Insights

Free Google Marketing Tools (2022)

Peter · May 8, 2022 · Leave a Comment

Must Use Google Marketing Tools For Your Advertising Agency

I love free. I love it when you can head over to a list of free Google marketing tools that will help you market your advertising agency. These tools and dozens more can be seen and loved on my Big Advertising Agency Resources List page.

Google Marketing Tools To Help Build Agency Insights

Google Scholar: Want to look smart? Google Scholar searches through thousands of research-oriented articles and emerging studies. It aims your search at articles, new ideas, books, abstracts, and court opinions. Results are from academics, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites.

Google Trends. Chances are good that you are aware of Google Trends. This is a powerful tool to help you know what is hot and what is not in Google’s search universe. It is also a great tool to help you find the right (hot) subjects for your next blog post.

Google Alerts. Stay ahead of your client, a prospective client (as in category, brand, and people), and industry news by creating a list of Google Alerts. Frankly, this should be a primary business development tool. You want XYZ account, right. Then create an alert for any XYZ news.

Google Marketing Tools To Help Your Agency Improve Its Business Development Programs & Platforms

Google Online Marketing. Learn from the leader.

Google PageSpeed Insights. Do you know how fast your website download speed is and how its performance ranks against your competitive agencies? Here’s the drill. If your site takes too long to download, it will lose some traffic.

Google Analytics. You want to track your website right?

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Here’s another very important test. If you are like me, over 20% of your website visitors are looking at y’all on a mobile device then you better make sure that they are digging how fast your website loads.

Free Google Marketing Tools For Advertising Itself

Advertising works. While your agency has a bunch of advertising options, clearly Google Ads should be considered. Usually, agencies will by relevant keywords like: “Dallas advertising agency” or “medical marketing ad agency”… but, there are some other options like buying an ad on “Trudy Hardy” — go ahead and see what I mean.

Google Ads. Yes, your advertising agency can run ads for itself.

And…

The Peter Levitan Story. A very helpful blog. If I do say so myself.

Inbound Backlinks – How To Track (2022)

Peter · April 27, 2022 · Leave a Comment

Inbound Backlinks: How To Track – 2022 Version

You want inbound backlinks to jive your SEO power – like get that higher position on Google. Push your competitor’s down. Right? You know that – but just to be clear, before I tell you how to easily track your inbound backlinks (mind-blowingly easy), here is what super SEO expert MOZ says…

Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another.

In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth surfacing on a SERP.

So, earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site’s ranking position or search visibility.

Here Is How To Track Those Super Sweet Inbound Backlinks

Help Google love you…

Use the incognito Google search
Type in links:WEBSITE URL

It’s that easy. By the way, A discussion on HOW you get the backlinks in the first place is for another day.

See it work… Try your advertising agency, your competitors, do this for your clients (they don’t know how to do this) and on. Here is what I get for Gooby Silverstein & Partners… Not too shabby. Unless you compare them to other very large agecies. Why is that?

Be The Smart Local Advertising Agency

Peter · April 23, 2022 · Leave a Comment

**How A Local Advertising Agency Can Own Its City**

I was the senior partner at Citrus, a full-service & very digital local advertising agency with offices in Portland and Bend Oregon, and San Francisco. In addition to having national clients like Nike and Harrah’s, we wanted to be a strong brand and resource in each of our local communities.

For Portland, we created the event series Meet The Makers, a small but powerful speaker series where we brought in execs from companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. Our audience included current clients, prospects, the ad press, and, importantly, local influencers.

In San Francisco, we ran and distributed an agency-produced video series to break into that crowded agency market.

Your Local Advertising Agency Can Own Its City

I have worked with many smaller agencies that wanted to make some noise in their city. The primary objectives are awareness and high-quality branding. As in, how to be unignorable in one’s hometown or region to be famous for future clients and HR staffing needs. In this case, local could mean London or Boise.

Some Smart Ownership Ideas + A Really Big One

Advertising agencies are well-placed for city ownership. Agencies are creative, work at the local level (even if they have national clients as well), are community leaders, and know how to market themselves online as well as physically.

For example…

A city newsletter – On the simplest level, an agency can offer a city-oriented newsletter – a What’s Up / What’s Going On approach from the cool agency people. If done right, it will get read. YMMV but it could include an event schedule and even point to some great local stores and even point to local marketing programs – how that Italian restaurant markets itself on TikTok.
Speaking of TikTok, maybe your agency can ‘own’ the ‘your city’ TikTok channel. Or, be like Gary Vaynerchuck and use SMS. man, I get at least two messages from him a day.
Run an event(s) as citrus did. Or participate big time in an existing event. I don’t mean going to that Chamber meeting, not a bad idea, but more impactful high-interest events.
A cool idea (yes, if I say so myself) — Lease an empty storefront for a week and give away free marketing advice to local merchants, brands, and even wannabe entrepreneurs. Maybe team up with a local publication. Everyone wins.

Here’s one more very interesting – very community-building idea. I’ve got more but you’ll have to call me to hear about those ideas.

A Really Really! Smart Local Marketing Idea…

11 B2B Email Marketing Statistics (2022)

Peter · April 19, 2022 · 4 Comments

Yup 11 B2B Email Marketing Statistics – A Sweet List Just For Your Advertising Agency Business Development Program

I just got off a long business development planning call with an advertising agency in Canada. We spent a good deal of time discussing the value of building and running an advertising agency email newsletter. I have written about email newsletters before but just built a set of statistics that supports my email advice that your agency should think hard about getting that newsletter out there (if you have a newsletter, good for you), Bottom line = email marketing should be a key element of your business development program.

My email marketing statistics list is below. But, just for the hell of it, here are a couple of earlier email marketing blog posts. Worth a read.

My 11 B2B Email Marketing Statistics (2022)

81% of B2B marketers use email marketing newsletters for biz dev. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020)
B2B marketers send email marketing newsletters every 25 days. (SuperOffice, 2020)
31% of B2B marketers use email to nurture leads. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020)
87% of B2B marketers say email is one of their top free organic distribution channels. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020)
90% of content marketers say email engagement is the top metric they track to measure content performance. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020)
89% of all B2B email campaigns are sent from a company name. (SuperOffice, 2020)
85% of marketers say they work with email marketing platforms. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020)
The highest email click-through rate goes to the consulting services companies at 25%. (Constant Contact, 2021)
Marketers who segment their campaigns see as much as a 760% increase in revenue. (Campaign Monitor, 2019)
Over 80% of marketers said they’d rather give up social media than email marketing. (Litmus, 2020)
YIKES!!!! You better be good at email marketing – 306 billion to be exact. And this number is expected to reach 361 billion by the end of 2024. (Constant Contact 2022)

And Now – B2B Email Marketing Guidance

The 9 Best Consumer Insight Definitions

Peter · March 31, 2022 · Leave a Comment

What Is a Consumer Insight? Some Definitions.

Importantly, Why the Use of Insights Is Critical to Advertising Agency New Business.

Whatever you want to call it… a consumer insight, marketing insight, brand insight or research insight, the idea of developing Ah-Ha insights is a primary driver of brand and revenue growth. The Ah-Ha element is critical to creating a powerful consumer insight. This is true for advertising agency B2B new business gains as well. Opening a conversation with a prospective new client with an Ah-Ha insight will get their attention, will quickly begin to help them realize that you understand their market, create a marketing opportunity and that, yup, you are smart.

Appearing smart at the start of a new business conversation delivers the Holy Grail of prospective clients’ needs – BIG word coming… confidence.

I will be writing in the coming about the wonderful world of insights and – importantly – the tools to get you there. However, I thought that it might make a bit of sense to provide a quick list of various definitions of just want a consumer insight is. As I move forward, I’ll give you examples of insights that have driven business growth (like the MAN). I’ll highlight how I think and actually know how a consumer insight can help an advertising agency win new business. Even win the pitch in the first minute.

9 Consumer Insight Definitions

Oxford Dictionary

“The capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing.”

Merriam Webster

1: The power or act of seeing into a situation: PENETRATION

2: The act or result of apprehending the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively

McKinsey

“Insights into consumers and how they think can help companies spark innovation, uncover the most promising (though not always most intuitive) sources of growth, and develop or maintain successful products and brands.

Generating customer insights through qualitative research. Qualitative research helps bring customers to life. It illuminates their needs, their decision-making processes, and their reactions to companies and brands.”