In today’s episode, I am talking with Mike Allton, Head of Strategic Partnerships at AgoraPulse. Wait until you hear his insights on how social media will be impacted in the future. Mike and I have been talking about doing this podcast for several months. Well, we made it happen and it is doozy.

Takeaways From This Episode:

• Agency Accelerator Podcast - Podcast With a Targeted Audience - and That is You.
• Agency Accelerator Programs - Designed to Accelerate Agencies.
• How are Things Shifting for Social Media and How Does That Affect Agencies.
• AgoraPulse Embracing the Community.
  
• Workaction, Quality of Life and the Need for Personalization.
• The Meat of What AgoraPulse Does Specifically for Agencies.
• Huge Opportunities for Agencies From Different Perspectives.

Agency Accelerator Podcast - Podcast with a Targeted Audience and that is you

Agency Accelerator Programs - designed to accelerator agencies

Whether you are an individual or a small team, someone looking to take their agency to a next level, or whether it is higher profits, bigger teams, better clients, different industries, whatever the case might be - AgoraPulse has what you need. Tune in to see what AgoraPulse has for you and hear a few of the talents he has coming up next year.

AlgoraPulse embracing the community

AgoraPulse has set up a board designed by agency owners for agency owners.  They invited people who have been in the industry and have actually been in the trenches for many years to help with meeting the goals of Agency owners. 

I am thrilled to be a part of this board and I am excited to see what this board will accomplish. Seeing the amount of time and energy AgoraPulse has spent truly working with small businesses and agencies has been very inspiring and I know they will inspire you as well. By the way, we are meeting in Paris, France this year. Talk about taking things to the next level!! I will keep you posted.

If you are a student of mine you know I like to ask the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up”. I asked this question for multiple reasons. I like to dig deep to see what your goals are and So many times, my students can’t answer that question because they haven't really thought about it. One positive thing that came out of Covid is it made people dig a little deeper and ask themselves the hard questions. 

Now, people are seeing that their quality of life is more important than working all the time.

workaction, Quality of Life and the need for Personalization 

I'm actually putting together a product that leans into the quality of life, a Workacation to get you where you want to be. It is going to be about quality of life, how to run an agency with a high level of quality of life and it also includes vacations and all that fun stuff in their space, pretty kind of cool product. We're excited about it. 

The meat of what AgoraPulse does specifically for agencies 

Interestingly enough, what we're seeing is an even greater demand than ever for personalization. What that means is not just being able to insert someone's name automatically in the top of a mail merge email. Now, it's an actual person talking to another actual person on behalf of a brand or business. People are going to social media more than ever for customer support, sales, referrals, demos, information for questions, commentary, or whatever the case might be and that sets up the challenge for agencies.

How does an agency scale the personalization for their business clients? Agencies need to have a vision and see that things are changing. See that more and more business deals are happening in the DMS instead of on the Facebook page posts, right? How do we leverage that? And how do we make our clients successful in the DMS so that their competition isn't?

Mike helps with these questions and shows how AgoraPulse has a way of automating with the personal touch needed. Mike and I talk about live events compared to virtual events. How are things changing? Do we still need live events? The answer is YES! 

There are huge opportunities for agencies from different perspectives. Learn how to use live and virtual events to your benefit. Tune in to hear some of these ideas and how we think things are looking in the near future.

huge opportunities for agencies from different perspectives 

Agencies themselves can benefit from virtual events of all different kinds.  Mike just wrote a book about the different benefits and how there are just as many opportunities for the agency now. Mike talks about working with agencies and their clients. That puts on your own virtual events  to help recruit potential clients prospects. He talks about what he does at AgoraPulse, regarding putting on virtual events, to reach multiple communities and help them attract prospects. It's a very simple, transactional, kind of an approach that at the end of the day is a for profit business. There's so much potential for agencies from livestreams, to summits and  to a number of platforms for full virtual events and conferences. All of this is available to agencies and small businesses.

There are many people today who are happy that events move to a virtual space, because they don't like to travel. They don't like to be among 1000s of other people in real time, they would much prefer to sit where they're sitting right now and consume the content on a virtual stage.  It's more convenient for them and more cost effective which means it's a channel that businesses can leverage. Then there is a whole other group of people who love to travel, love to meet people in person. They need to mingle in the hallways and go to dinner to discuss business. We need both and Mike talks about a hybrid concept that is going to be the future for sure. It is for the people who can not travel and for those who need to travel. Like I mentioned earlier, personalization is on the rise. We need to be on top of both aspects of events. We need to be prepared to fill in the gap for the upstarts, or the people who are just super busy, that can't afford to hop on a plane and go out there or can't afford to give up the time and for those who truly need to shake hands. The personal approach is never going away and we need to embrace it again along with virtual. AgoraPulse has a way to do both.

Shameless Plug 

True transparency, I used this platform for a while now. I absolutely love it. If you're listening to this podcast, you know that I do not have a referral partner that I refer to people, without me personally using the platform and or knowing the owners who built the effing platform or service. So with that being said, please go to  Partners - Marketing Agency Coach and check out all my partners and definitely check out AgoraPulse. 

To close out the podcast, Mike gives his plug for AgoraPulse and explains exactly what they do and how they are geared towards helping Agencies.

They are a social media management dashboard designed and built for agencies to help you manage multiple clients who have multiple profiles, each multiple users, all kinds of different levels of permission so that you can create content in a private draft experience, share it with clients for approval, get their feedback or approval, go and publish it, handle all that and then create beautiful reports that show them exactly how your work is paying off for them. They truly make your life so much easier. I have used other social media management systems and nothing compares to AgoraPulse.