Bitcoin, index funds, meme stocks, and muni bonds are all amazing things to have in your portfolio, but their impact is completely determined by factors that are external to your control.

It doesn't matter how quickly or well you can push the buy button on Robinhood, The value of whatever asset you buy is determined by the financial markets. As an Agency owner, however, I want you to create a fully different idea of the word portfolio because the assets that you create for your agency are almost infinitely monetizable. The only limitation on them is how well you adapt them to the current market conditions, and that's all in your control.

My definition is something that builds trust, value, and insight, because in this world of return on understanding, those are the currency of the realm. An agency asset is a tool that helps you accomplish your goals.

Here are some of the things that I think are assets that you ought to be building:

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We live in an extraordinary age of information. Every marketing tactic, every data gathering mechanism, and all forms of content creation and repurposing are available at the other end of a YouTube search or the delicate haptic of you pressing a button to send an AI chat.

You don't have to create unique information. Think of your job as creating context for information. If a marketer really, really wants to know how to best optimize their Google Shopping campaigns, there is practically an infinite amount of “how-to-content” that they can jump into and learn all the operational tactics to increase their performance.

So why should you create an asset around Google Shopping campaign optimization? It's simple - knowing how to do something doesn't necessarily help you understand what to do in which situation. Conversely, knowing what to do doesn't necessarily tell you how to do it. As in Agency, you have both sides of the equation and have experience layering it across multiple different marketer scenarios, so you can provide specific context.

Way back in AIC #103 - What Do Marketers Want From Agencies - Vineet Mehra, CMO of Chime (which is a terrific bank - 2 of my older kids have accounts there - great tech & service) said that he wants agencies to be interpreters of culture, not campaign launchers.

Basically, what he said is, "I know what to do. I need you to provide the context to help me do it." Context is what makes marketing relevant to the audience - and your skill at providing context helps improve your client's marketing efforts, but moreover, it becomes a needle mover for your content. Your ability to contextualize your experience to the specific needs of the client gives you the perfect advantage point to create compelling content that is contextually appropriate and that is an asset to your agency.

OK, I hear you, but let's really think about what content means in terms of creating assets that drive your agency ahead. Content assets are nothing more than stories:

All you have to do is tell stories…and in every aspect, storytelling is an innately human activity. It is how we share information. It is how we share emotion. It is how we share our separate lives.

You know how to do this.

Now I am going to give you permission to do it by providing context about how not difficult as you might think content creation is…

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I want you to commit to owning at least 1 of these Agency Assets (and if it's taking you more than 8 hours a quarter, you are doing it wrong…)

I spend a lot of time on my newsletters, but it's because I love doing them and I love the process of thinking and writing - that's why I send out two a week. But you could send out a newsletter once a month or twice a month. Here's the quick and dirty way to do it:

Lots of agencies don't put together case studies because they are hard. They don't know what to say, or they aren’t sure they can claim all the results, maybe the results aren't good enough…

BS - you can build a case study in 7 minutes. (And if you are feeling lazy - check out Case Study Lab - and Case Study Lab Pro is on its way - more formats, more customization & more in-depth interviews to get the best out of you).

It doesn’t take much to show off your VVV, tell all your great stories and help your team tell all of their great stories, too. I know that social content can be especially vexing for people because it “takes too much time”, but check out Demand Bird - it's a sweet social repurposing tool that can take your voice, a call, a blog post, whatever, and repurpose it appropriately in something that resembles your voice across multiple social channels. They have a team version that allows other people on your team to repurpose what you have said. This is a cool, great application.

But the benefits that you get from this are a growing evidentiary corpus of your insight, expertise, authority, and vibes, which are all of the things that clients need to be able to say, "Yes, you are a finalist."

This is probably the hardest of all content channels to create for…but if you ever crack the code, it yields enormous results. TBH, I've never really cracked the code (but check out my channel anyway…), but so many of my clients, so many of my colleagues, and so many of the authorities in the marketing space are leveraging video as their hub of content. If you think this fits, you should be creating maybe two to three 15- to 30-minute videos every month and then splitting them up into short, shareable video clips that drive social visibility and authority to your YouTube channel. But technology has made video creation easier than ever - tools like Descript make it easy to import a talking head recording from Zoom, edit it, make it look pretty, export it to multiple sizes, and create clips out of it

There is a some real setup here, but creating a podcast is a low-effort, high-return kind of endeavor. There are about a million tutorials out there that will teach you how to create a podcast where you invite people from your target market onto the podcast, talk to them, create a relationship, and then maybe you do business with them at some point. And that is a great way to move forward, but the real benefit of creating a podcast is that you are able to take a great and lively conversation and then repurpose that into social posts, video clips, long-form video, blog posts, email newsletters and every other gosh darn format that you can imagine. Tools like Descript or Riverside make video/audio capture easy, and tools like Beehiiv, Riverside & Lybsyn make podcast distribution a snap.

This is even easier than spinning up a podcast yourself! Just reaching out to podcasts and suggesting that you've got something interesting to talk about that might be awesome for their listenership is a fantastic way to create real opportunity. You can do it yourself, or you can work with a platform like PodPitch. An example of a podcast guest slot turning into real content is this - I was a guest on Adam O’Leary’s podcast, and I turned that into a content asset that has already driven leads for me.

It's pretty popular to shit on blogs these days, and it's true that they don’t drive visibility as they once did. But our AI overlords have to cite some sources, so I don’t see how it hurts. But as a sales tool, a well-thought-out, authoritative, articulate blog post on a relevant topic is a fantastic way to help share your thinking, your style, your results, your insight.

And with a little emphasis and thinking, my agency growth blog has been driving a significant number of AI-referred traffic. I'm quite sure that I do not have any magic around AEO/GEO, but I can tell you that it's working.

you've worked way too hard to let your experience, your expertise, your insight, your authority, and your talent go to waste by not taking the time to invest in these assets that generate visibility, authority, and clarity for you.

While your team is still in standup, the other growth lead already got the alert. Viktor is an AI employee that lives in Slack. It watches your Meta and TikTok spend overnight, flags the underperformer by 7am, and drafts the new brief before your first meeting.

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