Video Transcript 

Hi. This is Terence from Radical Marketing.

Today I want to share with you business lessons I’ve learned from a $45 million Bangkok ad agency.

 Now, this was a pretty awesome trip to Bangkok recently that I had. And the scenes and sights and sounds in Bangkok is just amazing.

Here’s just some photos from the street, just an ordinary street in Bangkok. And one of the highlights of the
trip was just a fine dining experience, which was really an experience. Not so much for the food, but
I mean, the food was great, but, man, it was just a piece of art. Every single piece of food that came
up, the kitchen was just a piece of art. 

So anyway, the highlight of the trip from a business perspective was that I managed to talk to a guy who’s actually a friend of mine, and he actually he didn’t tell me this, but he actually owns an ad agency in Bangkok that’s worth $45 million, him and his partners.

 So he got into this ad agency a couple of years ago, and they came to him for help, to basically help them to grow before pre-covid, where they were valued at about 10 million, and now they’re worth $45 million. so it’s substantial amounts of money, and I just was really curious as to what they did. 

And here’s the thing. I’ve always known this guy. We work on some projects together in the past, but I never thought of him as someone who could give me ideas on how I could grow my agency, because his background is from a big advertising agency kind of background.

So I thought I didn’t really think that his stuff would apply to a digital marketing agency, right?

 But after talking to him, I was just really curious how he managed to do that. And I really feel like slapping myself in the face because this guy has been around all this while, and I never thought of asking him how he
grows his ad agencies, because I thought it did not apply to me. 

So the first lesson here is really just about being aware and being curious.

And it’s my mistake that I wasn’t curious enough and wasn’t aware enough to ask him, but I guess late is better than never. So here are some of the strategies he shared to me how they grew the ad agency from a value of 10 million to 45 million. And when I say 45 million, this figure is actually verified by a venture capital firm. They’ve done all their due diligence, and they want to invest in this advertising agency, and they gave the agency a $45 million valuation. 

So this is not some pie in the sky type figure that’s put out in the air. So one of the strategies that he shared with me was that they decided to write a book, a book to demonstrate various case studies and what they’ve done in the past. And here’s the thing, I’ve always been wanting to write a book for our agency and I just stopped. I got into two chapters. I wrote two chapters or three chapters. 

And I stopped because I thought that’s not that important and other things just got in the way and I thought, well, you know, we don’t really want to spend all that time writing book. So, yeah, once again, big slap in my face because I started this writing a book project like over a year ago and I just stopped.

So big slap on my face again. But again, better late than never. So writing a book, what it does is, according to my friend here, it obviously builds credibility, builds authority, and helps you to stand out from the rest of the agencies and your competitors, right?

So this is one of the key things that I’m focusing on right now to get a book done, to get my two chapters. I’ve actually done four chapters now, but it’s going to be twelve chapters. So on the way there and that’s coming and maybe you can think of applying this in your business as well. 

All right, so writing a book to build authority and to stand out from the crowd and to demonstrate what you have done in the past and how good you are. Right? So this is number one strategy.

Number two strategy they have been doing consistently is doing press releases.

  Doing press releases. And I said, look, what kind of press releases do you guys do? And he said, well we do all sorts of press releases consistently about for example, what job they want, what kind of advertising they’ve created, any awards they won, and what kind of results they’re getting for their clients and all that stuff. 

So yeah, this is one of the strategies that I’m actually implementing in my business as well in 2023 when I’m making this videos, end of 2022. But you know, one of key things we’re going to do is to do a press release every once to one to two months, just to put it out there.

And obviously there is a ton of SEO juice if you release it to the right press release outlets. And getting publicity of course would be a bonus. But just being out there and having dozens, hundreds and thousands of what you call it, news agency outlets, publishing news, it’s always a good thing to get notice and to get publicity and to build credibility.

 So this is one of the key things that I’ll be doing as well in my agency in the coming year and yeah, maybe you can take that into consideration as well for your business.

Third thing is social media presence.

 This thing we’ve been working on for a while, in past few months, we’re designing whole social media strategy just to be present in all forms of media like Podcasts, YouTube, and to kind of like utilize those kinds of videos
like the one I’m creating right now.

 We can utilize it for podcasts, obviously, and we are going to obviously have it on all sorts of social media channels from LinkedIn and repurpose shorts into different other channels like TikTok and Reels and so on. So having that congruent media strategy and we’d probably be looking at hiring someone to just manage this whole thing for us and maybe for some of our clients even.

 So, this will be one of the core strategies to just get our name out there and just build that brand, right? So that’s the third strategy that I learned from him and that they have implemented in their business.

 Hence they were able to, you know, recently he told me they got a contact from the biggest petroleum company, I think in Thailand and you know, they’re bidding for a six, you know, a job that’s worth millions of dollars, I think $6 million or somewhere around there, I can’t remember the figure. 

But it’s a massive job and that’s because they’re just doing all this brand building stuff like the books, the press releases, social media and so on and they didn’t even know where that inquiry came from. It’s just suddenly they just popped up on your Facebook page.

So that’s a pretty cool thing, right? To get a big company like that approach you out of the blue on your Facebook page. So yeah, that’s the thing.

And the fourth thing they’re doing is that they are entering awards.

So in the past two years they’ve entered a lot of awards in the ad agency space and I think they’ve won several as well. I think winning awards for us is probably not such a big thing.

 But then again, when you think about it, because our clientele is more small to medium businesses, right? Whereas if you’re targeting corporates, basically when people make decisions at a corporate
level, they want to make sure that they are hiring a reputable agency, right? 

So I think if you want to move into the big corporate sector, which may be one day we will, that’s where I think all these awards will count for a lot. And in the meantime, I was thinking about it, there’s probably no harm in
us entering some smaller competitions, winning some awards.

Ultimately that helps us to stand out from the crowd as well, right? So there’s no harm. I’m sure there’s awards in your industry itself as well that you can maybe apply and maybe win some awards and that will help you to stand out as well. All right, so that’s the other strategy that I learned from them. 

So, yeah, I think that sums it up in a nutshell about all these things that they’re doing and I really hope that you got something from it as well, some lessons from it.

And yeah, we definitely will be doing some of this in Radical Marketing ourselves and we’ll be happy to report back on what results we get from all these efforts that we’re going to produce in the coming year. Yeah, the book, is a herculean task. Obviously, it’s not my strength to write such a long thing, but yeah, I’ve done it before, so I guess it’s just really disciplined. 

And maybe for you, you could get a ghost writer to help you write the book. Right. But for us, we want to demonstrate what we have been doing, what our case studies are, what results we’ve been getting and so on. So I think we have no choice but to do it in house.

 So, yeah, I hope really this session gave you some ideas and I hope you will also implement them as as we implement them and we will share our results with you.

 So thanks for watching and yeah, look forward to seeing you in the next video