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Which Social Media Strategy Is Best For Advertising Agency New Business?

Peter · May 13, 2024 · 2 Comments

Your Advertising Agency and Social Media. Oh, And Your Business Development Program.

I am updating this older relatively well-read blog post about the how-to make it happen for an advertising agency social media program. Updating is a good blog strategy to help Google love you.

Does Advertising Agency Social Media Work Anymore (As In Drive Incoming Leads)?

Start here: “Which Social Media Strategy Is Best For Advertising Agency New Business?” I am not going to bullshit you. There is no perfect social media platform for advertising agency new business. Why? Cause ya know… the devil is in the details, and your details might just be different than the agency down the road.

2024.

I originally wrote this very viewed advertising agency social media blog post back in 2014. Yikes. Time for an update, right? Like I said… Updating old blog posts that once had decent activity is critical to bumping them back up on Google searches. There is an art to this.

When I wrote this back in the good old days, blog posts by ad agencies had not yet exploded, Twitter posts had not yet exploded, Instagram was not yet a smash, TikTok had not been invented, and on. Here are some of those “we are now bombarded” stats.

Depending on who you listen to, you’ve got like 4,000 competitive agencies and freelancers.
How many blog posts are there today? Here is just one directional figure: there are “like” over 2 million blog posts daily – out of 1.7 billion websites. You think your ad agency can stand out?
From Claude: Assuming 85% of the 229 million daily active users on X, that’s around 195 million real users tweeting daily.
It’s estimated that around 200 million businesses across the world use Instagram each month. Around 90% of Instagram’s users follow at least one business account on the platform.
There seem to a billion LinkedIn posts a day.
I have over 6,000 “advertising people” connections, yet when I post on LinkedIn, I get maybe 80 individual post views. Pay per play, baby. It’s not so organic these days.

Do you get the idea here? You are kinda fucked if you think that your blogs, tweets, etc are gonna get noticed. You are competing with other, probably really good at SEO agencies.

The best I can do is share my personal experiences. First, here are my social media objectives.

How to Build A Winning Advertising Agency Business Development Program

Peter · May 13, 2024 · 3 Comments

How To Build An Effective, High-ROI Advertising Agency Business Development Program

Start Here. Ask Yourself: How Is Your Marketing, Digital, and Advertising Agency Business Development Program Going?

What do I mean? Are you getting the leads you want? Are these clients high margin? Do they want great thinking, media planning and creativity from you? Might they be long-term? Do they look cool on your client list?

#1: Tough News From the 2024 RSW/US Agency New Business Report

RSW/US asked agencies: “How Difficult Is Obtaining New Business, Compared to Last Year?”

58% of agencies found it harder to obtain new business in 2023, and 38% of ad agencies reported a decrease in new business opportunities in 2023, up from 26% in 2022.

#2: My Second Book On How To Run And Grow A Kick-Ass Advertising Agency Is being bought by your competitor down the street.

If you want to run a kick-ass advertising, digital, or whatever you call your agency business development program that stands out, makes more money, and is happy, then buy my new book. Its 27 chapters cover every aspect of agency management (including staffing issues), business development, and building critical personal branding. Go here: “How To Build A Kick-Ass Advertising Agency.”

Advertising Agency Business Development Strategies and Tactics

This is an update to “How to Build A Winning Advertising Agency New Business Program.” Your competitors have read it over 50,000 times.

Advertising agency business development is a 24/7 operation that requires the right agency positioning, strategies, action, and efficiency. I help my agency clients get there faster by building them a custom, efficient business development plan. A plan that they will run 24/7.

The post’s popularity is due to three key factors:

1. It directly addresses a major marketing pain point: how to build a winning and efficient advertising agency business growth plan.

2. The post is well optimized for search engines, delivers high value, and, therefore…

3. Google loves it. FYI, my number two trafficked post is, “How To Name Your Advertising Agency – Part One” at 30,000 + views. While always rethinking their website, advertising agencies also obsess about their name. By the way, the How to Name post is also a very good cheat sheet on naming that you can steal if a client ever needs a new brand name.

Your Competiton Is Growing – Be Unignorable

Your potential clients have over 4,000 marketing communications ‘agency’ options (other agencies, new consultancies, freelancers, even your ex-creative director…).

Therefore, any form of business development passivity on your part – sucks. If you think you are doing everything right, you probably are not. How can I say this? I never thought that all was well whilst running business development at Saatchi & Saatchi and when I owned my own west coast agency.

A critical message about not being unignorable… Watch this. I built it for my friends at AAR Partners, the leading ad agency search consultant. By the way, I read this thinking about consultants, “34 Advertising Agency Search Consultants“.

OK, Let’s Go… The 24/7 Business Development Plan

I moved from New York to Bend, Oregon, in 2002 to buy a very successful advertising agency (and raise a family 20 minutes from a ski lift).

Citrus grew to add a Portland office and national accounts including Dr. Martens, Harrah’s, Leagalzoom, Nike, Providence Health & Services, the Montana Lottery, and the UN.

I woke up every day as if a client like Nike would walk out the back door along with its revenues. I bet as an ad agency owner or manager you have rough nights too. One of the things I knew I could and should do was to manage this back-door issue was to have an active, I stress active, new business plan in place.

Here are some (I stress some) of the elements of my marketing plan. They helped me grow Saatchi & Saatchi and my agency Citrus. I hope my insights help you grow your agency.

Execution Rules.

When I set out to write this advertising agency new business post I didn’t think that it would be this long – a warning to the ADHD types. However, advertising agencies’ new business planning is complex and becoming more complex every day due to the rapid changes in our industry and technology. That said, the devil in business development, you know what’s coming, is in the detail. Success is all about execution.

For example, running a successful inbound biz dev program that attracts market attention must be based on a sound strategy and smart agency process if you want to run a 24/7 sales program. Staying the course is critical.

OK. OK. Help Me ChatGPT. Here is a quick FAQ that my buddy Chat created to help you understand the core elements of this missive.

What are the key elements of a successful advertising agency new business program?

Strategic Positioning: Define clear business and sales objectives, including your agency’s unique value propositions like media expertise or demographic specializations (e.g., mobile advertising, Gen X marketing).
Proactive Business Development: Employ a dedicated Business Development Director to lead client acquisition efforts, ensuring alignment with agency goals and maintaining regular prospect engagement.
Inbound and Outbound Marketing: Implement a balanced strategy with targeted content marketing (blogs, white papers) and smart use of social media platforms to generate inbound leads. Complement this with aggressive outbound tactics like cold calling, personalized emails, and strategic ad placements.
Client Acquisition and Retention: Focus on acquiring clients through thoughtful qualification of leads, engaging pitches, and effective management of proposals and pitches. Post-acquisition, ensure smooth transitions and high client satisfaction to foster long-term relationships.
Continuous Learning and Adaptation: Regularly update the business development plan to reflect market changes and internal growth goals. Utilize tools like CRM systems to track progress and optimize strategies based on data-driven insights.

How can an agency maintain continuous new business growth?

Consistency in Marketing Efforts: Regular updates and interactions via high-value emails and social media posts ensure continuous engagement with potential clients.
Leveraging Thought Leadership: Establish your agency as a thought leader by narrowing your focus to specific niches or industries, thus standing out from the competition.
Utilizing Advanced Tools and Analytics: Keep track of all marketing and pitch efforts through detailed analytics to understand what strategies work best and adjust accordingly.

What are common mistakes to avoid in agency new business development?

Overextending Without Focus: Avoid trying to be everything to everyone. Specialize in certain areas to differentiate your agency from others.
Neglecting Business Development Culture: Ensure that business development is ingrained in the agency’s culture, with all team members actively participating in growth activities.
Inefficient Use of Resources: Focus on quality over quantity in marketing efforts to avoid wasting resources on unqualified leads or ineffective strategies.

Back To Me: The Advertising Agency Business Development Plan. First Things First.

I have never been able to construct an effective business development program without first having an agency business plan.

The business plan should include (at least):

Your agency’s business and business development objectives
An assessment of your current strengths and weakness (I have all of my clients do an internal SWOT analysis)
A competitive agency positioning (specialization is a good thing)
An analysis of your space in the world – as in, why would a client hire you?
Clear target market objectives and target market personas
A service plan (it might mean adding new services)
Your inbound and outbound (think Account-Based Marketing) plan
The very important objective of running unignorable messaging
A dedication to being consistent and efficient – as in having a process

Your business plan should also help you plan for your future in the evolving world of marketing communications. I think that client confusion with the evolving state of advertising and marketing – this includes big and small clients – makes today a great time to be an agency. Winning agencies are resolving their business challenges, crafting the right services and guidance, and, importantly, are willing to modify their business model to avoid disruption to achieve success.

It is also imperative that you develop a roadmap for how to grow your current agency to become the agency of the future. The market, communication platforms, and client expectations are changing rapidly. Assess your current strengths, weaknesses, and how your agency expertise and personnel are going to stay ahead of change (do an annual SWOT analysis).

Change can be very profitable. What if you could restart your agency using a blank sheet of paper? Would you build a replica of your current agency or would it look dramatically different? If you think that change is in order, you better get started. Here is a powerful mantra from General Eric Shinseki.

“If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.”

The Agency New Business Program – Join The 34%

Armed with your business plan you can get ahead of your competitors by having a comprehensive new business plan. Most agencies do not have a plan. Get this industry research…

66% Of Advertising Agencies Report That They Do Not Have a Business Development Plan. This Is Lunacy!

Your plan should include most, if not all of the following: [Read more…] about How to Build A Winning Advertising Agency Business Development Program

An Optimized Search Engine Blog Strategy

Peter · May 22, 2022 · Leave a Comment

I started blogging in the early 2000s. I really cranked it up after I sold my advertising agency and became an advertising agency business development consultant. Below is a list of my blog posts. The subject matter of these hundreds of blog posts reflects my dedication to having an optimized search engine blog strategy. It worked.

My Optimized Search Engine Blog Strategy.

I am going to keep this easy. I could ramble on but these are the core elements of my blog strategy.

Understand your objectives. Mine is to entice advertising agency leadership to contact me about helping them develop an unignorable business development program. This has worked for me every week.
Understand and meet the needs of your market. You are writing for them. Example: My evergreen list that is just for advertising execs… Top Advertising and Design Awards.
Use all available SEO tools to help you determine trending subject matter and keywords. There are a bunch of tools listed on my advertising agency resources list.
Study your direct competition. What are they writing about? What are their best keywords?
Be consistent. As you can see, I have written, on average, over one post per week. In 2013 alone (when I wanted to really drive Google love), I wrote 188 blog posts.
Have your very own voice. Write with gusto,
Amplify the reach/frequency of your blog posts: post em on LinkedIn; use them in your agency’s email newsletter; send them directly to clients and prospects (even try paper), and on…
Go mega amplification. I am going to use some of these very best Levitan blog posts to form the basis of my new book.

OK – Here You Go… Levitan’s 750 Plus Blog Post Archive

Advertising Agency Outsourcing: An Opportunity and… New Competition

Peter · February 17, 2020 · Leave a Comment

I wrote this post about advertising agency outsourcing seven years ago. I am resurrecting it for a couple of reasons.

First, the use of outsourced freelance talent, as in not full-time employees (FTE), is a solid part of running a 2020 agency in a world of business uncertainty:

Will I win that new client? Will I lose our largest client? Will I ever get an agency of record client again or just get used to living with projects?

As an ex-agency owner, I know that keeping FTE costs down is a good idea. Given ad agency gross margins, having a bunch of FTE’s at a 70% utilization rate is not sustainable. Duh. That’s why I was initially intrigued by Victor’s & Spoils agency model. If there ever was an industry that needed to explore new models… it was/is advertising.

Second, it is worth noting that the Vistors & Spoils’ outsourced advertising agency model (actually crowdsourcing model) discussed below did not work. The agency, which was acquired by Havas in 2012, closed in August 2018. Why did it close? There are lots of thoughts about what happened. Consider…

Was crowdsourcing itself simply unmanageable? Is crowdsourcing a tool versus the basis for an agency? Was it’s possibly brutal system too unfair to freelancers? Did clients not get it? Is it simply too difficult to build and manage a complex marketing program using “anonymous” outsourcing?

And, on.

Finally and just an FYI. Here is the Victor’s & Spoils crowdsourcing competition that netted the agency’s logo. So, $2,400 to the winner of an advertising agency logo? That’s it? No comment.

Advertising Agency Outsourcing

Note: This blog post was originally posted in 2013. The primary points remain relevant.

The advertising industry has been outsourcing for decades. Freelancers are woven into our daily fabric. We use copywriters to write website copy and gun-slinging art directors to beef up new business pitch concepts. In the past few years, advertising agencies have gone beyond the traditional freelancer to add technologists and digital service firms to work in the background to make us look like sharp database, mobile, and social media experts.

Our outsourcing options have grown exponentially through the use of digital tools. We now have easier access to more talent marketplaces which have also resulted in new threats to the advertising agency model itself.

There is the power of emerging market labor: Ogilvy, Wieden+Kennedy, and Sapient all have offices in India that tap into the subcontinent’s skilled lower-cost talent. Most multinational ad agencies also use into their vast systems to find talent in other lower-cost countries. According to Firstpost, “Group FMG produces video, print, digital and mobile ads and has more than half its employees based in India. “We are applying all the clichés of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” to the advertising world,” Aditya Sharma, co-founder and chief business development officer at Group FMG. And, why not? The latest rounds of Clios have been won by art directors in faraway lands.

Interest in crowdsourcing is on a growth spurt, see Google’s trend line for the term “crowdsourcing” on the left, and has become a new freelance agency model. Victors & Spoils is known for its use of distributed problem solving to create advertising campaigns for blue-chip clients like Axe, General Mills, Harley-Davidson, and Levis. For sure, despite the benefits from having a more open market, freelancers have had issues with this model. However, the efficiency of freelance crowdsourcing works for clients. I suspect that Victors & Spoils is finding the middle ground.

Online freelance markets are booming. Elance reported 345,000 new freelancers and 826,000 jobs posted in 2012. Behance reported serious growth last May when they received an infusion of VC capital. According to their blog, “Users’ projects have received over 1 billion views and over 75 million views in just the past 30 days. Behance now showcases more than 2 million creative projects – after passing our first 1 million-project milestone just eight months ago.” I can imagine that many agencies are posting projects in this heavily trafficked marketplace.

The new world of freelance services may become one of the tools that agencies use to resolve the social media beast – social media authorship and management is, to put it mildly, labor-intensive. I have been using an ODesk freelancer in the Philippines to assist me with pinning “every advertising agency” website to my Pinterest agency site. In this case, I have a simple task that can be easily managed. In just a couple of weeks, he has efficiently pined over 1,000 ad and digital agency websites. This has freed up my time to write mini-website reviews.

On the SEO side, I have worked with a search engine marketing company based in Budapest that uses excellent English speaking writers across the globe to help their clients write guest posts.

The opportunities for agencies to leverage the flat-earth marketplace of freelance services are clear. Given the current and expanding outsourcing options, agencies need to continually explore how the Internet has dramatically expanded their freelance network, talent base, technology resources and can lower the costs of doing business.

On the other hand, many of these new services pose a significant threat. Just as the Victors & Spoils model is often criticized (feared?), we need to keep up with and continually review new Internet-powered services because they represent a growing form of competition. Just like you, savvy clients can directly outsource their work to India, Behance and 99 Designs too.

Advertising Agency Models

If you are interested in exploring new advertising agency models, give me a shout. I’ve examined many options.