FUEL LINES Fueling Ad Agency New Business Through Social Media

Your ad agency’s blog should be a central component to your social media strategy for new business. It is the site that you want to bring your prospective client audience to, the gateway and face of your agency.

“Build it and they will come,” is not the answer to generate traffic to your agency’s blog. You must employ proactive tactics to create awareness and interest among prospective clients. The more traffic that you can generate, from among your target audience, the more inbound new business leads that will follow.

Denise Wakeman, Online Marketing Advisor and Founder of The Blog Squad, has created an excellent list of tips to generate traffic to you blog. I would encourage you to create a list of “to dos” from her suggestions. For more details, be sure to check out her article,“19 Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Blog”

Here are the 19 tips:

1. Publish as frequently as possible
2. Pay attention to the headlines (blog post titles)
3. Send an email broadcast
4. Add a link in your email signature
5. Include multiple subscription options on your blog
6. Try article marketing
7. Comment on blogs in your industry
8. Do some guest posting
9. Conduct surveys and polls
10. Submit your blog to directories
11. Make a Google profile
12. Syndicate to Twitter
13. Syndicate Facebook
14. Syndicate to LinkedIn
15. Use Hootsuite
16. Distribute your video
17. Add the retweet button to your posts
18. Consider share buttons
19. Use social bookmarking

Denise’s list isn’t an exhaustive list of tactics but these are the core that you need for your own list. Just be sure that someone from your agency is charged with implementing it.

I would add at least six additional tips:

1. Make your target audience crystal clear. If you can’t clearly and narrowly define your audience you wont build significant traffic.
2. Optimize your posts content for search. Identify and dominate a few key words that your target audience will most likely use to find you. Use these words consistently in your posts titles and copy.
3. Knowledge is power. Get in the habit of checking your blogs analytics frequently. Keep it simple, but know at least daily the number of unique visitors, page views, top posts, how people got to your blog, search terms and incoming links.
4. Don’t be afraid to repurpose older  blog content through multiple social media channels. Posts that I’ve written 3 years ago is still pertinent and continues to generate traffic to my blog.
5. One thing to not do that will impact traffic. Don’t sell! The moment you start to sell on your blog is when you will most likely LOSE your audience.
6. Identify who your audience is in your post titles. This is especially helpful when you repurpose your content on Twitter and an important part of SEO for your blog.

Here are some resources to help you further create an agency blog for new business:

• 50 Blog Post Ideas to Fuel Your Ad Agency’s Blog
• Top 5 Benefits for Having an Agency Blog
• Top Ten Reasons Your Ad Agency Should Blog
• 10 Reasons Advertising Agencies Shouldn’t Blog
• 40 Ways to Take Your Ad Agency’s Blog to the Next Level
• How to Write Your Ad Agency’s Blog
• Agency Resources for Blogging and Social Media
• Ad Agency New Business Leads From a Blog?
• Ad Agencies Should Blog or Not Blog?
• Bob Hoffman’s Blog, An Example for Ad Agency CEOs?
• For Ad Agency New Business Fish with the Right Bait
• Ad Agencies: 8 Ingredients for Blog Post Success
• Ad Agencies on Target by Blogging for New Business
• Ad Agency Hill Holiday dumps website for “all-blog format”