A Building Block for a Successful Agency New Business Program – Consistency
Definition: con·sis·tent
adj = able to maintain a particular standard or repeat a particular task with minimal variation
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.
Your new business activities must be sustainable at the times when your agency is at its busiest. Too often new business development is put on the back burner until existing business decreases and a downturn begins. That creates a roller coaster effect on your agency’s pipeline of prospects which impacts agency income and causes you to accept the wrong type of client, from the wrong pool of prospects which do not fit your agency’s strengths and core competencies.
To be consistent, any agency new business program must be realistically achievable within the culture and resources of the agency, have a manager who is held accountable for its execution and top management must be intimately involved in the process.
Look for ways to simplify your processes. It may also be wise to outsource some services when possible. If you can’t be consistent promoting your agency your stop and go efforts wont be effective.
When that key account departs, getting serious about new business is too late.
“In an age of me-too products and instant communication, keeping up with the competition isn’t a winning strategy. Today you have to out-position, out-maneuver, and out-design them. Discover radical differentiation—the number one strategy of high-performance brands. The new rule? When everybody zigs, zag.”
Martin Neumeier, President of the brand agency Neutron and author of the book Zag, the power of differentiation.
I’m hearing from a number of agencies that social media is providing new business opportunities. They are up selling social media marketing services to current clients and increasing new business opportunities with prospective clients. They also are using social media for their own promotional efforts.
Social Media is not only a hot topic for clients but can also generate new business for your agency.
“We needed to use (Guerrero) to reach all those customers who may not be usual symphony-goers,” said S.A. Habib, founder of Nashville-based Locomotion Creative, the agency that designed the commercials.
“We thought he could reach a more youthful market, maybe an ethnic market, maybe audiences that wouldn’t consider going otherwise.”
The campaign has been a huge success for their client and has generated lots of buzz for the agency which has been busy capitalizing on it. Sending an email to their prospective clients with a link to the story. A lot of agencies would let this kind of an opportunity pass without capitalizing on it because they do not do for themselves what they do for their clients.
With the sluggish economy and companies pulling back on their ad budgets, this is actually a great time to up-sell your current clients using new media and gain new business from prospective clients.
Locomotion is on an upswing during a recessionary period. They have prepared their agency to be digitally ready. They have a good understanding of how social media works and how to use it correctly. They are providing fresh thinking for clients and are even using social marketing to build awareness for their agency with prospective clients.
View one of the Nashville Symphony’s videos created for the campaign
This is one of the four 15-second spots produced by Locomotion Creative for the Symphony.
The other three show Guerrero conducting fountains while kids play in them, playing drums with a band, and offering advice on a game of dominoes in a local taqueria. They’re fun and effective. One of the ways in which they’re the most effective is by showing Guerrero in his tuxedo. He’s doing things that subtly undermine the idea that the formal trappings of the concert hall are signifiers of importance and seriousness. Guerrero’s tuxedo is just the costume that he wears.
Update on the Nashville Symphony’s campaign:
It’s hard to say how effective the web marketing blitz has been–the ads posted to YouTube have, as of today, gotten an average of only 510 views each–but whether it’s attributable to the better TV spots, the web marketing, or both, something is working. On July 19, the first day of single ticket sales, they sold $130,000 in single-concert tickets; last year that number was $80,000.
Your headline determines 95% of the success of an article in traditional copywriting.
Article marketing success on the internet must take into consideration how the article is found by readers.
EzineArticles Training Series: An Introduction to Article Writing and Marketing provides some helpful information that you can use to assure that your target audience discovers your online articles and thus discovers your agency.
Myth:
Most people will read your articles because they came to a website and started browsing just like they do if they were at a local book store.
Fact:
Most people search the Internet using one of the major search engines. They will type in between 1 to 5 keywords that are related to the topic of the article or information they are looking to locate. The search engine will then deliver results that best match the human’s interest.
Goal:
Find your articles in the search engine results for the keywords and topics that are most relevant to the content of your article. Most search engines give heavier weight to the first 3-5 keywords and a lower priority to the rest.
The first 3-5 words of your Article Title determine the success of your article in terms of how much traffic your article will generate back to your website. Create keyword-rich article titles that match the most commonly searched keywords for your topic.
You can maximize your article marketing strategy by understanding keyword research and creating keyword-rich, intelligent article titles. You can create massive amounts of traffic to your articles and website thanks to the search engines who love smart, keyword-rich titles.
Here are some Keyword Research sites to help you create your keyword-rich Article Titles:
Think like your target audience, brainstorm and find the perfect target keywords your target audience is likely to use while searching the net.
With a majority of decision makers saying they found the vendor, The smart ad agencies will be the ones which make sure they can be found when and where the prospect is looking! Agencies need to promote themselves using 2.0 marketing strategies.
Having a working knowledge of social media isn’t even an option for an agency’s new business director – it’s mandatory.
Today it’s almost impossible to have a discussion about branding and marketing without considering the latest wave of how people are using “social media”. That is also true of your agency’s brand and self marketing efforts. Social media is having a big impact on how agency’s promote themselves and how they are found online by their prospective client audiences.
So before hiring someone responsible for your agency’s new business efforts, in addition to the questions regarding their new business expertise, think about asking some additional questions like these. How they answer will tell you what they really know about social media.
Do you read blogs? Which ones?
Do you have a personal blog? What’s it about?
What are the social networks do you participate in?
Have you ever uploaded a video online? What program did you use to do it?
What’s your favorite search engine. Why?
Have you ever used an online classified service such as craigslist?
Besides making phone calls—how else do you use your mobile phone?
Have you ever registered a domain name?
Do you use social bookmarks or tagging?
Do you use a feed reader of some sort? Which one? Why?
Now think about these questions. What are you looking for in the answers? You are looking for empathy. You are looking for a sense of understanding that only comes with experiencing something for yourself. You are looking for honesty and authenticity. And you are looking for credibility. It’s not important to have done everything in this list—but for this new paradigm for agency new business, it’s critical to have done SOME of it.
When focus and differentiation are powered by a trend, the result is a charismatic brand that customers wouldn’t trade for love nor money. It’s the difference between paddling a surfboard and riding a wave. Neutron, LLC
Your ad agency’s new business program needs to pay attention to social media. Like it or not, Web 2.0 is now mainstream and needs to find its way into your agency’s self promotional mix. Agencies would be wise to pick technologies like blogs or communities first instead of focusing on what they want to accomplish. Smart marketers recognize that social media work best when used to listen to prospective clients talk about ideas, concerns, and desires — and not for selling.
You should also make sure to execute online tactics like search and email marketing to keep your agency’s lead generation pump primed while integrating social tactics into your new business program.
“The common failing among agencies seeking new business,” says agency search consultant Bob Lundin, “is their inability or unwillingness to name what they stand for and market themselves on distinguishable differences.”
In the midst of so much financial news that is doom and gloom, I thought you might enjoy a bit of lightheartedness created by the Hollywood, Florida agency, AdExcellence.
It is an innovative online platform that allows experts to share knowledge, expertise, wisdom and receive traffic back to their website/blog in return. That makes it a great, no cost, agency new business tool. It can help position you as an expert to your target audience and positions your agency so that it can be found.
Here is additional information about this unique service:
Source of quality, expert content in the form of short, informative and educational or entertaining articles.
A site that only accepts original articles where the author has an exclusive right to the content.
Perfect for email newsletter publishers looking for content they can syndicate for the benefit of their members.
Advertising supported so that our core services to the market can be FREE.
Their staff provides great personal service, timely feedback and technical assistance.
According to a research report by BPM Forum, over 80% of generated leads are never followed up on, are dropped, or are mishandled.
Ad agencies often are busy and have a tendency to neglect time sensitive leads that they already have in-house, just waiting for follow-up.
It’s also been my experience that with proactively generated leads, 25% are short-term while 75% are long-term leads. If you’re focused on the short-term, you might be missing out on 3/4ths of your new business opportunities.
Blogging is the rage these days but it isn’t for everybody and it’s not for every ad agency. Here are five reasons NOT to start an agency blog:
Your target audience doesn’t read blogs. If you prospective clients aren’t the blog-reading type, the time and effort involved in starting and maintaing a blog might exceed the potential benefit.
Your agency isn’t exactly tech-savvy. If technology just isn’t your agency’s thing, think twice before starting a blog. The learning curve may be to steep to make good business sense. I just wouldn’t let me clients and potential clients know.
Your agency’s business model isn’t based on a uniqueness. If your ad agency offers services that really don’t differ all that much from those provided by your competitor agencies, there might not be much point in blogging.
Your to agency is to busy. But when is life not busy at an ad agency. Your clients work may be more important than your own.
You’re a seller not a writer. You can easily describe your agency in a moments notice. You can clearly articulate how your agency is different without sounding just like all of the other ad agencies.
If you want to know why an ad agency should consider a blog for agency new business, check out some of my other blog post articles:
“Sadly, most agencies still don’t get the new space, or if they do, they lightly gloss it over by saying “Oh yeah, we’ve a blog” and when I look, it’s a bunch of self-serving posts written by a variety of different folks with little strategy and few comments.” - Jeremiah Owyang, former Forrester Sr Analyst: Social Computing and current Web Strategist.
Digital marketing is a hot topic with clients and prospective clients. Many agencies are up selling digital services to their current clients and landing new business offering prospective clients fresh online marketing ideas.
Jason Baer is President of Convince & Convert, a digital marketing consultancy to small and mid-sized ad agencies and PR firms. Below is a compilation of Jason’s top questions to determine if your agency is digital ready:
Have you used the term cyber, e- or digital anything in the past year?
Have you visited a social networking site this year like Facebook, Myspace or LinkedIn?
Does your agency have MySpace/Facebook or Wikipedia page or has it created one for a client?
Do you use an RSS reader?
Do you know the number of inbound links to your agency’s Website?
Do you watch TV shows or new on something other than an actual television (ipod, hulu.com, etc.)?
Does your agency have its own blog?
Has your agency launched a mobile marketing campaign for a client?
Has your agency engaged in subject line testing for client email blasts?
Have you looked at a client’s Website statistic reports in the last year?
“For ad agency new business make your focus narrow and deep rather than wide and shallow.”
“As a general rule ad agencies try to be all things to all clients for fear of losing potential business. We were no different. But narrowing our focus on a particular target audience gives us a much better focus for new business and has led to more opportunities than we could have imagined.” - Stephanie Holland, President/Creative Director Holland + Holland Advertising
Blogworld Expo recently released some blogging statistics that is of importance to ad agencies. Especially with client interest in Web 2.0. and social marketing.
More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
Over 57 million Americns read blogs..
89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
At one time it was said, “every business needs a Web site.” Today it’s, “every business needs a blog.”
A blog will become the gateway to your agency, make your agency easier to find and provide a reason to visit online often. Your agency’s Web site becomes more your agency’s online brochure. That’s good news for the majority of agencies that know how difficult it is to redesign and update their Web site!
Welcome to my blog, FUEL LINES: The best business development tips, tactics, practices and trends to help ad agencies, PR firms and digital shops create a more clearly defined focus and differentiating business strategy.
Click here to listen to my experience using social media from an ad agency new business perspective, BlogTalkRadio interview conducted by Trey Pennington
Michael Gass, agency new business consultant, primarily to small and mid-size advertising agencies, utilizing both traditional and new media tools.
Posted by Michael Gass 
, the power of differentiation. 
