Almost every agency owner asks me this at some point:

“Do I have to post more on social media to grow my agency?”

No, you don’t.

In fact, I discourage it for most agency owners.

The instinct is good. Behind the question is a real truth: growing a business usually takes more or better marketing.

So what is “marketing?”

The clearest explanation I’ve heard comes from a book that isn't even about marketing: For the Culture, by Dr. Marcus Collins. He says “marketing” literally means “to bring to market.” And a “market” is “a set of players who interact in pursuit of exchange”. So to grow an agency, it makes sense that you need to reach a bigger set of players in pursuit of exchange for you to interact with.

Posting more on social media can help with that. But the real reason agency owners jump to it so fast is that it’s the only kind of marketing they know.

About 5.8 billion of the 8.2 billion people on Earth have at least one social media account. That’s roughly 70% of the world. So most people already know what it feels like to be marketed to. It seems logical: if you want to reach more people, go to the places that hold the most people. But that’s a trap. The biggest crowds also make the most noise. As the saying goes: everyone’s selling something.

To stand out in all that noise, you have to build a presence and grab attention. We have a word for that: “going viral.” But going viral is way harder than it sounds. Even the creators who teach you how to go viral don’t do it every time. They can pull in big numbers, sure, but one post gets 50K views while the next gets 5M. If they really knew the secret formula, wouldn’t every post hit the top number? They don’t, because attention is always moving. The real skill is reading those waves and riding them as they shift.

The advice you always hear is to post a lot and post consistently, so you can keep learning where attention is at any moment. A common starting point is posting 5 to 10 times a week for a full year. Top creators like Alex Hormozi have talked about posting around 250 pieces of content per week across multiple platforms. In his words: “To get 5× the results sometimes you have to put in 50× the effort.” Is that the game you want to play?

Whenever I bring this up, I hear the same pushback: “I don't need a million followers or hundreds of millions of dollars. I just need a small piece of that.”

Ha.

That's like saying, “I don’t need to swim across the whole lake. I’ll just swim a quarter of it.”

If you’re only going to swim a quarter of the lake, why swim it at all?

If your plan is to post once a week, you probably won’t reach enough people to grow your agency in a way that makes a difference for you.

Again, the instinct to market more or better is a good one. But picking social media as the way to do it is a mistake.

The goal isn’t to find the biggest market. The goal is to find the biggest market where you can actually be seen and heard.

I think other kinds of marketing work much better for agency owners than social media.

The proof is in the numbers.

You can run a $1M agency with about 10 clients who each pay you around $100K a year.

Let’s use a conservative win rate of 10%. If you win 10% of the projects you go after and you need 10 clients a year, then you only need to talk to 100 clients that year to hit your goal.

If you only need to talk to 100 clients, why are you posting to platforms with billions of users every day?

Yes, your 100 potential clients are probably on LinkedIn or Instagram. That’s not the problem. The problem is they’re buried among hundreds of millions of people who are not your potential clients.

Where can you talk to your 100 potential clients without also shouting at hundreds of millions of people who aren’t?

That’s the magic question.

The strongest marketing I know for agency owners is to make a list of 100 potential clients and send each one a well-written pitch. Yep, 100 emails, written by you, a real human, sent to another real human. In my experience, this is by far the best way to get more clients with the least effort.

(The fancy term for this is ABM, or “account-based marketing,” if you want to do more research.)

“100 custom emails? That’s so much work,” agency owners whine.

That’s because they're doing two things wrong: they’re underestimating how much work other marketing takes, and they’re not scoping it out properly.

How many posts do you need to write in a year to do social media well? 5 posts a week × 52 weeks = 260 posts. At the very least. That’s way more than 100 emails.

Break it down. 100 emails a year is 25 a quarter. Or about 8 a month. Or 2 a week. Or 1 every 3 days. I know you can write 1 email every 3 days.

So why don’t more agency owners try this? Because it’s hard in two very different ways.

First, it’s hard creatively. You have to think hard to do this. Where do you even find 100 people for the list? That’s not easy. But if you can track down a specific screw at your local hardware store or a dress on Etsy that fits just right, you can do this too. It takes creative work. And that’s the tricky part: it requires you, the design agency owner who clients pay to be creative, to confront the idea that you might not be as creative as you think.

Second, it’s hard emotionally. When you email a real person, a real person can reject you. A real person can ghost you. A real person can insult you. That’s scary to think about, and it stings when it happens. Even though social media takes more work, the rejection there feels more dull. If a post flops, you can blame the algorithm. You can shrug it off because it's “just a post.” No big deal, because “not every post is a banger.”

But the fact that it’s hard is exactly why it works. Sometimes it works because it’s hard. Since it’s hard, most people won’t do it, which makes it rare, which makes it valuable. That’s the whole point of a service business: doing something for someone that they can’t or won’t do themselves.

Strategist Alex M. H. Smith says it well in his article “If you make content online, here’s the problem:”

The key thing to understand about content creation and thought leadership in the post-saturation economy is…: If it’s not difficult, it won’t work. The entire reason it’s stopped working is because it’s become too easy, letting too many people into the market. So the trick to making it work again is to make it hard again.

A better question than “should I post more on social media?” is “Am I willing to do a hard, scary thing that actually works?”

Make a list of 100. Write a real pitch. Send it to a real person. Get rejected by a real person. Repeat.

Somewhere in that cycle, a “no” turns into a “yes.”

When I first opened my agency, I made a list of 300 people to reach out to to ask for work. I got through 30 and was booked for 6 months.

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