Used in the right way, Twitter can be one of the best social media tools to be used to generate traffic and leads for your agency’s new business.
For the past 3 years Twitter has been the leading traffic generator to my Fuel Lines blog. It definitely needs to be part of your agency’s overall social media marketing strategy.
The following are seven of my personal tips to help make Twitter more effective for your agency’s new business:
Don’t be afraid to use Twitter differently from the way it was originally intended to be used. Twitter is more of a broadcast tool that most would admit and current research validates. Treat it as a broadcast tool through reach and frequency of your content marketing efforts and generating the best return on your time investment by repurposing your content through tools such as Social Oomph.
In addition your own blog’s content, be sure to supplement your Twitter posts with resources from others that are of help to your target audience.
Pay-it-forward. As others are so kind to publicize your content, also help to promote theirs.
In addition to Twitter being a broadcasting tool, it must be utilized as a networking tool for you to have success. Content helps build awareness but it is up to you to turn awareness into relationships. The efficiency of these kinds of online networks should be all that is need to motivate you to participate. People want to work with other people that they know, like and trust.
Use third-party Twitter tools like CoTweet and HootSuite to minimize your time and maximize the effectiveness of your Twittering.
What you learn to do for your agency can be used for your clients. There are a multiplicity of benefits from your involvement.
To provide you with further help in using Twitter for new business here are 20 of the most popular post:
If you want to reach prospective clients online your writing for email, eNewsletters, blog post, etc should contain half the word count of conventional text. People read a lot online plus the receive a lot of email. They don’t have time to read a lot of text.
The most frequent advice study of participants had for newsletter creators was to “keep it brief.”
Nielsen Norman Group ’s research found that 79 percent of their test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. A newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.) People prefer sites that get to the point and let them get things done quickly
Improve your online writing style from this …
Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions that draw large crowds of people every year, without fail. In 1996, some of the most popular places were Fort Robinson State Park (355,000 visitors), Scotts Bluff National Monument (132,166), Arbor Lodge State Historical Park & Museum (100,000), Carhenge (86,598), Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (60,002), and Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park (28,446).
to this, to increase readability and usefulness:
In 1996, six of the most-visited places in Nebraska were:
Users spend 51 seconds reading the average newsletter. The layout and writing both need superb usability to survive in the high-pressure environment of a crowded inbox.
I highly recommend the Nielsen Norman Group, they are true pioneers in user experience studies that can greatly improve your writing for Web. Check out their online publications, white papers and reports:
This is my collection of writing tips to help you consistently generate great content that produces inbound leads for your agency’s new business through social media.
Content marketing is a great means of converting prospects into clients by creating and freely sharing helpful, informative content that builds awareness and relevant relationships.
I hope that you find these 21 blog post writing tips helpful:
Write to a specific target audience. Having a target audience in mind keeps your writing focused. Plus, the narrower your focus the easier it is to write.
Reading fuels your writing. You need a good strategic reading program with a clear focus that is centered upon your audience’s interest and needs.
Keep headlines simple and direct.
Load each post title with the keywords you want to dominate through search (i.e. “ad agency new business”). This is also helpful to your Twitter audience as well.
Write post titles that are understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results).
Be predictable, so users know whether they’ll like the full article before they click.
The first sentence of your post should be the “takeaway or benefits statement”. Just simply answer the question, what will be my takeaway or benefit if I commit to read this post? This is theinverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion.
Remember that online readers prefer writing that is concise, easy to scan, and objective (rather than promotional) in style.
Avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Invest this time in writing thorough articles that are of value to your audience.
Publish on a regular schedule. Be consistent in delivering at least 3 to 5 posts per week. This will keep your readers coming back for more. Also, frequently updated content makes search engines happy.
Highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others).
Use often, bulleted or numbered lists. Readers love them. You are basically providing the “readers digest version” or an “executive summary” for your readers. You are doing work on their behalf, highlighting the rich nuggets of content for them and presenting it in an easy-to-read format.
Half the word count (or less) than conventional writing. Usually 350 to 450 words.
Don’t sell. Readers detest “marketes”; the promotional writing style with boastful claims. The moment you start to sell on your agency’s blog is when you will lose your audience.
Include at least one high quality graphic.
Write numbers with digits, not letters (21, not twenty-one).
Use short sentences. Get to the point. Break up long paragraphs. Make your copy easy for a persons eye to scan.
Your blog should become a repository of valued information for your audience. That means that it’s not all original content. I recommend writing 1 original post for every 4 or 5 resource post.
This is an example of a “resource post”: Steve Jobs: 10 Presentation Tactics for Ad Agency New Business. I found this info through my reading program. I made it relevant to my audience, added my own thoughts and provided some additional tips to create more value. It took only 25 to 30 minutes to write.
For original posts, I share my opinions, my point of view. Original posts usually take over and hour to write. Your prospective client audience is searching the internet for good, rich information that solves problems. They are attracted to fresh thinking, writers who have opinions that don’t always follow the status quo.
Think of your reader’s experience. Make your posts easy to find, your blog simple to navigate. Highlight popular posts, provide links to additional resources. Make their interaction with your blog’s content a pleasant experience.
Here are a few thoughts on repurposing content from your blog and maximize the return on your time investment:
Don’t ever think that just because you’ve written it, everyone has read it. Repurpose content in a bi-weekly or at least monthly eNewsletter. It can take as little as 15 minutes to create and provide a great return on your time investment.
Take your most popular blog post, add some really good images and translate it into PowerPoint or Keynote.
You should also take advantage the time and effort that goes into writing for your blog and compile your best 100 blog posts into a book. You can actually think ahead and create an outline for a book as a guide for your blog post writing.
A conference for ad ad agency principals and partners plus media, account, creative and business development leaders that helps them get their digital house in order.
Bret Giles, president of agencysidewhich offers high-quality, current training, coaching, staffing and consulting exclusively to advertising agencies. An advertising veteran of 22 years, Bret started his career at Ketchum Advertising in San Francisco.
Bret has asked me to speak at his annual conference for advertising agencies and I asked him to share directly with you more about it.
I ran across a great quote from Dan Wieden of Wieden + Kennedy not too long ago. He said “The hardest part of this business is to realize that what you knew yesterday and all the things that gave you a sense of empowerment and prestige and security and safety is perhaps not relevant this morning…perhaps somebody else sees something you missed because you keep thinking you knew it all.”
Like it or not, marketing is in a sea change. What held value to your clients at the beginning of the year might not by the end. Media is increasingly fragmenting. Agencies are increasingly consolidating. Technology is increasingly converging. And that leaves principals in an interesting predicament, one which I feel we have never previously faced.
How do we, as agencies, remain relevant in the communications channel?
At agencyside, we started a conference called BOLO – that’s “Be On The Lookout” – an agency-exclusive, 2-day event in October focused on issues facing agencies today. It’s forward-looking, focused on arming agencies with information to thrive, not survive. With a heavy focus on digital marketing, attendees learn from four keynote addresses, dozens of breakout sessions, Q+A “salons” and interactive sessions with other attendees.
We’ll feature the creative director on the Old Spice campaign at Wieden + Kennedy, the social media professional who effectively rebranded Mardi Gras and authors of books ranging from Content Strategy for the Web to Escape from Cubicle Nation, Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company to PR in a Jar.
You can find more information about the event and other speakers at www.bolo2010.com. As a reader of Michael’s, you can use the promo code “MGass” for $100 off your registration.
In short, status quo is boring anyway, let’s shake up the future together. I look forward to meeting you in person come October!
Here are some great examples of agency creativity utilizing social media. Hopefully you will find a spark that will ignite your own creativity for your agency’s clients.
Forbes asked three experts to rank the 20 best-ever social media campaigns based on the success, execution and creativity of the campaigns. The three panelist included: David Berkowitz of the New York City agency 360i; Brandon Evans of the social marketing agency Mr. Youth in New York City and Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship, a digital ad shop in Brooklyn.
In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary … A year later their footage was found …
The Blair Witch Project was considered to be the best-ever social media campaigns, cost $22,000 to make the film and generated $249 million worldwide. Not a bad ROI.
Forbes list of the 20 best-ever social media campaigns:
Shift Your Ad Agency’s Thinking to Stimulate Creativity, Spur Innovation and Create Enthusiasm for New Business.
A lot of small to midsize ad agencies have chosen to take shelter during the recession, but that strategy doesn’t provide any creative stimulation for ad agency new business. Perhaps the better strategy would be to dramatically shift your agency’s thinking, spur innovation and enthusiasm by setting some challenging new business goals.
I owe inspiration for this post to a recent Stephan Shapiro, a well known business innovation author, speaker and consultant. In a recent article, , How Goals Enhance Creativity, he said,
“… businesses are driven by goals, how can we leverage them as a tool for enhancing creativity? One way is to use stretch targets. REALLY stretch targets.
What if they set a target of growing by 50% a year? It might have a fundamentally different impact on the organization.
That level of growth is unprecedented. It will certainly stretch the way they think. A 14% improvement can most likely be attained through conventional thinking. But a 50% growth target would require some breakthrough thinking; radical ideas.
The future gives them the present, rather than present giving them the future.”
4 Ways Goals Can Enhance Creativity for Ad Agency New Business:
Shifts thinking. Instead of being reactive, it provides a proactive approach to generating new business. A shift from defense to offense and getting your agency out of its hunkered down, bunker mentality.
Stimulates creativity. I have never liked setting unrealistic goals. To me they are meaningless. But I do embrace robust new business goals, that will stretch and challenge your agency’s creative thinking to attain them.
Spurs innovation. Most agencies are not good in creating a consistent new business program. They are always busy. Client work comes before their own. But, there are always answers to these types of challenges, always a “work-around” if you will take the time to figure out an innovative solution.
Creates enthusiasm. Big goals can be the spark to generate a spirit of enthusiasm. A rallying point for your beleaguered troops. These may seem like the darkest days your agency has ever faced but in reality this could be the greatest of times for growing your agency. You will NEVER have another opportunity like this in your lifetime. These times present the perfect conditions for small to midsize agencies to shine.
Small to midsize ad agencies, Steve Jobs has something to teach you about pitching for new business. Every new business pitch should do three things: inform, educate and entertain.
BusinessWeek.com columnist Carmine Gallo reveals the techniques that have turned Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, into one of the world’s corporate presenters. Here are his 10 Ways to Sell Your Ideas the Steve Jobs Way:
Plan your presentation with pen and paper.
Begin by storyboarding your presentation. Steve Jobs will initially spend his preparation time brainstorming, sketching and whiteboarding before he every opens PowerPoint. All of the elements of the story that he wants to tell are thought through, elements are planned and collected before the slides are created.
Create a single sentence description for every service/idea. Concise enough to fit in a 140-character Twitter post. An example, for the introduction of the MacBook Air in January, 2008, Jobs said that is it simply, “The world’s thinnest notebook.”
Create a villain that allows the audience to rally around the hero—you and your product/service. A “villain” doesn’t necessarily have to be a direct competitor. It can be a problem in need of a solution.
Focus on benefits. Your audience only care about how your service will improve their lives. Make the connection for your prospective clients. Don’t make them make that mental leap leaving them to figure it out for themselves.
Stick to the rule of three for presentations. Almost every Jobs presentation is divided into three parts. You might have twenty points to make about your service, but your audience is only capable of retaining three or four points in short term memory. Give them too many points and they’ll forget everything you’ve said.
Sell dreams, not your services. Steve Jobs doesn’tsell computers. He sells the promise of a better world. When Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, he said, “In our own small way we’re going to make the world a better place.” Where most people see the iPod as a music player, Jobs sees it as tool to enrich people’s lives.
Create visual slides. There are no bullet points in Steve Jobs presentations. Instead he relies on photographs and images. When Steve Jobs unveiled the Macbook Air, Apple’s ultra-thin notebook computer, he showed a slide of the computer fitting inside a manila inter-office envelope. Keep the presentation that simple.
Make numbers meaningful. Jobs always puts large numbers into a context that’s relevant to his audience. The bigger the number, the more important it is to find analogies or comparisons that make the data relevant to your audience.
Use plain English. Jobs’s language is remarkably simple. He rarely, if ever, will use the jargon that clouds most presentations—terms like “best of breed” or “synergy.” His language is simple, clear and direct.
Practice, practice, practice. Steve Jobs spends hours rehearsing every facet of his presentation. Every slide is written like a piece of poetry, every presentation staged like a theatrical experience. Yes, Steve Jobs makes a presentation look effortless but that polish comes after hours and hours of grueling practice.
There is a paradigm shift for how new business is being acquired for small to mid-size ad agencies.
Innovation and creativity are important elements for any small to midsize ad agency. They are also critical for ad agency new business. They can set your agency apart from the pack.
Creativity Online provides excellent innovative examples to spark some creative ideas of your own. Just be sure that you use some of your agency’s creative moxie for business development.
Ad Age and Creativity’s fifth annual list of the most inspiring and innovative thinkers and doers from among advertising, marketing, designers, directors, entrepreneurs, and others who have made the largest impact upon all creative cultures. Be sure to check out : Ashton Kutcher, Mike Hughes, Linus Karlsson and Paul Malmstrom along with Ty Montague, Ian Tait.
Congratulations to the Square One agency, Dallas, TX. Their blog, SQ 1 War Room, was selected as Fuel Line’s Blog of the Month for July, by 61% of the 638 votes cast.
“Ever wonder what’s going on inside our heads? Our blog is a peek into our thought process, an exhibition of work we’re proud of, a celebration of things that impressed us, and a few observations and insights into what makes advertising work.” Square One, Dallas, TX
Fuel Line’s Blog of the Month not only provides examples of agency blogs but it is an opportunity for agencies to showcase their blog and participation in social media, generating traffic and interest in their site.
Square One’s blog will automatically be included in Fuel Line’s Ad Agency Blog of the Year.
Ad agencies all need an integrated social media strategy if they are ever going to see the payoff from their participation in social media. An agency blog should be the central component. The place you can drive targeted online traffic through SEO, Twitter, email newsletters, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The blog becomes the “gateway” to your agency and the“face” of your agency. As important as it was to have an agency website, it is now equally important to have an agency blog.
But … having a blog isn’t something you check off your list of social media “to do list.” Nor is it a place to lead with agency capabilities and credentials. It must be of benefit to your audience.Here is a collection of agency blogging resources:
The following is a treasure trove of information that you will want to have handy as you discuss social media with your agency’s clients and prospective clients.
Danny Brown, co-founder and partner at Bonsai Interactive, pulled together this great resource that you will want to bookmark and handy. Danny does a great job of filtering through a lot of published facts to pull together these 52 from the 5 most popular social networks.
The average Facebook user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events.
Twitter’s web platform only accounts for a quarter of its users – 75% use third-party apps.
Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users every day.
80% of companies use LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.
Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn.
The very first video uploaded to YouTube was called “Me at the Zoo”, on 23rd April 2005.
YouTube receives more than 2 billion viewers per day.
77% of Internet users read blogs.
Bloggers use an average of five different social sites to drive traffic to their blog.
Danny’s blog, is featured in the AdAge Power 150 list as well as Canada’s Top 50 Marketing Blogs, and won the Hive Award for Best Social Media Blog at the 2010 South by South West festival. I would encourage you to be a subscriber.
Additional social media | new business articles that may be of interest:
Relevant and valuable content will attract a clearly defined and understood target audience.
Content marketing is an overarching term that involves the creation and sharing of content for the purpose of engaging your prospective clients. Educating your potential clients results in building your agency’s brand awareness and recognition as a thought leader and industry expert. The primary objective is lead generation for new business opportunities.
Here are 6 steps for using content marketing to attract prospective clients:
First, define your target audience
Second, determine what are their marketing and advertising challenges, “what keeps them up at night”
Third, create a blog as your central communication platform that becomes a repository of information, “a one stop shop” that provides consistent solutions, rich helpful content
Fourth, continually measure how well you’re doing and adjust as you go
Fifth, “Jump start” your blog’s traffic, accelerate its growth by repurposing content through other social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn using third party tools to that help to make the process easy to manage and time efficient.
Sixth, now, what you’ve done for yourself, do for your clients
“Okay, I believe that content marketing can create significant traffic to my agency’s blog and generate inbound new business leads. But my main concern is that I wont have enough to write about that would be of interest to my audience. What should I do?”
I’ve been writing about ad agency new business for four years. My wife will occassoinaly ask how can I possibly have anything more to write about regarding “ad agency new business”. But I still have plenty of ideas. At last count, I had over 200 post drafts that await my completion.
What fuels my writing? A solid reading program that keeps me ahead of the curve and provides the resources for writing.
My reading had to be strategic and more efficient. It also had to be focused, geared to the interest of my target audience which is small to midsize advertising agencies and specifically, ad agency new business. I learned early on to constantly manually searching online was a huge time waster.
The primary tool that simplified, strategized and focused my online reading more efficiently has been the use of an RSS Reader, specifically Google Reader. This Reader is set as my Homepage, on my Firefox browser to help me ritualistically start each day using it. I found that if I opened even on email, most of the day my reading was put on the back-burner.
Also, I’m ADD enough, that when I just Google information, I’m easily distracted and chase lots of rabbits. An hour or two goes by and I can’t even recall what I initially was searching for. Google Reader resolves this issue for me.
Using Google Reader can be awkward and first, but you will soon see its value and time-management benefits. I have hundreds of focused, daily RSS feeds coming to me instead of me searching for them. They are all one central location, organized in specific topical folders.
A couple of tools will enhance your Google Reader experience and make your reading seamless:
Bit.ly is a little tool is becoming a big deal. It is now the default shortener for Twitter and has rapidly become the most popular URL shortener available.Google Reader included it in their new “send-to” feature, which lets you share any post on Twitter, automatically shortening long URLs with bit.ly. Just sign up for bit.ly and drag and drop into your browser bar.
Press This. This tool is for WordPress.com users. You can collect and share bits of the web easier and faster than ever with Press This, the new WordPress bookmarklet. Grab an article title, URL and info quickly and add it as a draft post. When you are in your writing mode, all you need do is go to your blog post drafts and you’ll have plenty of writing resources to kick start a new post.
In addition to an RSS Reader, eNewsletters also provide a great resource. Some of these are daily briefs and others are received either weekly or monthly. Here are a few of my choice newsletters:
Review and decide which of these 16 agency blogs really understands social media. You may also pick up some fresh ideas for your agency’ blog.
The following 16 advertising agency blogs have been submitted to Fuel Lines. Review and vote for the best agency blog of the month. The winner will be featured on Fuel Lines throughout the month and included in the voting for ad agency blog of the year.
Keeping older content alive can provide additional fuel your agency’s inbound lead generation program through social media. It also greatly enhances the return on your writing time investment.
Some of the most helpful tips on blog writing I have found online from resources as old as 1996. In a day when blog content that was published only a few months, it is often discounted as being old. If it is content that has been generated over six months it is considered ancient. But some of the most helpful resources that I have found for writing for Web is as old as 1996.
I often cite older sources without disclosing the date, if I’m confident the resource is of worth to my readers. Readers would often discount these resources if I included the date when I cite the source.
Just one example is information that I gleaned from Jacob Nielsen when writing this post, “How do users read on the web? They don’t … they scan”. His online writings have completely changed my view of “older content”. The New York Times calls Nielsen,”the guru of Web page usability”.
The date of the material shouldn’t matter. What should matter is relevancy. Is the content still of value to your audience?
Here’s an example of some of Nielsen’s rich nuggets of information for writing for the Web:
In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.
As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using
highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
bulleted lists
one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
Web users generally prefer writing that is concise, easy to scan, and objective (rather than promotional) in style.
Jacob Nielsen’s insights were ahead of the times. It would be a shame to discount them just because some of his great content were published online over fourteen years ago.
I continue to recycle and repurpose blog posts to over 40,000 + Twitter followers and too subscribers to the Fuel Lines eNewsletter. I have also pulled older content together for eBooklets, white-papers, SlideShare presentations. You can even recycle your blogs content into a book. Recycled posts continue to generate lots of blog traffic and fresh comments from readers who have just discovered them for the first time. By reviewing my analytics I can tell what posts to keep in this recycling rotation and what I need to pull out. Ultimately my readers decide what is appealing and what isn’t.
If you’ve written it, don’t assume that the majority of your readers have read it. Don’t be afraid to repurpose/recycle content.
Also, as you write your posts, learn to write “ever-green” to give the content a long shelf life. By doing this, a post that took me an hour to write, will provide a 100% return on my time investment.
I recently wrote a post, 50 of the Best Insights from Ad Age’s First Ever Small Agency Conference, the first ever small agency conference sponsored by Ad Age. Even though this was a one-day conference, I purposefully wrote the post in a way that would allow the content to be used for a much longer period of time.
I would also suggest revisiting older posts that may not have generated very much traffic. With the proper edits and revisions you can breath new life into them as well.
Here are some additional resources for creating content for an agency blog for new business:
Tried and true best practices and tips can accelerate your agency’s success with social media and keep it ahead of the competition.
Having a clear objective from the get-go is important. I would suggest that you use social media as a big part of your agency’s new business program. Social media can provide a sustainable, affordable and focused program for networking and lead generation and also a great return on the time invested.
I recently received this note from an ad agency president that has differentiated his agency using social media,
“We just landed a significant project with Coca-Cola purely through our sustainable marketing niche. The best compliment we could receive was when they said our price was waaaay more than the next bid, but given our background in green marketing and sustainability, that it was worth the extra investment. Finally, a value over price purchase. Love it.”
To be successful with social media for your agency’s new business, here are 6 tips:
Identify and address a specific target audience. Face it, most agencies are afraid to put their stake in the ground and even identify who their target audience. You would never recommend a marketing campaign for a client without first identifying who they are trying to reach.
Lead content and conversations with benefits. Social media helps agencies to talk in a new way. To discard the past agency speak for a language the resonates with their audience. That is focused on what are the benefits for them. “You Can Only Get What You Want, If You Help Enough Other People Get What They Want” – Zig Ziglar.
Differentiate from your competitors. You wont win any significant business by showcasing how you match up with the rest of the agencies. You must unlevel the playing field. Set yourself apart. What would give a company reason to fly over hundreds of other agencies, across a number of states, to do business with your agency? Social media provides a great opportunity to for your agency to stand out.
Become a specialist instead of a generalist. Our world is becoming more and more specialized. I had to have surgery a few years ago. My personal physician recommended a neurosurgeon practicing at our suburban hospital. My choice was one of the leading neurosurgeon in the country who happened head up the department of neurosurgery at an academic medical center less than 30 miles from my home. A CMO’s job could be very well on-the-line with the choice of an agency. If I were in their position, I would be choosing a specialist rather than a generalist. Wouldn’t you?
Create appeal. One of the great benefits for using social media for new business is the instant feedback from your audience. It allows you to easily test your message an hone your appeal.
Earn positioning as a “thought leader.” In less than 3 years, social media has created an international awareness for my personal brand among my best target audience. I have clients from coast to coast, so far this year I spoken in over 43 cities, traveled over 43,000 miles, recognition from some of our national trade publications and advertising associations. All of it through social media. What has worked for me and can also work for you and position you as a thought leader to your prospective client audience.
Some additional tips and best practices for using social media for your agency’s new business:
An ad agency’s new business pipeline isn’t something you can just turn on and off. It needs to continually flow, constantly generating leads.
While there are different approaches to successful agency new business development programs, they are made up of some common building blocks. The first secret to a new business program is getting started. The second secret is developing a new business program that your agency can consistently execute and sustain.
As you create a new business plan for your agency you should think in terms of “what is sustainable when our agency is at its busiest”.
Many well-intentioned plans are often derailed by success. When the agency starts to get busy the new business program is put on the back-burner. This creates a roller coaster effect for new business. Your new business pipeline often takes 3 to 4 months to begin generating leads so it is very inefficient to turn it on and off like a spigot.
Often, when your agency is beginning to get busy with new business, it is the best time to step-up your efforts. What agency wouldn’t want to be in the position of being able to turn away business. To be more selective of the type of client accounts your agency is willing to accept.
To be consistent, any agency new business program must:
1. Be realistically achievable within the culture and resources of the agency
Set realistic goals. There are a lot of agencies, when asked what are their new business goals will say, ”we want to double in size” or ”we want to take our agency to the next level”. This aren’t realistic goals unless you have a plan and that plan will be dependent upon what resources of time, personnel and budget that are available for implementation.
2. Have a manager who is held accountable for its execution
If everyone is responsible for your agency’s new business then no one is responsible.
Someone must be accountable, have the authority and ability to drive it. There’s a lot of pushing, prodding and poking that must be done to keep the new business program working. Someone must be responsible for keeping it focused and on track.
3. Top management must be intimately involved in the process
No one in the agency feels the pressure to succeed more than the agency principals. Like it or not, they are the face of the agency. Their involvement is important for new business and they shouldn’t shy away from this responsibility. To maintain consistency, new business, must be a priority in their daily responsibilities.
Mandate that your agency has an integrated new business plan. Unbelievably, 62% of agencies don’t have a planned new business effort.
Define your agency’s positioning. This is the starting point for any ad agency new business program. It is a fundamental prerequisite for small and midsize agencies. But it is also the place where most agencies where most fail. Positioning is everything.
Choose a target audience. This will not deter your agency from still obtaining “other” type of clients through your personal networks and referrals within your local market, but it will go a very long way to creating awareness, appeal, differentiation and focus for your agency’s new business program. It makes new business so much easier when you do.
Resolve to stay the course. New business efforts are relational and take time to come to fruition.
It’s time to un-level the playing field. To have success with social media, agencies need to fly a differentiated social media flag.
Small-to midsize ad agencies tend to constantly promote how they are alike rather than how they are different from other agencies. They tend to look and sound just the same.
When agencies gave up fighting against the social media tide and decided to dive in, instead of using this new communications channel to showcase how they were different, they ended up just following the lead of others. Once again positioned as a generalists instead of a specialist and following the “safe-way” rather than the “smart-way.”
I had hoped that agencies would have learned this lesson by now, “if you try to appeal to everyone, you will appeal to no one”.
Having spent my entire advertising career in new business, I know first hand the financial pressures small to mid-size agencies are under. I understand their reservation for not wanting to focus to narrowly on a target audience or discipline. I know all of the excuses for not wanting to drive a stake in the ground and define themselves for who they are. But agencies are missing a grand opportunity.
Social media provide agencies to boldly declare who their target audience truly is, what their points of differentiation are. Social media allows agencies this freedom without fear of ”throwing the baby out with the bath-water.” It provides favorable, acceptable conditions for the agency’s principals to fly their differentiated flag proudly without fear of missing “other” opportunities that use to come by way of their personal networks and referrals.
Agencies tend to look and act the same because they merely have a check list of social media tools and platforms to prove their participation. But there social media practice has no strategy, no connection to a particular target audience, no demonstration of how they are different. Merely showcasing that they are a bona-fide member of the global social media community.
Here are my 5 tips for flying your agency’s differentiated social media flag:
Create an agency blog for a specific targeted audience. If you don’t, it will lack focus and be nothing more than mishmash that has no flavor , appeal or audience.
Have an objective. I would suggest the objective to be using social media for your agency’s new business pipeline. Inbound new business leads through content marketing that positions you as a thought leader to your best prospective clients.
Remember that social is about people. I would strongly suggest that you don’t incorporate your blog into the branding of your agency’s website. Give it room to breath and grow on its on. Let your agency’s blog be a reflection of key persons within the agency instead of trying to socialize an entity. You connect with people online the same way you do offline, but online you can efficiently reach more people over a much broader geographical area. People want to work with people that they know, trust and like. Social media provides you with this great opportunity to network.
Don’t be afraid to use social media differently than the way it was intended. Some social media purists act like Barney Fife and may threaten you with”citizens arrest,” but there is just one social media rule for you to keep in mind, there are no rules! This is still the wild, wild west.
Never lose your marketing mind when it comes to social media. Remember that it is just another communication’s channel. I have had much better success working with the agency “baby boomers” and their getting up-to-speed with social media than younger staffers who understand this new communication technology but they lack the experience in marketing and advertising. Don’t be intimidated. It’s not as hard as it may appear to get your marketing mind around the social media space.
Direct from New Orleans, some fresh ideas and insights for small-to midsize advertising agencies that are worthy of your review.
Ad Age recently conducted its first-ever Small Agency Conference in New Orleans. They brought together a great group of group of speakers that shared their expertise delivering rich nuggets of information from the importance of having a unique agency culture; how to attract the best talent in the marketplace; using creativity to boost the bottom line; to the nuts and bolts of new business and getting the win.
Attendees have been Twittering from the conference using the Twitter hashtag #smallagency, sharing some of the best-of-the best information. Wish you could have been there? I thought the next best thing for those who missed it would be sharing some of those Tweets for you. Some excellent insights.
Enjoy these top 50 nuggets from the conference attendees:
@sharondnapier The Brownstein Group has “Family” dinners with their key clients.awesome!
@tjeffrey: What do clients want to be educated about most ? 1 – social media. 2 – analytics/measurement
@adage: Everyone at @methodtweet takes turns answering phones, working front desk. “Keeps ego out of the org.” – Eric Ryan.
@jeremyporter: Find a way to get people to audition for your job. Hire off of homework not the interview.
bwaggoner: #smallagency It’s not about an agency and a client. It’s about a bunch of smart people in a room with good ideas. – Eric Ryan of Method
@rupalparekh Brand Jockey? Sure. If you work at Method (@methodtweet) you get to choose your own title
@AdLawGuy: Rocketfish owns a coffee company – who knew?
@jeremyporter: Very impressed by Rockfish. Lots of cool projects. They even make their own coffee to know what it’s like to be a CPG company
tjeffrey: Eric Ryan – “Without a social strategy, you can’t succeed with social media.”
AdLawGuy: Eric Ryan of Method: every brand in social media should have a social message
A great resource for small-to midsize ad agencies is Ad Age’s SMALL AGENCY DIARY.
This is a side note, a way to participate in conferences when you aren’t present by using Twitter:
I wasn’t able to attend the Small Agency Conference but I was able to share in it through live Twitter streams from the attendees. You could easily get a gist of some of the best-of-the-best parts of the conference speakers by what the Twittering attendees felt were important. There would be lots of the same quotes and points repeated.
I was able to glean from the Tweets some of the best insights from the attendees themselves. It felt as though I was there in a sense. I knew that the conference room went from being extremely cold to hot and very uncomfortable. Participants loved the New Orleans style cuisine and were absolutely blown away by the deserts.
The camera guy offered advice, through Twitter, to the speakers. Speakers shared their impressions. Lots of behind-the-scenes info that you wouldn’t have gotten just through a live video stream.
I was even able to follow along during the Awards Banquet that evening and have heard from friends who attended the conference on their travel home.
How to enhance Twitter by Blogging:
I was able to post the 50 Best Insights out to my 40,000 + followers on Twitter before the conference was even over through a blog post on my Fuel Lines site. That allows the content provided through the Twitter hash tags to have a much longer shelf life. This info will continually be shared well beyond the conference. This is a reason to use a blog as your central social media platform to complement tools such as Twitter. I will continue to gain SEO, content for my eNewsletter, repurposed Tweets that will be re-published through my Twitter accounts periodically
I also help spread the word of the conference, create buzz and help generate traffic for the conference sponsors: AdAge and AOL Advertising.
A command center (often called a war room) is any place that is used to provide centralized command to determine the best course of action.
Every agency needs a “new business war room”, a place within your building that is organized for and focused on nothing but new business.
Usually the new business person is the “odd duck” of the agency. Why? No one else likes doing what they have to do, which is to sell the agency. But it is amazing at how quickly the new business director can get roped into almost everything but agency new business. Endless meetings throughout most days with no time left for execution of the agency’s new business strategy.
When I served as the VP of new business for the BOHAN agency in Nashville, we were fortunate to have our own space dedicated solely for the purpose of new business. We often called it our New Business War Room, because this was the place that we were able to focus on the lifeblood of the agency’s new business efforts.
No matter the size of your agency, I would suggest that you designate an area just for the purpose of agency new business. Here are some of the features, equipment and arrangements we had for our new business area that may spark some ideas of your own:
Multipurpose Room:
Comfortable seating for about 15 people. The chairs were on rollers and could be easily re-arranged or moved entirely out of the way.
Not a typical conference table, but two tables that could be set apart for workshops, focus groups, etc. A large whiteboard, flip-chart, a large bulletin type display board. This provided us our own space where we could keep visuals of on-going new business projects.
Large flat screen TV, wireless Apple keyboard and presentation remote, Apple Airport, DVD player and sound bar.
Work Room:
Equipment and materials to create customized notebooks, presentation-leave behinds, RFP covers and special delivery boxes.
A collection of agency work that was well organized, that could be easily gathered and customized for a specific prospect.
Storage for agency collateral materials, new business direct mail pieces, printed agency newsletters, prospective client gift items such as hats, shirts, pens, thumb-drives, etc.
Files: Hard copies of previous RFPs, new business intel on current prospective clients, materials from prior pitches.
New Business Server:
On our agency’s server, we had a designated area for new business that was password protected. Only a limited number of staff persons had access. It included:
RFP resources: to help with new RFP requests, we had all of the previous RFPs broken down into sections such as Experience, Staff, Billings, Case Studies, Processes, Client Lists, Work Samples. This made the RFP process much easier.
New business intelligence on prospective clients: current news, press releases, staffing info, current work, agency relationships, etc.
Intelligence on competitor agencies: client lists, news updates, press releases, staff changes, etc.
Electronic prospective client data base, a collection of prospective client data from sources such as The List.
Electronic samples of the agency’s creative work and a system to add new work consistently.
Web-based microsites for prospective clients, specific to certain areas such as healthcare and leisure products. Two of the agency’s core strengths.
Downloadable Agency Fact Sheet and Agency Brochures that were specific to certain prospective client groups.
Offices:
Quiet, comfortable, individual offices, designed for long hours, for the entire new business team.
Nice common areas for collaborative discussions.
Our own kitchen area with bar seating. A nice plus for prospective client meetings as well as meetings for our our agency staff.
Our offices included a large balcony overlooking the city of Nashville, where we also entertained prospective clients, after hour drinks, grilling, etc.
Having our own space on a separate floor of the agency allowed us to stay rifled focused on new business. Making calls, gathering intelligence, cultivating and engaging our prospects. It was amazing the amount of work we were able to do.
Systems were in place to keep us in the loop of the new creative work and we had consistent communications with our staff regarding the efforts of the new business team working on their behalf. We still participated in the monthly and quarterly meetings but avoided being brought in for a lot of the daily meetings that went on in one of the agency’s other four conference rooms.
I hope this can serve to help spark your own ideas for creating a space for your agency’s new business. Be sure and share some of your best ideas us.
Out of a a group of 53 ad agencies, Murdoch Marketing’s blog, We Think. We Can. Blog., was selected as Fuel Lines’s Blog of the Month for June capturing 40% of the votes casts. They are a 27 year old full service agency located in Holland, MI.
Why We Get Social
We Think. We Can. Social Media – Our clients know first hand how seriously We Do social media. Whether it’s managing multiple Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts, blogging for our clients or creating viral videos, we know that at the end of the day only one thing matters – tangible results. That’s why we measure. Our social media metrics track interactions, site visits, analytics and rankings. And the fun doesn’t stop there. We drill down into the social media-sphere to ensure our clients are forming valuable relationships with their audience. – Murdoch Marketing
Ad agencies all need an integrated social media strategy if they are ever going to see the payoff from their participation in social media. An agency blog should be the central component. The place you can drive targeted online traffic through SEO, Twitter, email newsletters, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The blog becomes the “gateway” to your agency and the“face” of your agency. As important as it was to have an agency website, it is now equally important to have an agency blog.
But … having a blog isn’t something you check off your list of social media “to do list.” Nor is it a place to lead with agency capabilities and credentials. It must be of benefit to your audience.
Here is a collection of agency blogging resources:
Posted by Michael Gass 
