It’s time for you to vote for your favorite agency blog for the month of November. 10 ad agency blogs have been submitted to FUEL LINES. The winner will be featured on FUEL LINES throughout the month of December.
These are the 10 agency blogs submitted for the month of November:
SPURspectives, Spur Communications, Overland Park, KS
Vote Now for Your Favorite
Please note: Anyone may submit an agency blog. It’s up to FUEL LINE readers to decide which agencies are doing it best and truly understand social media.
Written by All of Us, The Slack Barshinger agency’s blog, Chicago, IL, was selected by FUEL LINE readers as the Agency Blog of the Month for October. They received 94 of the 196 votes cast.
Submityour favorite ad agency blog to be considered for Blog of the month for December
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Michael Gass, agency new business consultant, primarily to small and mid-size advertising agencies, utilizing both traditional and new media tools.
5. Use Creativity to Build Awareness for Your Ad Agency
Ad agencies are all being pushed, prodded and poked by their clients to explore this new emerging medial.
Marketing is changing from the idea of “intercepting” attention to “creating” attention.
People don’t want impersonal sales messages broadcast at them. They want to be invited into useful or entertaining engagements with advertisers where they remain in control of the experience.
Demonstrate to your clients and prospective clients your agency’s ability to creatively build traffic to your agency’s blog. Issue a challenge to your staff to use their creative genius to come up with unique ideas to promote your agency using new media tools. Build awareness for your agency and demonstrate abilities of what it can do for its clients.
Noah Brier is the creator of a new Web site that shows visitors the logos of big companies and asks them to type in the first word or phrase that popped into their head upon seeing the logo. It’s called Brand Tags, and in just a few days the site attracted more than 40,000 visitors and about 183,000 individual responses, according to Mr. Brier.
His thinking:
“If brands exist as the sum of all thoughts in someone’s head, then if you ask a bunch of people what a brand is and make a tag cloud, you should have a pretty accurate look at what the brand represents.”
Brier’s Web site now has over 1.1 million + tags and counting.
Consider the possibilities unleashing the next great idea promoting your agency’s blog.
4. Blogs are one of the most notable social media tools.
Marketing methods have changed significantly. Many of the tools and tactics accompanying the rise of social media are inexpensive and highly effective, regardless of an ad agency’s size.
It was once said that,
“Every business needs a Web site.” Today it’s, “every business needs a blog.”
No matter what your industry, your prospects have come to expect a blog from your business. This is particularly true of ad agencies, but most are slow to get on board.
I’m telling you that a blog is becoming the “gateway” for ad agencies.
Blogs are also necessary tool for agency new business. With other agencies lagging behind, it is an excellent opportunity for your agency to gain a significant advantage over your competition by getting on board now.
And if you study some of the more popular blogs, it’s easy to see why:
Blog content is more naturally conversational; conversational content is viewed as educational and not sales oriented.
Blog content changes often, giving your customers fresh reasons to return.
Blog readers can contribute directly to content by adding comments and participating in dialogue.
Blogs must be written to the benefit of the target audience. It isn’t a platform to brag and boast about your agency.
There are other practical reasons for having an agency blog:
Posting content frequently makes you a better communicator and allows you to gain expert status. You don’t know what you know until you write it down.
Branding your agency is a difficult exercise. Most agencies struggle to differentiate themselves. I’ve found that blogging helps agencies better articulate what they do, how they do it and why they are different from their competitors.
One of the most practical reasons to start and promote a blog is that it increases search engines optimization and is much better than for youragency’s website. SEO marketing is a necessity for any company and important to your agency.
“Instead of finding your prospects, the “new” new business paradigm for social media is to help your prospective clients find your agency.”
Just having a blog and posting content allows your agency to gain much better exposure from search engines.
Creating an effective blog can feel like a lot of work, but the benefits will add up over time and give your agency a significant competitive advantage.You’ll be able to demonstrate to prospective clients how you have used social media to grow your agency.
“No single thing in the last fifteen years, professionally, has been more important to my life than blogging. It has changed my life, it has changed my perspective, it has changed my intellectual outlook, it’s changed my emotional outlook (and it’s the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude that I’ve ever had.)” Business Guru, Tom Peters
A strong point of differentiation from your agency’s competitors, when you are sitting across from a prospect and can demonstrate that you“practice what you preach” and that your agency uses the very tools you recommend to your clients.
Social media is revolutionizing advertising as we know it, because motives matter.
“The people making millions of dollars a month DID NOT sign up to make money. The people making pennies a month DID. The best, widest-spreading ideas are done for the sake of the idea, not for the dollar.” Seth Godin
“If you don’t know where you want to be, it hardly matters which direction you take.”
Usually, you start with a plan but I think it’s important that you have first hand “experience” with the social media tools that are available. Get a feel for where your target audience “hangs out” online, what’s their interests, their challenges, what information are they searching for and what are the best channels of communication to reach them, etc.
Once you’ve had a taste of the tools and a feel for how they can be used to promote your agency, the next step is to develop a “simple” plan of action.
At the core of every good team there’s a good plan. Along with the plan, having a person who pulls everything together. Building a Social Media Marketing plan and determine what the objective of the campaign is and therefore what tools should be utilized and how.
It is useful to step back and think strategically about where and how you’re going to commit your marketing resources online. Tap into the creativity of your staff to create a simple social media marketing plan.
POST is one of the most effective acronyms since the four P’s of marketing. It’s a four-step approach that helps marketers define a social media marketing plan for their business and/or clients.
The POST method is the heart and soul of the book, Groundswell, written by Forrestter Research analysts, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoffand. It is highlighted in Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell blog post, The POST Method: A systematic approach to social strategy. The POST Method serves as a guide to help you determine the right strategy for the right audience.
Your purpose should dictate strategy and the tactics used for reaching desired goals. A few common outcomes for your social media marketing efforts should include:
Gain insight into your target audience- You can use all the qualitative data you want, but some of the most interesting and helpful market research can be found within the social communities where your prospective clients interact, share information and make recommendations.
Link building for traffic and SEO- According to Marketing Sherpa, 80-90% of business to business transactions begin with a search on the web. Creating linkbait and promoting it to social media news and bookmarking sites can attract a slew of links from bloggers that read them. Creating value for the community is not the only rule, creating value and behaving according to formal and unwritten rules is what sustains social media sourced link building.
Build brand visibility and authority- You’ve heard it before, “Conversations are happening online about your agency’s brand, with or without you.” You might as well participate and do so in a way that pays close attention to the interests and needs of your prospective clients – providing them with information and interactions that further support your agency’s brand.
I’ve heard agency principals say that they have better things to do than write blog posts and update their status on Facebook. In the little picture of daily demands, this may be true, but in the bigger picture of using these tools to truly understand an emerging medium they don’t.
You can attend conferences and training sessions regarding social media all day long, but the only way to truly learn it is to experience it for yourself, and learn along with everyone else trying to stay ahead of the communication’s technology curve.
Again, I believe the best way to learn social media is to use it to promote your own agency. It is a different means of communication and it must be done correctly for it to be effective.
Blogs and forums allow agencies to take off their professional mask and get comfortable with their potential clients. It provides a comfortable, informal voice for your agency.
Social media allows prospective clients to check under your hood, kick the tires, examine the interior and when they are ready, they will engage you.
Discover where your target audiences are online and join them there. Instead of waiting for our audiences to come to your Web site or blog, join the conversation wherever it is—on users’ blogs, Web forums, FaceBook, MySpace or wikis. You’ll build relationships and trust.
Prospective clients want to work with people they know and people they trust.
Eric Kintz, a Hewlett-Packard marketing exec and blogger said: “I think they [agencies] are somewhat helping. But they need to show how social media has helped them further their own agenda. So if an ad agency comes to me, I’d ask if they have their own page on a social network site? Are they posting videos on YouTube? Do they have their own blog? And how has it helped them in their own business?”
Ad agencies have alot of non-traditional marketing tools now available to promote their agency. It is important that they understand how to use these tools because today’s clients are more resistive to traditional marketing practices.
Prospective Clients:
Don’t want to be interrupted
Have found ways to screen out, throw out and tune out unwanted marketing messages
Use online tools and techniques to seize control of their agency selection process
Seek out the information they want when they want it
Are finding their agency, rather than the agency finding them.
First and foremost, it is critical that you and your staff understand and participate in social media by learning about it firsthand. One of the best ways you can learn is to develop a blog site for your agency. Just remember that motive matters. It is not about your agency, it is about benefiting your audience. If done correctly, you will be amazed at the response.
Holland + Holland Advertising, a small ad agency in Birmingham, AL recently started a blog, She-conomy. The president and creative director, Stephanie Holland, is one of the few female creative directors in the country. Only 3% of creative directors are women but 85% of brand purchases are made by women. The agency’s blog site provides a clear point of differentiation from its competitors and a great opportunity to build a prospective client audience targeting men advertisers by helping them learn how to market to women.
Having your agency’s own agency blog will also help by:
Defining your target audience
Learning to write specifically to their needs
Learning the basics of Search Engine Optimization so your target audience can easily find your agency
Establishing a clear point of differentiation
Testing your message
Identifying the most important marketing challenges and obstacles your target audience is facing and providing solutions
You will also better understand YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr, digg, MySpace, and Technorati.
Learn and use these great tools to reach your target audience. In turn, you will also understand how Social Media works and can better help your clients! A win-win.
I’ve recommended social media tools for agency new business. There are still a number of agencies and PR firms that haven’t quite figured out what social media is much less utilize it to generate new business leads. Mark Hopkins provides helpful insight in his recent Mashable blog post Just What is Social Media Exactly?
“When you look at it in context of the terms “new media”, “old media” and “social media”, there’s some implied context. The media part of that doesn’t refer to the message, but the methods by which that message is conveyed.
This means the newspaper, the television, and the radio when you’re talking about Old Media. Moving forward into New Media, it starts with blogs and podcasts and authorship-centric tools like Twitter, YouTube and the other variants of online video and microblogging distribution.
Social Media is a term that encompasses the platforms of New Media, but also implies the inclusion of systems like FriendFeed, Facebook, and other things typically thought of as social networking. The idea is that they are media platforms with social components and public communication channels.
“80% of decision makers say they found the vendor, not the other way around.”
The growth of Social Media is dramatically impacting how agencies promote themselves.
As Social Media hits the mainstream, I thought agency readers would enjoy a few excerpts from John Miller’s, “Marketing 2.0 Hits a Tipping Point.” This article was featured in the CMO Council’s Marketing Outlook 2008 study.
“Marketing 2.0 is by no means a brand new idea, but this year’s Marketing Outlook survey demonstrates that 2008 is the year it will tip into the mainstream.”
Comparing Traditional Marketing with Social Marketing:
Gaining the Prospects Attention
Traditional Marketing uses push marketing tactics, such as cold calls and unsolicited email, that work but only if they interrupt the customer’s attention.
Social Marketing uses “behavioral marketing” techniques to engage when and how consumers want, in direct response to behaviors and buying signals.
Controlling the Message
Traditional Marketing, markets toprospects. Marketers attempt to control the message as well as the customer’s buying cycle and agenda.
Social Marketing, customers interact with each other, and marketers nurture passion and engagement from their best customers – marketing with prospects.
Measuring ROI and Accountability
Traditional Marketing was characterized by a severely limited ability to demonstrate ROI and marketing accountability, which led to the perception that marketing is a cost center.
Social Marketing gives marketers the ability to measure the bottom-line impact of every marketing activity, to quantify the impact of changes to marketing budgets, and to demonstrate marketing’s impact on revenue.
Today’s CMO lives in a world where traditional marketing practices are no longer acceptable.
Consumers:
Don’t want to be interrupted
Have found ways to screen out, throw out and tune out unwanted marketing messages
Use online tools and techniques to seize control of their buying process
Seek out the information they want when they want it
How does this impact ad agency new business?
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 Social Marketing strategies.
George Morris, Client Services Manager at Imulus, a web design and marketing solutions company, in the Denver/Boulder region, was kind enough to ask me to write a guest blog post on ROI and Social Media. George and I became acquainted through Twitter. I appreciate his invitation and you can read my article on their blog site imulus/insights.
Many principles of small-to mid-size ad agencies or PR firms haven’t yet decided whether they should participate in Social Media. You need to know that conversations regarding your agency take place every day with or without you. These conversations can greatly curtail agency new business.
Below is a TweetBeep alert that I signed up for the key word “ad agency.” As you can tell from this alert it would be a good idea to monitor your agency’s brand along with the brands of your clients. Over the weekend, there was a groundswell against Motrin’s latest viral advertisement that was rejected by mothers in Twitter, spread to blogs, and YouTube.
Jeremiah Owyang provides 5 lessons learned from the Motrin Moms backlash:
Always test your campaign with a small segment first
Always have staff on hand to be prepared to respond during the weekend
Don’t launch a campaign right before the weekend unless you’re prepared to respond
The participants have the power, so participate
For better or for worse, more influencers are talking about Motrin than ever before
Remember: Negative online comments such as these are timeless.
Blogs are becoming the “gateway” to learning about your agency. Your agency’s Web site is becoming an online brochure.
As important as it was to have an agency Website it is now as important to have an agency blog.
Blogs are a fantastic agency new business tool, but only if done right.
People will flock to your blog site primarily because of good content. Your key target audience has questions you provide answers. It is that simple.
You will soon find that content is even more important than search engine placement. With good content you’ll have recurring visitors eager for your latest update. Relying on unique visitors will not give you the traffic that is sustainable. You must find a way that would encourage previous visitors to return to your site as well. This is what good content does.
Below are some simple steps that will help you build a content driven site:
Develop the layout that is simple and pleasant to the eyes. Focus your visitors to the content you want to share. Let your content carry your web pages.
Do your research. Make your content as comprehensive as possible, and your visitors won’t have to look elsewhere to find the answers they are seeking.
When writing your content, make sure that the first part of your piece is capable of grabbing your visitors’ interest. The challenge lies in capturing their interests and giving them what they want. This would compel them to read on and stay.
Always update your site with new content. Not only will the search engines love this, resulting in a higher page rank for your site, but your visitors will likewise be encouraged to return to your site for the new information.
Blogs are much easier to set up and keep updated than your agency Web site. Once you have typed your entries, all you have to do is to click on a button to publish them. Draw prospective clients with the kind of content that keeps them coming back for more.
Sigma Group a full-service advertising agency with 65 staff members, located in Ordell, NJ is using PR to attract new business. They are being aggressing in an economic downturn and seizing the opportunity by challenging advertisers, who normally only work with large global and national agencies, to look give smaller agencies a look in 2009.
Shannon Morris, president of Sigma Group says, “You don’t have to sacrifice good, smart, strategic creative and media products by working with an agency our size. We are finding that larger brands who did not look at midsized agencies in the past are looking to make their dollars work harder and are turning to a more approachable midsized agency offering all of the same services … but perhaps less bells and whistles. A more ‘no-nonsense’ approach to well-executed media and marketing plans.”
Sigma Group reminds advertisers that the larger advertising agencies may offer big names, award-winning work, and departmentalized experts, they often come with inflexible, high price tags. Advertisers can find significant cost savings by choosing a more moderate moderate-sized agency.
Instead of press releases all about your agency, your latest hire, new business win, etc.m use them to speak to the benefit of your prospective client audiences.
Sigma Group provides a great example of using PR the right way.
Read the ABOUT page of any agency’s website or read through some of their promotional material or listen to their capabilities presentation and you are likely to read and hear the same descriptions over and over again.
Nothing new, certainly nothing differentiating, even if they say, “but it’s really true about our agency. We really are strategic. We really are fun to work with, yada, yada, yada.”
Here are the ten things agencies are most likely to say about themselves:
We’re full service
We offer comprehensive solutions
We provide great ideas
We are results oriented
We use an integrated marketing approach
We have a wide range of experience
We are strategic
We have great chemistry
We provide you with our best people
We have award winning creative
Sound familiar? Sound the same? Care to add to this list?
Agencies commonly fail to differentiate themselves. They typically focus on what makes them the same instead of what makes them different and that is why they look and sound the same to prospective clients.
Agency’s that try to appeal to everyone are appealing to no one.
A diverse portfolio of clients, for small and midsize agencies, is not a sign of strength but a sign of weakness.
“No single thing in the last fifteen years, professionally, has been more important to my life than blogging. It has changed my life, it has changed my perspective, it has changed my intellectual outlook, it’s changed my emotional outlook (and it’s the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude that I’ve ever had.)” Business Guru, Tom Peters
Do you know which of your agency’s clients is your most important?
There are just over 12,000 advertising agencies in America. The vast majority look and sound just alike. Any wonder that most clients have a hard time distinguishing one agency from another. There is nothing unique about them at all.
Finding a brilliant positioning is one of the most important and rewarding experiences an agency can undertake. You’ve spent so much time and effort working on other people’s brands you need to make the decision to work on your very own.
Given the economic crisis and predictions for 2009 the remaining two months of 2008 perfect time to commit to putting into practice that your agency is going to be your most important client.
There is no better use of your time than thinking about how to set your agency apart from the competition. But this is not a simple process that is resolved quickly. To produce a solid positioning that is lasting it must involve all the major stakeholders: principals, management and staff. It will most likely exceed the time you would normally commit to developing a clients brand.
Think narrow and deep rather than wide and shallow.
If you are willing to take the time to dig deep and narrow for your brand, you will greatly expand the breadth of your agency. You will not be limited to business because of your agency’s location.
Plus, the more focused and defined your agency brand becomes, the more you can charge for your services.
Who charges more for their services, the family doctor or a neurosurgeon? A specialist makes more money and a good surgeon will attract business from all over the country and doesn’t have to compete with all the other physicians just other neurosurgeons. For the ad agency, clients will know who you are and what you stand for and as importantly so will you.
Who charges more for their services, the family doctor or a neurosurgeon?
Many agency principals agree to initiate the process only to lose focus and interest within a few weeks. They have to set the example. If its not important to you, it wont be important to your staff and this is the most important process your agency will ever undertake.
Your agency is probably doing a good job of differentiating your clients brand and adding value to their companies. Now is the time to add some value to your own by applying the same kinds of strategies and that you use to market your clients brands to marketing your agency’s brand. You treat your agency with the same importance as you would with any client. The difference however is that your agency is your most important client.
David Armano, AdAge, writes, “As an individual, my blog is one of the most effective manifestations of “marketing” I could have produced for myself. Unconventional times call for unconventional tactics.”
Sally Falkow is an acknowledged expert in Internet marketing strategy – blogs, RSS feeds, online news and social media. She recently posted an article To Blog or not to Blog? That is the Question
According to the 2008 State of the Blogosphere from Technorati, a little more than half the companies in North America do not have a blog. So that means that just under half do. Why are they spending their time blogging?
Lynette at the MIndless Babble Blog says that based on the Technorati numbers, blogging should be a part of every business’s marketing or PR strategy:
46% of all bloggers are professional bloggers. This may mean that they’re writing a corporate blog, or simply writing about the industry that their company is in, while not necessarily mentioning their company at all.
This equates to just over 84.5 million bloggers that are, in essence, business bloggers. If your company doesn’t have some kind of blog presence, that’s potentially 84.5 million businesses ahead of you when it comes to reaching your target audience.
Online sales in 2007 totaled $260 billion. Blogs are known to increase awareness of new products and offers from companies. Less than half are utilizing this, which means that 1 out of 2 companies are losing a large part of $260 billion dollars of online income.
If this is true of companies, how much more should it be part of every ad agency’s new business strategy?
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.
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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 
