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Interesting Inbound And Outbound Marketing Numbers

Peter · August 10, 2014 · Leave a Comment

I’ve Been Looking At My Network And Its Inbound and Outbound Marketing Potential.

Why? I am going to be marketing my new book in September. The book is about the art and science of pitching for advertising, digital, design and PR agencies. However, the essence of the book will be useful to the very broad B2B market. We all sit in rooms trying to sell something and we all make the right and wrong sales related moves. The book is designed to call these mistakes and opportunities out and immediatly grow your odds of success.

I will be employing both inbound (think of this blog) and outbound (think email marketing) to reach my target audiences.

Some numbers: 5,245 and on, and on….

Guest Post For Fun & Profit

Peter · August 4, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Yes Kids, Go Guest Post For Fun & Profit

Just in case, this is what guest posting is (C/O TrackMaven):

Guest posting is creating content and publishing it on another person’s website. Blogs are a very popular platform for guest posting. This is a great way to build an online reputation and for a company to get its name out there. By posting on another person’s blog, not only will a company’s followers see its content, but anyone who follows the host blogger will see the company’s content as well, thus reaching an audience that might be unaware of your brand.

I did the guest post thing last week on Agency Post, Business2Community and the Portland Ad Fed websites.

Agency Post On Procurement

My blog post, You can’t Avoid Procurement, But You Can Learn How To Sell Them, appears on the fast growing ad agency blog Agency Post, which was recently bought by HubSpot. As I say,

Few words strike more fear and loathing in the hearts of agency management than “procurement.” This P-word gets its rap from being viewed as an impediment to an advertising agency’s ability to sell its strategic and brand-building creative expertise. Instead, agencies have to sell on price.

However, the role of procurement isn’t that simple.

It has its own ying and yang.

The major point I make is that clients of all sizes and shapes (regardless if they have a procurement department or not) are interested in getting the most bang from their ad agency buck. Yes, its that ROI thing again. I suggest that agencies have a compensation plan and a POV on agency-client financial management (“we care and pay attention to details”) that they can share with prospective clients.

Get ahead of the issue and… look much smarter than the other agencies.

Business2Community On Meeting Management

On the well-read and high Page Rank website Business2Community (Page Rank = 6) I wrote about meeting management in How To run A Smart Meeting. We waste hours and cash on poorly run meetings. it is brain numbing. As I say,

Effective meetings deliver three key benefits:

Effective meetings focus on and achieve meeting objectives.
Well-managed meetings take up a minimum amount of time.
Participants leave the meeting feeling that a sensible process has been followed and that their time has been used effectively.

This post was easy to do as it is a slight rewrite from my soon to be published book: The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. I did the same for the Agency Post guest post. Repurposing, with thoughtful adjustments for the new platform, is a good thing if you want to reach new audiences.

Portland Ad Fed On Guest Posting

For the brand new Portland Ad Fed website I wrote about the value of guest posting. The article Go Forth And Guest Post discusses why I, and you, should guest post. Get over the thinking that guest posting’s primary benefit is getting a link back to your site to make Google love you (Google makes too many algorithm revisions to count on this). Just love the fact that YOU are building awareness by having your pearls of wisdom on other people’s well-read website. As I say, yes again,

I admit it. I am a habitual guest blogger.

I do this for a few reasons. One is simple ego-boosting. But the most important is awareness growth for my agency consultancy. It works because I can get way past my current blog, Twitter and LinkedIn readership to introduce myself and my thinking to a much larger advertising audience. I trade articles for audience.

Matt Cutts On Guest Blogging

Matt is in charge of spam at Google. He is one of the most read people on the subject of SEO in the industry. In the article, The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO, he discuses why guest posting is and isn’t a good thing. Bottom line, it is a good thing if your posts are high quality and you are seeking marketing awareness. It is bad for the industry when posters act like poseurs. Read on,

It seems like most people are getting the spirit of what I was trying to say, but I’ll add a bit more context. I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

I’m also not talking about multi-author blogs. High-quality multi-author blogs like Boing Boing have been around since the beginning of the web, and they can be compelling, wonderful, and useful.

I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to “guest blogging” as their link-building strategy, and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. Because of that, I’d recommend skepticism (or at least caution) when someone reaches out and offers you a guest blog article.

My advice: go guest post for fun, pleasure and fame.

One Reason Not To Do Advertising Agency New Business

Peter · July 22, 2014 · Leave a Comment

OK, I admit it. I am fibbing.

There is no reason that an advertising agency shouldn’t always be executing some form of business development activity. While you might want to slow down on outreach during the summer (but, keep those monthly emails going out), there is no reason that you shouldn’t be thinking and planning hard for the fall. You want to get out of the blocks fast. The reason is that your prospective clients are going to spend more marketing dollars in 2014 and 2015, and you want to get some of those bucks.

You would like some of that $180.12 billion, right?

Me and New Business

In my case, in the past few weeks, I have slowed down the number of blog posts, guest posts and LinkedIn activity that I have been sending out. People still find me via SEO but I am not actively stimulating the conversation at my usual pace.

Why? I am finishing my book and its marketing plan. Here is what is close to the final cover. I am getting psyched. It will be a very valuable book (If, I do say so myself) packed with my insights from thirty years of pitching and over twenty interviews with pitch experts of all stripes.

Get The Book Early

I guarantee that you will be able to deliver more successful new business pitches earlier and faster than the agency down the street.

Advertising Agency New Business & Inbound Marketing

Peter · July 2, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Along with positioning and outbound marketing, I help my advertising agency clients plan and execute their social media based inbound marketing programs. These programs are designed to attract the clients that they want to their messaging and get the email lights to fire up. Allow me to state the obvious:

Inbound marketing is marketing a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, newsletters, white papers, SEO, social media marketing and other forms of content marketing. Inbound marketing is essentially an attraction strategy based on strategic scheduled content marketing that helps clients find you. The inbound program should attract the right traffic to your messaging (as in on your website), convert this traffic to leads and help you convert these leads into meetings.

Inbound marketing ~~can become~~ is complex and very time consuming. It is imperative that you do not overreach. Trying to do too much, more than your agency staff can and will handle, will result in visible inconsistency. The web is littered with way too many agency-ignored, virtually empty advertising agency blogs, Twitter feeds and corporate LinkedIn sites. Plan accordingly. Looking empty is… lame.

There is a valuable secondary benefit to doing inbound marketing. It is important to note that agency clients are looking for agencies that have a deep understanding of how to do inbound, social and content marketing. Therefore, your inbound marketing program will serve as proof of your expertise. Walking the talk is a good thing. Looking empty is… lame.

Does inbound marketing work to win new business? Like, is it worth the effort?

At the end of the day is all of this blogging, Tweeting and LinkedIn action worth the time?

Yes if you have a plan with clear objectives and target clients and categories.

I have concentrated on inbound marketing to drive interest in my agency business development consultancy for the past year. Search engine marketing coupled with a sound social media program works. I have lots of happy clients (who find me) and I am making a very good living after selling my advertising agency. Yes, there is a life after advertising agency ownership.

Yesterday, I repurposed a one year-old blog post — Advertising Agency New Business and Cold Calling. – by putting it up on LinkedIn’s self publishing channel under the new title, Dump Cold Calling. Go Warm Calling. This activity delivered 607 views on my blog as of 1700. FYI, my best blog day netted 2,052 views (I put a quick screen grab of my blog stats below.)

My blog’s subject on my 2,052 day was about the art of pitching. I am rather happy about this one because pitching, how to pitch so that you greatly improve your batting average, is the subject of my soon to be published book: The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches.

So, yes, all the effort, if well planned and executed does work.

Sign Up:

Give me a shout and we can discuss how to use social media (and… outbound marketing too) to grow your leads. Or, just sign up below, get a detailed business-building white paper and I’ll let you know when the book is out.