Peter Levitan & Co.
The New Business of Advertising
Lot’s of updates for LinkedIn (smart upgrade = good news), Facebook, Tumblr., and Foursquare… remember them?
Social media news and new developments making social media marketing easier. (LinkedIn Contact, Facebook mobile app update, Twitter app update, Foursquare update)
Read more from the source: socialmediaexaminer.com
I’ve been thinking about the power of the personal brand of Gary Vaynerchuk, David Droga, and David Ogilvy. The power of their brands to drive advertising agency awareness, expertise, and new business.
What is a personal brand? There are many definitions. I went to the website PersonalBrand.com for this definition (why not go to a company smart enough to have bought the URL PersonalBrand?)
“A personal brand is a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.”
Kinda wordy but you get the idea. My definition: “How people perceive you.”
I am keen on the idea of building and managing a personal brand for agency leaders and senior managers.
One’s personal brand is how you present and control your image to your market – your current and potential clients, your competition, and your staff (and, I can’t stress this enough, your future staff.) Your personal brand puts you in charge of your professional perception and lets you highlight your skills, thought leadership, strengths, and history.
As I’ve discussed in my agency naming chapter, many agencies are named after their founder. In most of these cases, the founder is the face of the agency. The founder embodies the agency mission and soul of the agency.
Ogilvy the global agency continues to use the brand essence of its founder David Ogilvy who passed away in 1999. The agency’s Careers page quotes David and leverages his personal brand to help sell the agency’s creative street cred and soul to future employees:
“As out founder David Ogilvy put it, we seek people who are bigger and smarter than ourselves. That’s how we create a company of giants. We’re always looking for modern marketing and brand experts with big hearts and enormous talent.”
How is this for branding? In 1962, Time Magazine called him “the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry“. Believe me, this recognition did not happen by accident. Ogilvy was a PR brand master. [Read more…] about How Does A Personal Brand Work? Ask Gary Vaynerchuk & David Droga
“Is your advertising agency findable?” This is one of three key questions, and mucho critical points, I make when I start to help an advertising agency plan its business development program. First things first. The other two questions are: “do you have a new client referral plan/program” and “do you have a system for how to grow business from current clients?” Want to know how to do that? Ask me.
So, Is Your Advertising Agency Findable? Your First Issue.
You should have clear objectives for your business development plan. And, the right marketing plan. And, run that plan 24/7. And do you have a smart process to align the agency and make stuff happen? But, the first thing (after having the right positioning and core marketing tools like a great/effective sales-oriented website and LinkedIn presence, etc.) is to make sure that a prospective client who is actually looking for an agency like yours can find you. Yes, a duh.
An idea (a good one)… go ahead and play client and see if you can be found. If you are a Tiktok specialist, will you be found? If you specialize in hospitality, will you be found? If you are the best agency in London, will you be found? You get the idea, right? Yes, a duh. But, go ahead and try to find you.
This question was driven home today when I examined the Roth Ryan Hayes** agency search consultant website. I noted that they ask advertising agencies that want to be found by clients to list themselves in the WINMO database. A database used by both prospective clients and search consultants. Roth Ryan Hayes asks agencies like yours to enter into the agency information database right here. Just do it.
Need a list of advertising agency search consultants? Search my website.
Some other examples:
There are more “Be found” ideas. Call me up.
Ok, you are found. Then what? Is your positioning and messaging and branding UNIGNORABLE? Being found is cool. Being unignorably unignorable is even better. Do not waste that be found thing. Work it.
** From Above…
Roth Ryan Hayes, founded in 1988 as Roth Associates, is a pioneer in the search consulting category.
The firm has forged a reputation as a trusted adviser to some of the world’s leading companies as they seek to optimize their agency resources and efficiently navigate the evolving media and marketing landscape. Today, RRH is a leader in the field of agency search, selection, and compensation, providing counsel on the intersection of digital innovation and business strategy to companies such as CVS Health, Aetna, Activision, Blizzard, Home Depot and many others.
Let’s start this talk about advertising agency video marketing as a core sales tool for business development in two ways. Then I will point you to a super-smart ad agency video series. The videos I’ll show are aimed directly at a client’s needs (strategic needs). These videos are well-produced, and sell the agency leader. A good thing. People buy people. The videos also leverage the power of LinkedIn.
The last truly “revelatory” thing I can tell an advertising agency is that video is a great marketing tool. Like, um, I know that you know this. But, then, why do so many of yous guys not use it for self-promotion? So, here are some reasons to use video marketing – now.
Most advertising agency websites have similar attributes (like the same old same old navigation – not bad – but the same old same old). Few, few, open up with a short but very sweet video to tell the visitor how wonderful (and different) the agency is. No not a sizzle real. A personal message. Not an “I am wonderful” message. A “this is who we” are message. And, even a “what we can do for you” message.
In one year, LinkedIn video posts generated more than 300 million impressions on the platform. They also earn an average of three times the engagement of text posts. Plus, early findings from LinkedIn’s beta program show that LinkedIn native videos are five times more likely than other content to start a conversation among LinkedIn members.
Impressive engagement stats aside, video marketing has been shown to boost revenue across social platforms. According to Aberdeen Group, brands that use video marketing grow their revenue 49 percent faster than companies that don’t.
Producing video for an advertising agency is cheap (or, at least cost effective). You do stuff like this for a living.
Ok, on to a very good example of an advertising agency’s video marketing.
My Advertising Agency Resource List is curated often to help advertising, digital, design, and PR agencies easily find the inspiration and industry resources that will help y’all build killer agencies and careers.
If I were you, I’d grab a glass of Larkmead Cabernet Sauvignon 2016 (LOL only $150 or a nice craft beer – a bit less expensive) and check out all of these links. I guarantee that at least one of these websites and/or tools will help you or your team grow your agency.
Dig growth and sharing? Therefore my friends, go ahead and share this page with your friends, family, and staff.
A kudo from David Ogilvy: “I wish I had this advertising resource list when I was in the ad biz. All I had was my brain.”
OK, one more. This here Peter Levitan blog has over 800 posts dedicated to helping your marketing communications company grow. I hope that my insights on the art and science of agency business development, growth, and management help you to make more bucks. Speaking of resources and advice, take me up on my Corleone offer.
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’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Here’s another very important test. If you are like me, over 20% of your website visitors are looking at you on a mobile device then you better make sure that they are digging how fast your website loads.
BROWSEO.We might be getting a bit geeky here. That said, BROWSEO helps you view any web page like search engines see it. The tool helps you to identify issues with your site and with your current and future clients’ websites.
AnswerThePublic. This is a free visual tool that shows you what questions and queries your consumers have by getting a free report of what they’re searching for at Google.
Exploding Topics. Yes, just like it sounds.
Google Trends. Chances are good that you are aware of Google Trends. This a powerful tool to help you know what is hot and what is not on Google’s search universe. A look at the top 2019 Google searches may or may not make you a fan of humanity.
Social Mention. Ever wonder what the world is saying about you or your company? Here you go.
Here are the topics covered: