Peter Levitan & Co.
The New Business of Advertising
Well, to be more precise, she doesn’t mind what ‘Levitan content’ gets shared.
“Social Popularity By Content Type”, thanks to HubSpot, is an infographic worth a five minute ingestion and the learning should be applied to your social media plan. I am doing just that right here. [Read more…] about What Social Media Content Gets Shared?
A friend who ran an advertising agency in L.A. once told me that he made at least five ‘warm calls’ every week to prospective clients. This agency CEO was gregarious, had a great rap about advertising trends that clients liked to hear and he was very smart. He knew that on any given day, a few clients woke up thinking that they needed a new agency to replace their AOR or to hand out a project. He just wanted to be on the client’s radar when that day happened.
Clearly, not all agency CEO’s can or will make these calls. Though, sales pressure applied with TLC does work for some.
Another way to get ahead of the search process is to use a business development database and news tool like Access Confidential. To get a better understanding of Access Confidential and their pitch that they can help agencies know about a new business pitch before the other agencies, I interviewed Lisa Colantuono, a partner at the highly successful agency search consultancy AAR and a contributor to my book on pitching. I posted this interview on HubSpot’s Agency Post. Here is my lead-in.
Another Holy Grail (can there be more than one?) is being able to predict when a client is unhappy with their current agency and is getting ready to begin the search process. This is a tough one, so I searched to see if there was any existing advice on being able to predict when a client is about to search for a new agency. My quest led me to Access Confidential.
Access Confidential is an online new business tool from AAR Partners, a leading agency search consultancy with a history of conducting more than 1,500 searches. Access Confidential includes an up-to-date client database, business news, and a research hotline, and it is used to forecast when clients will look for a new agency.
I also asked Lisa about the current new business landscape. Here is the Q&A.
What do you think is the biggest or fastest-growing client need as we move into 2015?
Innovation with an eye toward creating purposed-based brands.
Successful agencies will help identify emotional values in their client’s brands and use them for real-time engagement and meaningful positioning. Consumers are going to continue to have influence over brands. Agencies that help marketers to embrace it will succeed. You can boil this down to the need to turn big data (and the overwhelming amount of data) into core brand insights for marketers, which will remain as an asset. Analytics and programmatic and real-time buying, as well as social command centers to keep an ear to the ground on what’s trending, are all important tools to offer a client. But the greatest tool will be the interpretation of the data.
Ah, innovation.
I put a new infographic on social media planning and a checklist below. It is a good one. Big thanks to Post Planner and its article “FINALLY! A Checklist for Social Media Marketing that Actually Helps or the advice and graphic. “
Good stuff.
Most advertising agencies cannot and will not do all that is recommended. I firmly believe that the 2 biggest issues confronting ad agency business development programs are the lack of a clear plan (or any plan for that matter) and biting off more social media marketing than they can chew. This leads to inaction and inertia…. and not running the program 24/7. Therefore, my caution. This is a great chart on what to do and how to do it. But don’t bite it all off. You probably won’t be able to run it all.
Define your target audience. I am continuously amazed at how few (50%?) of ad agency social media programs look like they do not have clear objectives and understand what will be of value to their target audience. Is it current or future clients? Culture support for your agency? The press? Prospective employees? [Read more…] about Ad Agency Social Media Check List
I’ve written and talked about why and how your ad agency should write a book. You can see my presentation “The Agency Book. From Idea To Published In 6 Months” below.
In the presentation I mention that video is a great way to promote your agency-built book and that the video can go up on your author page on Amazon (very easy to do.) You can see how it fits in right HERE. But, to make your life easier, I put the video below.
As I discussed in the presentation, interviews are a great way to create lots of content – easily. In fact, my author video is an interview I set up with my friend Rebecca Armstrong, the leader of Portland’s ad agency North. The whole experience took about 45 minutes and it was done in one take. Again, very easy.
Here is my SlideShare presentation.
Check out the Twitter tool SocialBro (and, don’t thank me for naming this company). Here is what they say about themselves:
SocialBro’s advanced solutions for Twitter marketing are built around what you need. From Enterprise scale organisations coordinating multi channel strategies across multiple teams to individual influencers building a personal brand, our clever tools work with your preferred Twitter client (e.g. Hootsuite or Tweetdeck) to help you achieve your goals on Twitter.
Here is just one of the detailed traffic reports I get from them about my Twitter account. Now, make sure you think about the following detail about me when you look at these numbers:
I post on west coast time. Therefore, my east coast audience is getting up earlier than me.
When see what my Followers talk about in their feeds, consider that I write about advertising, social media and marketing. I am not so sure about the “love” thing.
My audience works 24/7 across the globe. I don’t have best days or seriously best times.
For more, many more, insights on SocialBro, head over to Razor Social. If you haven’t been to this fab website… Go there!
Here is a link to my post about 11 must have social media tools for advertising agency business development — and agency clients.