon, like Amanda Hocking did. (She has made over $2 million publishing her own work after being rejected by traditional publishers.)
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Entire companies can be created and attract paying customers before they even build a product, thanks to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter.
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And growth marketers can hack their way to success with nothing more than a few lines of code, like Airbnb did in its early days.
For agencies to take advantage of these opportunities, agency pros and owners need to rethink what’s possible. Says Diamandis in the book:
“Right now, and for the first time ever, a passionate and committed individual has access to the technology, minds, and capital required to take on any challenge.”
2. Hijack Someone Else’s Infrastructure to 10X Your Results
You may need to scale talent, net more or better clients, develop new products, build software to enhance your services or any one of a hundred other business goals. But you don’t have to build from scratch anymore.
“Entrepreneurs no longer have to lay out scarce cash for expensive equipment, spend months to install, configure, and program that equipment, worry about what happens when they need to scale up that equipment, or worry about what happens when it breaks or becomes obsolete,” Diamandis points out.
There are more opportunities than ever for marketers to leverage social, content and automation platforms to 10X their reach and impact—without writing a line of code. New predictive lead scoring features in software like HubSpot deliver unprecedented insights without breaking the bank. And artificial intelligence platforms like IBM’s Watson are pushing the limits of what could be possible when it comes to transforming marketing performance.
You don’t need to build infrastructure for 10X results, you just need to leverage someone else’s effectively. Understanding this fact opens up untold opportunities to exponentially improve your efforts.
As master marketer Tim Ferriss says, “Look far and wide—there are worlds to conquer.”
3. Time to Stop Obsessing Over Marketing
Wait, what?
You read that right: It’s time to branch out from solely marketing-related content and education. It’s extremely important, but the future is cross-disciplinary. Those who can discover, curate, combine and apply knowledge from a variety of disciplines in new ways stand to reap the rewards the future marketing landscape will provide.
That doesn’t just mean reading more and different content (though that helps). Says Diamandis:
“Massively up the amount of novelty in your life; the research shows that new environments and experiences are often the jumping-off point for new ideas (more opportunity for pattern recognition). Most important, make creativity a value and a virtue.”
This needs to be baked into your agency at every level. During his tenure at Pixar, Steve Jobs famously designed offices with a central bathroom area so more people from different departments would run into each other.
How is your agency structured for serendipity, creativity and cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange? You may be the best in the world at your marketing specialty. But in an age of artificial intelligence and automation, you’ll increasingly create value by doing what only a human can: creating value by combining ideas from anywhere and everywhere into new, innovative offerings.
We highly recommend you read the whole book for yourself to discover how. Check out Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter Diamandis.