Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

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8 Reasons Your Advertising Agency Fails At New Business

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Know what? There aren’t 8 reasons. 8 is a silly number. Don’t get distracted by numbers in blog post titles.

The single biggest reason for advertising agency new business failure is…

Inconsistency.

Agencies that fail don’t have a plan, a consistent approach (sorry, being busy working on current client business is a bad excuse) and don’t have a CEO who makes this his / her primary job… These agencies don’t act hungry.

Agencies cannot wait until they lose clients before they decide to reactivate their new business program. The sales cycle is way too long.

If this sounds at all familiar… call me up and I will help you get focussed.

While you are at it… Don’t miss any of my brilliant (LOL, but I mean it) thoughts on new business.

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How Advertising Agencies Should Find Clients

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The RSW/AgencySearch New Year Outlook Survey is out. It was completed by 150 senior level marketers in December 2013. I haven’t had a chance to review it in detail but I found the section on how clients find agencies (or conversely, how advertising agencies should find clients) particularly relevant to my current agency new business clients.

I had two meetings yesterday where we discussed the balance between inbound and outbound marketing. I can’t see an agency only doing inbound marketing (social media, etc.) as suggested by some of my agency new business colleagues. Is is simply too passive and the great majority of agencies are not so specialized or well-positioned that they get a high level of incoming leads. I believe that its a mistake to put all of an agency’s chips on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. I stress “all.”

The research shows that agencies need to directly target clients and make the “call” — a warm call. Agencies also need to have a referral strategy to stimulate referrals from current and past clients, friends and family. Yes, even cousin George.

I have written about “warm calling” and how to grow referrals. 

Back to the study. As you can see, 32% of marketers find out about agencies from direct contact and 48% use referrals. To not go directly to clients with the right message and not stimulate your referral base would be a huge mistake. You need sound strategies for both.

www.rswagencysearch.com images_and_uploads 2014 RSWAgencySearch Agency Client New Year Outlook Report

Steve Jobs + Nancy Duarte = How To Present

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Steve Jobs Dissected

AAPLNancy Duarte’s book on presenting, “resonate – Present visual Stories That Transform Audiences” has been my go-to book on how to create powerful presentations for the past four years. It’s a serious, almost scientific look at the art of presentation. In fact, it is science.

Nancy uses a graphical tracking system called sparklines to visually track a presentation’s flow and major points. Here is Nancy’s TEDx talk on presentations which includes her sparklines deconstruction (it starts at 8:45) of Steve Jobs and his art of presentation. Watch it. It will help your agency win more business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfQF3DXG-S4#t=541

For more on Jobs and how he can help you give better presentations head over here: Steve Jobs “Secret” Advertising Agency New Business Presentation Tips

FYI:

I interviewed Nancy about her presentation prescriptions for my book… “The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches.” Nancy is just one of a range of experts interviewed that will help make you a better pitch person – and win more business. Amazon and I would like you to buy it. 

Why SlideShare Is A Smart New Business Tool

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According to SlideShare’s 2013 recap, my presentations and white papers were viewed 3,012 times and I uploaded 15 “SlideShares.”

Beyond these general stats, I can’t make a direct correlation between SlideShare and my new business leads. But, I’ll gladly take 3,012 views since I can’t imagine that my advertising industry targeted documents are being viewed casually. I’ll take the inherent branding as a positive.

Given SlideShare’s ease of use and LinkedIn relationship, why wouldn’t you want to add SlideShare to your personal or advertising agency content-based business development program? SlideShare obviously drives message reach. Here is a portion of my personal SlideShare report. You will see an uptick in October. I tested what would happen if I did a bit of promotion on my blog and Twitter feed. It worked. I love the smell of social media synergy in the morning.

Peter levitan s year 2013 on SlideShare

Need More Reasons To Use SlideShare For Advertising Agency New Business

Slideshare is the world’s largest content-sharing community for professionals. Here is how SlideShare puts it on their SlideShare 101 page.

With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million page views, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.

Here is another fact. I put up my presentation “24 Advertising Agency Positions For New Business Development” about 3 months ago and it has been viewed by over 900 people. Not too shabby for an easy upload and distribution of an existing presentation. The presentation is a repurposed use of Part III of my series on how to position advertising agencies. Here are other reasons why I use (and love) SlideShare…

  • It’s content marketing, baby.
  • It has that huge audience. According to comScore, SlideShare has 5 times more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn (which now owns SlideShare).
  • SlideShare is primarily a business tool and has deep reach into my advertising industry target market.
  • Google loves SlideShare and SlideShare presentations and PDF’s get indexed immediately.
  • My SlideShare presentations and documents are automatically shared across LinkedIn.

So, without further ado, my “best selling” 2013 SlideShare presentation…

Need some more facts? Here’s an infographic on SlideShare from Column Five Media.

Slideshare_Giant_c5