New Business

10 Ways To Advertise Your Advertising Agency

Peter · March 27, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Do you advertise your advertising agency?

Based on my industry experience, most do not. This means that agencies are not aiming and tailoring their primary sales messages to their target audiences.

This post offers 10 ways to advertise your advertising agency as well as the why you should to it, like, yesterday.

Caveat: You should seriously consider advertising your advertising agency. However, you should first run a smart, consistent account-based marketing program to directly drive agency awareness to your best prospects.

Advertising – A Definition

Just for the heck of it, and to get us all on the same page, here is a definition of advertising. I use ‘advertising’ as a universal term for marketing communications companies.

Advertising is a means of communication with the users (or, non-users) of a product or service. Advertisements are messages paid for by those who send them and are intended to inform or influence people who receive them, as defined by the Advertising Association of the UK.

Why An Advertising Agency Should Advertise

There are four reasons an agency should advertise.

You want to be where prospective clients look for agencies.
You want to put your agency right in front of the right prospects (and even busy agency search consultants like Laura Bajkowski) 24/7.
You want to borrow the interest that on and offline publications can deliver.
You want to prove that you believe in advertising and that you are super creative.

10 Advertising Platforms Your Agency Should Consider

WARNING: Most likely, your agency cannot create and run efforts on all of these platforms. Roll them out based on your marketing plan.

TEST: Test everything. Do more of what works and less of what does not. Yeah, I’m being very obvious. But, testing is the mantra. Your clients want ROI. You do too and running your own programs may make you a better judge of how to judge success across advertising channels.

In addition to listing the ad platforms, I am also giving some, not all, of the reasons that a local/regional agency and an expert agency (example, lead gen B2B agency) should choose the platform. This is meant as food for thought. There are too many types of agencies for me to give every iteration. But, you get it.

Update: It is five hours after I wrote this. I now have number 11. It’s at the bottom of the list.

1. Google AdWords.

Every client in need of a new agency searches on Google. If you are not on page one for the search, buy the position.

Do keyword research and buy the keywords that meet your reach objectives.

Local/regional agency. It would be insane to not try to be on Google’s page one for your location. Example: if you are based in Seattle, buy ‘Seattle advertising agency’ or ‘Seattle SEO agency.’

Expert. Buy ‘Lead generation agency’ or ‘high tech leads agency.’ Do you want Purina as a client? Think about what their marketing team searches on.

2. YouTube.

I have an agency client that produces an interview with marketing leaders every month. They blast them out in emails, on their blog and… yup, leverage the power of the number two search engine to aim their videos at their audience. The agency also retargets. Since there are fewer results on YouTube than on Google, the agency gets more attention (and, yup, these videos also turn high up in Google searches.)

It would real easy for a local agency, most are, to ‘own’ their town’s video world. How about a weekly where to eat in Kansas City series shot on an iPhone?

Need inspiration? Here is john st.’s rather viral video (as of writing it has 2,447,266 views) about the power of Catvertising. Frankly, has any other agency ever had over 2 million views?

3. Advertising Agency Directories.

This is a serious no-brainer that many agencies do not take advantage of. In many cases, an agency directory is on Google’s page one and lists your competitors.

Make sure you are every relevant agency directory and spend the cash if it nets you a higher position or allows you to deliver more information (i.e. your work) and, especially, a link back to your website. [Read more…] about 10 Ways To Advertise Your Advertising Agency

Advertising Agency Business Development & Cold Calling

Peter · March 5, 2019 · 1 Comment

Eeeew, Advertising Agency Cold Calling

One of my advertising agency business development clients asked me today if cold calling was better than doing nothing.

I responded that cold calling is so ineffectual that he might just want to do nothing. Of course, we had a more in-depth conversation about objectives, strategy and tactics — but his question points out that many agency people still employ cold calling. They must think it works.

Cold Facts About Cold Calling

I took these facts from the 2018 ZoomInfo blog about B2B cold calling:

63% of salespeople say cold calling is what they dislike most about their jobs
Cold calling is ineffective 90.9% of the time
Less than 2% of cold calls actually result in a meeting
Less than 1% of cold calls lead to a sale
In 2007 it took an average of 3.68 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. Today it takes 8 attempts

Don’t make cold calling an important element of your biz dev program. But, you know that.

Cold Information

One more serious point about make-believe B2B marketing. All you have to do to get Sales Qualified leads is to do content or inbound marketing.

As you traverse the world of business development thinkers, you will find people that tell you that inbound is the only way to go – even going so far as saying that if you are brilliant and narrowly focussed you will never have to pitch for business. Sorry, not true.

Today, as has been the case for years, you need to exercise all of your business development muscles and tactics to win.

Don’t make content marketing the only element of your biz dev program. But, you know that.

In and Out

Hey, I have no issue with inbound and social media marketing as I have built my global consultancy on inbound – I get it. My 650+ blog posts get Google, LinkedIn and Twitter action.

This has worked for me because when I get a call from my very (very!) narrow target audience of advertising, PR, and digital agencies, they most likely found me because I am on page one of most ad agency business development related searches. Now really, do you think your agency will be on page one for a search of PPC or PR or general, even local, agencies? Probably not. That’s why you also need to be very smart about outbound marketing. Or, as it is now called Account Based Marketing. Which simply means… find a set of companies that you want to work with and go after them with a very smart, well researched, insight-driven marketing program.

LOL. For years, we’ve called this ‘sales.’

As pointed out earlier, a ‘nerve-racking’ element of outbound marketing is the cold call. I prefer to call it / make it warm calling.

Just the mere mention of cold calling strikes fear in the hearts of the most accomplished advertising agency CEO’s and business development directors. Let’s face it, who really likes to pick up the phone to call a stranger and ask them for something… like their advertising or design account? Um, chances are rather good that it’s not you.

Because of this painful fact, we now have an entire industry of social media experts telling you that all you have to do today to win at business development is inbound marketing. You know, if you blog, Tweet, leverage Linkedin and Facebook, the business will just come knocking at your door.

Really? I don’t think so.

Please note, I am not telling you that a refined agency positioning plus the strategic use of social media coupled with targeted insight-driven content marketing won’t deliver incoming leads. I am just saying that inbound alone is a bit too passive for most aggressive (in a good way to be aggressive) sales programs.

I am sure you know what accounts that you’d like to work for and why they should think about you. OK? So, go get them. But, do not wait for the looong social media cycle to get them to find you. Will attracting the attention of the specific clients you want to work with take time? Yes. But I’d rather be intelligently pro-active than 24/7 passive. [Read more…] about Advertising Agency Business Development & Cold Calling

Nootropics, Brain Food For Advertising

Peter · January 30, 2019 · 2 Comments

Nootropics And Advertising

UPDATE:

I originally wrote this 18 months ago and promised an update. I did not receive enough benefit – as in, making me enough of a smarter boy to merit ingesting the nootropics and the cost. It would have been nice to tell you that I became Bradley Cooper.

Back to the original blog post:

Remember the movie Limitless and the little clear pill NZT that turned Bradley Cooper into a raging genius? He had entered the new world of nootropics. Read on.

Today is Day One of my Nootrobox test. My “NZT” test. Nootrobox is a nootropics or “smart drugs” company. I hear you saying, “Nootropics?” Here’s the Wiki definition…

Nootropics (pronunciation: noh-ə-TROP-iks)—also called smart drugs and cognitive enhancers—are drugs, supplements, or other substances that improve cognitive function, particularly executive functions, memory, creativity, or motivation, in healthy individuals.

And, here is the description from Nootrobox, the VC-funded company that is supplying me with my three-pill set. [Read more…] about Nootropics, Brain Food For Advertising

See How Advertising Agency Humor Can Sell You

Peter · January 29, 2019 · Leave a Comment

When I owned my Portland advertising agency I was always looking for a way to really grab the attention of a business development prospect the second they hit our home page.

I mean grab them. Excite them. Hold them. Sell them.

An approach that I considered over and over was to have a stand-up comedian do one or more video sets about advertising issues, the issues that our agency would solve plus toss in some self-deprecating agency humor. The key here was to immediately capture home page attention, look different and find a way to deliver our sales pitch via laughs. For some reason, I never made the decision to go this route and I kinda regret at least testing it.

A new liquor company looking for marketing help approached me last week. As I was starting to think through their objectives, product line and target market opportunities, I began a search for what is currently considered smart liquor advertising. One of my advertising agency clients pointed me to the Deadpool actor Ryan Reynold’s Aviation Gin. I’ll get back to him in a minute. [Read more…] about See How Advertising Agency Humor Can Sell You

What To Learn From Learn From Crispin Porter Bogusky

Peter · January 20, 2019 · 1 Comment

Advertising Agency Learning From Crispin Porter Bogusky

I use a bit of show and tell when I work with my advertising agency clients. Based on their business objectives, positioning, and service offering, I show a series of relevant benchmark agency websites and marketing tactics to help agencies learn from related B2B best practices. Here is what I think is valuable learning from the recently rebranded Crispin Porter Bogusky and its new website.

Crispin Porter Bogusky – Background

Crispin Porter Bogusky was once the golden creative baby of the advertising industry. It came to fame in the early 2000s with its Truth campaign for the Florida Department of Health. From AdAge, June 2002:

Crispin Porter + Bogusky had a good week in Cannes, winning two Media Lions for its launch campaign for the Mini and picking up two Film Lions for anti-smoking work for the Florida Department of Health. The agency’s brand new campaign for Florida “Truth” takes a rat’s eye view of the tobacco industry.

Over the years, the agency moved from Florida to Boulder and then expanded globally. They’ve been named “Agency of the Year” 13 times, was Advertising Age Agency of the Decade in 2009 and was Cannes Lion’s Interactive Agency of the Year – get this – three times. The agency is owned by MDC Partners.