We are all in the services business. You don't agree? Then think about all the people you need to please directly or indirectly - clients, potential clients, co-workers, bosses and subordinates.

This is most prevalent in professional services companies, especially agencies because this is what they sell – their knowledge and expertise in a particular service area rather than a product, e.g. marketing strategy, PR and digital comms management and implementation, website build, SEO optimization etc. All things that at first sight are intangible but extremely important to a client.

I’ve worked in five different agencies across Germany and the UK and I know firsthand how difficult clients can be. Even now on the other side where I consult agencies on how to grow their businesses with HubSpot and inbound marketing, I still face demanding and energy and time-consuming client situations all the time.

Learning how to properly handle those comes with experience because you are dealing with real people and everyone is different. The situation or issue might be the same, but the people you are working with have different characters, understandings, behavior and expectations. And they don’t care that you have other clients, they don’t even think about you or your situation, they want to feel special and have their issue solved now. As I always say, the client is king, right?

I was on holidays last week and I actually managed to not open my email, read any blogs or articles or even write. I completely switched off. And I'm proud of myself for doing so for the very first time in my life.

Now I'm refreshed and ready to get back to it with full energy. And so I spent a few hours on Sunday afternoon catching up on all my reading from the past two weeks. Almost 500 articles were waiting for me in my feedly but yet again, sitting on my sofa with my coffee and reading helped me learn quite a few new things that I thought I need to share with you too.

Below you'll find 17 must-read pieces about digital, inbound marketing, public relations, agency world and management and leadership I recommend for you to go over this week.

17 Articles and Blog Post to Read Now:

Digital

#1: 26 Disruptive Tech Trends for 2016 – 2018

Brian Solis again gives us a sneak peek into the future. Brands, brace yourself and start adjusting and adapting again and never stop if you want to stay relevant!

PR agencies (and agencies in general) are notoriously known for not having the time to invest in their own PR or marketing activities but make their living out of advising and implementing such for clients.

If you are an agency owner or work in an agency, let me ask you some questions:

1. Do you blog?
2. Do you use social media?
3. Do you have a landing page on your site?
4. How much time do you invest in doing PR for your own agency?

Now, let me take a guess about your answers:

1. Hmm when we have time.
2. Yes, but mainly just to curate or share our own stuff.
3. No, no time for that and what’s the point.
4. We just don’t have time because we are swamped with client work.

You might be thinking, “Why do I even need any of that? We have our clients, our team is busy, we can’t invest time and money into something that won’t bring us much result.”

Yep, sure. For now you do. Do you think about the future, though?

Far too often I hear “We just didn’t have time to blog this month, there’s just so much going on with our clients.” 

This is the number 1 challenge for agencies –> we don’t have time for our own PR and marketing.

But that’s just wrong.

I’m sure you’ve heard about PR, but how about inbound? Do you know what it is?

Don’t worry if you don’t because after reading this post you will, and you will also know how inbound and PR fit together quite nicely.

Let’s start with PR.  

As per definition, public relations is the communications process concerned with building relationships between an organisation and its publics.

Going back to a few decades ago, PR was mainly concerned with media relations, events, reputation and crisis management, and investor relations. In fact, for a very long time public relations and media relations were considered synonymous (some still think so).  

PR is not just media relations

But PR now is not and shouldn’t be just media relations. Because today, the arsenal of PR activities has increased enormously. Media relations can simply be one of those activities.

I spent a good three years working in PR and digital agencies across Germany and the UK. Now I’m on the other side – as a Channel Consultant at HubSpot my role is to help our partner agencies grow their businesses.

That not only includes teaching them the inbound marketing methodology and how they can use our software for their own marketing, but also offering them strategic advice on how to choose the right market, develop and deliver better services, recognise areas for growth, make the right team decisions, establish expertise and more. So really - business consulting.

Just a few months ago I thought agency life was hard (and it is, don’t get me wrong), but now I’m seeing that running an agency isn’t easy either.

Especially when you have to compete with thousands of other similar firms out there.

From what I’ve experienced so far, the biggest challenge agencies face is developing a unique positioning that allows them to truly stand out and be seen as an expert, with clients chasing them for their knowledge and capabilities, rather than the agencies having to pitch all the time for new business.