Peter Levitan & Co.
The New Business of Advertising
When I ran my agency I avoided the oh-too-obvious XMAS client dance / gift/ celebration by waiting just a bit to send out engraved bottles of red wine that ushered in the New Year. Thought we’d get past the XMAS rushhhhhh and clutter.
Below is my first holiday thing. This is from a Wolff Olins email. Guess they are beating the clutter by being first.
A funny thing happens when you run a blog. You find out that you have to feed it as if it was a pet. No food, no life. In the blog’s case, no content (copy, videos, photographs), no Google love.
Google love is my primary business development tool. Most of my ad agency clients tell me that they found me on Google (usually on page one for a related search.) So, in honor of my need to feed the Google beast and the fact that my weekly round-up newsletter will go out tomorrow and… the fact that I have not written a new blog post this week (too busy with client work – a very lame excuse), I am starting a new series called My Wednesday Photograph to ensure that I have at least one post per week. By the way, that’s me on the left in the mining town Minerale de Pozos.
I’ll get into my photography in greater detail in the future. But, as a fast start… I started shooting when I was a teen in New York. Got my BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Ran Levitan & Feinstein Photography in SF for 4 years and then moved to New York where I decidedIi did not want to shoot commercial work. I then started my advertising career. That said, I’ve been shooting for myself since then. For gear heads… I shoot a Widelux, a 1960’s wide angle film camera made famous by Jeff Bridges, and Fuji’s X-T1 and X100T.
I moved to Mexico last July. You can read about the move here. In the past few weeks, I’ve been going out in the streets of San Miguel de Allende and nearby small towns with two assistants and a large white background to photograph Mexicans. One of my goals is to show Americans how wonderful these folks are in a time when many Mexican are demonized by xenophobic Americans. So, here you go with the portrait on the left and two Apache dancers I shot last week in San Miguel Viejo – a town of 336.
More to come.
OK, not big news here: inbound marketing works. But, in the interest of sharing, I’d just like to say it works for me big time and how it does that.
A couple of weeks ago I sensed that the number of high-octane inbound inquiries was falling off. I usually get at least a couple of qualified new business leads from interested advertising agencies a week. Noting the decline, I did the following…
Yes. I now have four ‘hot’ leads – from the USA, South America, and Europe. Was this a direct result of my upping my inbound efforts? I can’t directly attribute all of the leads to this effort since not all agencies ever remember how they heard of me*. However, I have seen a 300% increase in the type of leads I want.
This makes me happy.
So…. I will just do more. Why not? My increased efforts just cost me some time and $50 bucks.
*Interestingly, it is often a long-term / repeat exposure to my brand. They see me via SEO on Google, read the blog, see guest posts, read me on LinkedIn and have bought my book on pitching.
I’ve written about the potential of chatbots as an advertising agency revenue and new business source. Read about it here on HubSpot and here on my blog.
If you have any reason to think that chatbots are NOT going to be a major part of the digital world & your marketing, listen to the leaders of Facebook, Microsoft and Google on what they are up to.
Why is 29 so popular?
