The truth is that our world as agency owners is in constant flux. Think back to the Mad Men days when we didn't charge clients anything for creative or strategy. We lived and died off media commissions. That wasn't hundreds of years ago, that was just a few decades ago. So it's no big shock that our industry is, yet again, undergoing a transformation.

We've seen it coming for a while and for many of you, this may be something you've already been thinking about or experimenting with inside your shop.

Most agencies have been playing footsie with content. Your shop may be the exception but for most agencies, they're good at creating content in volume but we've been too focused on getting done and not the true strategy underneath. It's time for us (for both ourselves and our clients) to get serious about what thought leadership means, owning a distinct point of view/position and leveraging that point of view to generate revenue.

That's why I was excited to have Robert Rose on the podcast. Robert's most recent book that he published in September with colleague Joe Pulizzi from Content Marketing Institute is called "Killing Marketing" and it's going to really stretch your mind in terms of what is possible and what's coming next for us as agency folks.

Robert Rose is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the Content Advisory which is a consulting and advisory group of the Content Marketing Institute. As a strategist, Robert has worked with over 500 companies including global brands like Capital One, Dell, Ernst & Young, HP, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

He's the author of three books including "Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing," a book about how marketing is shifting. It was called "a treatise and a call-to-arms for marketers to lead business innovation in the 21st Century."

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• The rapid changes in the agency business and why those changes are coming more fast and furious than ever before
• Why agencies need to make a big investment if they want to survive (and why so often they just splash around in the water until it's too late)
• Using content marketing to build an audience for your clients based on their specific needs
• How to use your engaged audience to find more people like them with Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube's lookalike audiences
• Why you can't expect clients to want to work with you if you don't invest in your own marketing
• Why Robert believes that your agency blog isn't usually the best place to host your content (and where you should write instead)
• Getting back on track when you find yourself falling into the trap of creating generalist content
• Building client trust by helping them transform into something new
• Why agencies have always been good at creating stuff for clients but why strategy and measurement need to be our new norm
• How to start working with a C-Suite level person when your current client contact is not as high up
• Why a media centric agency is the best kind of agency to build today (and how to retrofit your agency to become a media centric agency)

Ways to contact Robert Rose:

• Website: contentadvisory.net
• Website: robertrose.net

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!