As “The Expert’s Copywriter,” I’ve been a part of growing Expert Brands from almost all sides. I’ve been the consultant working within the Expert Brand. I’ve been at the ad agency working on campaigns for the Expert Brand (in fact, I’ve played this role several times for agencies as small as $5M/year all the way to $30M/year.) I’ve even been the Expert Consultant who’s come in and designed an ad campaign from scratch.
And now, I’m the Expert sharing my opinion:
Ad agencies are failing Experts.
But let’s back up for a moment. You may know this, but back in the spring of 2024, I created the core concept of what is now The Sophistication Spectrum and the Sophistication Stages out of sheer frustration.
As the Senior Copywriter at an ad agency and the only one absolutely obsessed with offers and Expert Brands, I was often tasked to fix campaigns for Experts only after the ad campaigns had run through the budget and failed, leading the client to want to leave. At the same time, I was also in the middle of conversations about why some Expert Brand clients were seeing amazing results with specific ad strategies…
And yet others failed to move the needle at all…
And this led to conversations about what made a good client for advertising services.
The answer to both was the Sophistication Spectrum .
Once I saw the spectrum, I couldn’t unsee it. And not understanding how the spectrum applies to how we build our offers and messaging… and how it determines what kind of agency clients are ready for advertising services at all… causes so much difficulty for Expert Brands and the agencies who are trying to serve them.
Ad and Marketing Agencies are Ready… But Clients Are Not
If you lifted the hood, you’d find many marketing agencies who serve Experts often find themselves asking fundamental questions over and over again:
How can we get more ideal fit clients?
Usually coupled with:
We need better clients who don’t churn, expect the moon out the gate, and are great to work with.
Often also combined with:
We need to get better results for clients.
Marketing agencies, especially those whose primary service is building cold traffic campaigns for experts, tend to see a revolving door of clients whose campaigns utterly fail. The reason isn’t malice (usually), but rather an oversight. This outcome is, I believe, preventable IF the ad agency is smart enough to do specific work in advance of launching ads.
Let’s look again at the Sophistication Spectrum concept I introduced in early 2024, and have been refining ever since:

If you understand the Sophistication Spectrum , you know that businesses mature in the various factors unevenly as they grow. So a business might lead in say, revenue, but lag in foundational marketing assets. And your job with your offers – whether you’re running an Expert Brand that’s an agency or an Expert Brand selling coaching or products, is to get the buyer to their next stage of Sophistication. That’s it.
The Sophistication Spectrum for an agency would include the following variables as factors to consider whether a potential new client is actually ready for ad services which has nothing to do with available budget:
- Offer Stack
- Advertising Experience (# of platforms)
- Foundational Marketing assets (mature website, social channels, etc)
- Sales team (= sales capacity)
- Marketing team (= operational capacity)
- CRO / testing experience
- Mindset around marketing
- CRM adoption
- Email marketing maturity
- Positive testimonials / case studies
- Multiple forms of proof
- “Prestige” elements (unique mechanisms, etc)
Whether an ad agency takes a client on, and which services that client is ultimately sold, should entirely depend on their Sophistication Stage – NOT THEIR BUDGET.
Let me repeat that: if you’re going to serve Experts, you need to sell them the right-fit service for their Sophistication Stage, not their budget. Just because they have the budget for your complete package, doesn’t mean they’re ready yet.
And the reason, I believe, has to do with what I call the “Inverse Sophistication Effect,” which says:
The earlier the Sophistication Stage, the more education, mindset reframing, and foundational business/systems work must be done in order for that business to implement whatever it is you sell.
Let me repeat that:
- The earlier the stage
- The MORE WORK which must be done
- (By you or the client)
- In the areas of: mindset, education, foundational business/systems, foundational marketing/sales assets, etc., team size, etc
- In order for them to implement
- Whatever it is you sell (beyond fulfillment)
- And get to the next stage of Sophistication
Which means selling to early stages may simply not be feasible given the kind of service you offer. (Solution: change your marketing/sales)
Or maybe your offer just is too unsophisticated for the type of business you want to reach. (Solution: change your service/packaging)
Case in point 1: The agency I worked with at the time didn’t offer to optimize any of the marketing assets required to run advertising campaigns. To do their best work, they required customers already in Sophistication Stage 2 or 3 in order to have the financial runway and make the best use of their service.
Yet they insisted on selling to early-sophistication businesses because they had the money, or because they wanted to get to Stage 3.
I wish I could say it was obvious that this approach was a recipe for failure which played out in repeated client churn, and that until and unless they changed their entire positioning and offer approach, they would continue to attract clients who would, inevitably, churn.
But it wasn’t. I pointed this out and got crickets. I was ignored. And I ultimately left the project to bring this to YOU instead, someone who I hope is smart enough to understand the absolute value of this framework for designing campaigns which actually work. And I saw this in not one agency, but two separate ones I spoke with.
Case in point 2: I’ve since worked on a project where the Sophistication Spectrum stages had not yet been mapped in any meaningful way, and so the ads and offers were either addressing multiple stages and awareness levels at once… or they were addressing too high a stage to be effective. I helped them shift their messaging and hooks to be at the correct stage, and now they’re seeing 4X as many booked calls and more sales.
Which brings me back to my point:
Ad agencies are failing Expert Brands, which brings me to what I can tell the owners of Expert Brands about how to hire and work with ad agencies, because the answer isn’t not to use them… but to know when you’re actually ready.
When to Hire an Ad Agency if You’re Running an Expert Brand
If you’re running an Expert Brand, part of maturing through the Sophistication Spectrum, as you’ll see, is expanding your advertising from one platform to multiple. So start there, maturing each stage until you get to be about Stage 2 or Stage 3. And then consider how you can slowly scale ads.
Here’s what else you can do.
What to do in Stage 1 and Stage 2:
- Maintain consistent growth on organic social media channels – this means not just followers but engagement
- Create at least one front-end offer and one back-end offer, and prove them to at least warm traffic. Get healthy conversion numbers for these.
- Build your social proof: case studies, testimonials, awards, etc.
- Test at least 5 different lead magnets, preferably of different types. I like to see Experts have a book, a webinar, a checklist, and a podcast, show, or other consistent “presence”
- Get interviewed at least 5 times by others – podcast, YT show, publication, etc
- Consistently grow your email list – and use a solid CRM which is tracking segmentation data. Please, for the love of marketing, don’t use tags to do this. Use fields.
- Begin doing monthly reporting on spreadsheets. Track both your overall metrics and your campaign-specific metrics. Begin thinking in terms of campaigns.
- Grow your email and sales maturity. You’ll need more sales maturity especially if you’re going to scale.
- Start testing. Getting into the mindset that marketing is testing will help you mentally and emotionally handle the testing which comes with advertising
- Build your “Brand Voice Playbook”, Avatars, etc so that you can hand them to the ad agency when you’re ready to hire
Once you do all this, you’ll be in a really solid place to make the MOST of your advertising and marketing budget. And then you’ll be one of those success stories which initially drew you to hiring an agency in the first place.