Why Marketing Agencies Need Your Advice (and How to Reach Them)

Practical marketing strategies, backed by insights from our proprietary database of over 80,000 business owners, to help you refine your message, target the right audience, and build a more successful advisory practice.

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Why Marketing Agencies Need Your Advice (and How to Reach Them)

As an advisor marketing your services to small business owners, you know just how diverse that audience can be. To cut through the noise, focus is key. The more you can segment this broad market into well-defined groups, the easier it is to craft messages that land and start conversations that convert.

One of the most compelling segments to focus on is marketing agency owners.

These founders are confident, creative, and growth-focused. But like many entrepreneurs, they can fall into familiar traps.

As marketing legend Seth Godin famously said, “Everyone is not your customer.” It’s advice that agency owners often give their clients, but don’t always apply to their own business. In the pursuit of growth, they stretch too thin, customize for every client, chase trends, and stay deeply involved in delivery.

The result? These businesses grow fast, but they’re tough to expand beyond the owner, and that makes them hard to sell.

That’s why this month’s edition of Advisor Marketing News is dedicated to marketing agency owners: what drives them, where they struggle, and how to win their trust before the exit conversation begins. More than 80,000 business owners have completed the Value Builder Score Report, giving us a proprietary window into how founders think about their business and the road to a successful exit. See how the Value Builder Score Report can support your advisory practice.

📅 Join us for a webinar on May 22nd at noon ET to explore the opportunity with marketing agency owners, hosted by John Warrillow, best-selling author of Built to Sell, The Automatic Customer, and The Art of Selling Your Business. John will reveal what these owners need, what they fear about exiting their business, and how to position yourself as the advisor they’ll turn to first.

Save Your Spot

Marketing Agency Owners: A High-Growth Opportunity for Advisors

According to IBISWorld, in the U.S., there are an estimated 100,000 marketing and advertising agencies, spanning everything from boutique creative studios to full-service shops. As the chart below shows, based on data collected from owners who completed the Value Builder Score Report, nearly half of marketing agency owners expect revenue to grow by more than 20% in the next 12 months — a pace that significantly outperforms other industries. For advisors, that kind of growth signals urgency — these owners are investing now and looking for ways to keep it going.

Profit margins are also strong, with 40% reporting margins above 20%, indicating that they have the resources to afford your services and implement your recommendations.

And they’re going to need that help, because nearly two-thirds plan to sell their business to a third-party acquirer.

On the surface, they appear to be ideal, well-positioned clients for you, but significant challenges are keeping marketing agency owners awake at night.

Tap Into Their Pain to Get Their Attention

To connect with marketing agency owners, you need to understand their key pain points. Artificial intelligence is shaking the foundation of the agency model. On the one hand, it helps agencies deliver work faster and more efficiently. On the other hand, it leads clients to question whether they need an agency at all. That tension is creating real urgency, making some agency owners wonder if now is the right time to exit.

Add to that the structural challenges most agencies face, and the pressure only builds. The data in the chart below reveals that marketing agencies are 42% more likely to be fully owner-dependent than the average business. That level of personal involvement might drive short-term results, but it makes the business difficult to grow in the long term, and even harder to sell.

Agency owners also struggle with an overreliance on customization — 44% of agency owners say they deliver basic offerings with a lot of custom work, making them much more likely than the average owner to operate without a repeatable model.

Strong client relationships are great, but the next step is turning those relationships into structured, repeatable offerings. That’s what enhances transferable value and makes the business more appealing to acquirers.

This isn’t theory — it’s already happening in real agencies. Salted Stone, a global marketing agency, shifted from bespoke consulting to fixed-scope project engagements with transparent pricing and timelines, making their work easier to deliver and repeat. WebFX, one of the fastest-growing agencies in the U.S., built its momentum around clearly defined service bundles for SEO (search engine optimization — helping clients rank higher in search results), content, and paid media. And Digital Shift, a Canadian boutique agency, transformed local SEO into a subscription-based model, generating predictable revenue and streamlining operations. Each one shows how productizing services doesn’t mean giving up creativity, it means building something acquirers can actually buy.

If you can speak to these concerns confidently, you’ll get an agency owner’s attention and earn their trust.

The Best Way to Connect with Marketing Agency Owners

If you want to reach these owners, start where they already are — online.

These owners aren’t just digitally literate, they’re digitally active. According to Value Builder data, 38% of agency owners have built audiences of up to 10,000 contacts, compared to just 25% of the broader business population. Only 9% report having no digital list at all, less than half the rate of owners in other industries.

That’s a striking difference and a clear signal that agency owners count on digital communication to get their information.

Consider the following:

🌐 LinkedIn
Connect with founders running agencies in the $1–10M range. Don’t pitch — interact with their posts and share your own thought-starters, such as polls tied to real pain points like pricing pressure, owner burnout, or AI disruption. It builds relevance fast.

📧 Email
Skip the templates and send a short, thoughtful insight — something grounded in data or a pattern you’ve seen. For example: “Looking at data from 33,000 agency owners, the ones getting acquisition offers weren’t always the biggest, they were the ones who packaged their services and pulled themselves out of delivery. Let me know if this sounds familiar. Happy to share what else we’re seeing.” It’s specific, relevant, and opens the door to a real conversation.

💬 In The Wild
Show up in communities like Bureau of Digital or Slack groups tied to tools that agency owners use, such as HubSpot. These are spaces where operational pain points are discussed in real-time. A single thoughtful comment in the right thread can have a greater impact than a month of ads.

Recognizing their business challenges is one thing. Turning that insight into meaningful engagement is where the opportunity lies. As the chart below shows, 4 in 10 agency owners say they’re looking for an advisor with a record of helping fast-growth companies, so being able to speak to how you help companies grow is critical.

As that same chart shows, you don’t want to lose sight of the fact that industry expertise still carries the most weight. Over half of marketing agency owners want to work with someone who understands their world and the pressure to stay current with their clients.

That industry fluency builds credibility. The bestselling book Built to Sell is already familiar to many agency owners — the protagonist runs an agency, and the story reflects their reality. For advisors, referencing the book can be a natural, low-pressure way to start a conversation and signal you understand the road they’re on.

Agency owners are growing their business fast, but that growth comes with pressure. They’re juggling custom work, staying relevant in an AI-driven world, and trying to avoid burnout. They need support from someone who understands the business they’re in.

Focus your marketing on growth, show you understand their world, and meet them online, where they already are. That’s how you get in the conversation.

🖥️ Learn More at Our Webinar

Join us on May 22nd at noon ET for a live webinar focused on the opportunity with marketing agency owners. Hosted by John Warrillow, best-selling author of Built to Sell, The Automatic Customer, and The Art of Selling Your Business, we’ll dig into what’s driving these founders, what’s holding them back from exiting, and how you can become the advisor they trust most when the time comes.

Save Your Spot

🛠️ New Product Updates: We recently released three new product features available to all Value Builder advisors to help improve your marketing to business owners:

• Most Active Contacts (MACs): Instantly identify who’s engaging with your content, based on activity from the past 30 days.

• Inbox Optimizer: Automatically pause emails to unengaged contacts to improve deliverability.

• Advanced Bot Filtering: Get more accurate metrics by filtering out bot-generated clicks and opens.

📖 Did you know, research from business owners reveals that getting an owner to open up about their next chapter unlocks a hidden wallet worth 60% more in terms of what they’re willing to spend on external advice? Check out the data and learn how to start The Endgame Conversation® with this free eBook.

💻 Curious to learn more about how Value Builder helps advisors start more strategic conversations with business owners? Book a demo today.

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This Issue's Contributors

Jason Reilly, Vice President of Marketing; Michael Sarkis, Director of Advisor Marketing; Deanne Kong Ting, Director of Customer Success; and Jen Chou, Senior Graphic Designer.