Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

Search Results for: linkedin

Gary Vaynerchuk Loves You And Your Ad Agency

· · Leave a Comment

Contrary to (some) popular belief, Gary Vaynerchuk actually loves you and your advertising agency. He wants to help you grow. Here is my take on today’s Gary Vaynerchuk plus a rather inspiring B2B marketing video.

FYI: One of my best-read blog posts is “Gary Vaynerchuk Is Full Of Shit.” It is a response to his early damning of the advertising industry. Take a read. By the way, it has been read over 5,000 times. Why? Well, putting “Gary Vaynerchuk’ and “Full Of Shit” in your headline gets Google’s attention and speaks to my audience.

My original sense of Gary being full of shit stemmed from Gary’s 2015’s “Do you know the problem with Marketing?” episode of the Ad Age Digital Crash Course:

Here’s the ‘shit’ part. In the video, GaryVee pontificates in ‘Gary Speak’ about how advertising agencies don’t care about selling products (only about winning awards); that emotion does not sell (tell that to Apple’s “Think Different”); that ‘traditional’ advertising is inefficient (like much of digital isn’t); that creatives might want to consider shooting 10 spots for $300K each vs. one for $3 million (this is a new idea??? what world is he living in?) and that maybe we should think about testing advertising before we run it (hmm… that’s a new one).

I love self-promotion. And I get railing at the old ways of doing business to further one’s cause. But, please, cut the way too obvious crap and don’t be insulting.

Gary Vaynerchuk Is Not Full Of Shit – He Wants To Love You (And Your Ad Agency)

OK, that was Gary in 2015 when he was building Vaynermedia and needed some service differentiation. Let’s cut to 2019.  He recently spoke to a meeting of the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts. Watch the speech and Q&A below. Gary has both mellowed and has a lot of insight to deliver – to any B2B marketer. Just like your advertising agency.

A couple of Gary’s key points:

Buy underpriced attention for your agency marketing. This includes hammering underutilized LinkedIn. Hammer. Post like 40X a day.

Create longer content, like Gary’s videos, and cut them up for distribution. Amplify everything.

Don’t go out and hire a “social media expert” to run your program. YOU spend the 50 hours to learn it before you can ever judge the value of the freelancer/expert. I remember asking advertising agency CEO’s at Advertising Week if they ever placed a Google ad. The answer was no. I was like, are you kidding me? Do you even know WTF is going on?

Gary was asked how he finds the time to get things done. His answer – you probably waste three hours a day on really stupid shit. That 1-hour meeting should be 15 minutes.

If you run a local advertising agency, let’s say in Raleigh Durham, create a local show. Do a podcast, a local newsletter, a blog… just become known locally for your agency voice.

Big One: Romance your clients. Ever say thank you? Call up a client one year later to discuss that great project you did 12 months earlier? Send an unexpected gift? Call back a prospect that has fallen off your A-List? Find a good reason to say, Howdy.

The GaryVee Video…

 

Seven Powerful Ideas To Help You Attract That Desirable Advertising Agency Client

· · Leave a Comment

Imagine that you are a desirable advertising agency client. The desirable (to me) client = has a decent budget; respects marketing and what my agency could do for them; has a famous name and are nice people (If I got three out of four of these attributes I was usually happy. My client Nike got all four.)

Now imagine how many incoming sales messages a client like this gets every month from the aspiring advertising agency universe? I’m talking about direct sales messages.

To find out, I asked Lee McKnight, Vice President Sales at RSW/US. RSW/US has consistently provided a research-oriented perspective on the advertising agency business development marketplace.

Marketers Are Inundated – The Insane Math

Inundated is the best word I can use to describe the life of an average prospective marketing communications client. Here are a couple of stats from Lee:

The desirable client gets from 5 to 15 advertising agency emails per month.

Incoming telephone calls average 2 to 5 a month. Phone contacts are lower because, according to Lee, “Most agencies are afraid to pick up the phone, even when they have a new business director, the tendency is to rely on LinkedIn and email.”

So, you are Ms. Client trying to get her 10 hour day moving along – it is not hard to imagine that you might get 20 (or more) incoming advertising agency sales messages a month.

But, but there is more. This client also gets vendor and media contacts. Yikes.

The of-course question is: How can you get a prospect’s attention and then interest in hearing what you have to say?

Breaking Through The Clutter

Here are my top seven clutter busters:

  1. Make sure you have something to offer the prospect. This might sound like it does not need to be said. But, too often agencies just roll the dice without any forethought about why the client might ever be interested. “HI HI, we are here” is not an effective sales pitch.
  2. Create sales personas for the client types you want to reach and entice. Who are they / what do they need / what are there pain points / what do they look like / what might be job issues?
  3. Have a sales plan that includes an account-based marketing schedule and a sales messaging progression.
  4. Create a set of insights that must be read. Figure out more than one platform for your thinking. Get efficient. Amplify your messaging. That uber desirable advertising agency client – the ones you want – need to learn about how to grow their sales. Help them.
  5. Attack specific categories so you can use and reuse ‘expert-oriented’ sales messages that can be easily tailored to multiple clients. Why recreate the wheel for every client? But, do not be too universal – you want to speak directly to that prospect.
  6. Learn how to do warm vs. cold sales calls. Read this: Advertising Agency Business Development and Cold Calling.
  7. Think hard about how to look and sound different. How can you and your insights and messages and outbound tools be unignorable? You know, how can you break through the clutter? Sameness does not work.

I busted through sales clutter for Saatchi & Saatchi and my own advertising agency. I got the attention of that allusive advertising agency client.

Let’s talk about growing your business. You are in a hurry, right?

Contact me and take me up on my free Vito Corleone offer. 

How Small Advertising Agencies Can Win Big Clients

· · 1 Comment

A recent interview in Ad Age’s Ad Lib podcast reveals the insight that even large clients are now very attracted to small agencies. I’d imagine that this might not be a big surprise to you. Expert smaller agencies that deliver specialized services have been on the radar for a few years.

However, you might not know about serious client angst that comes along with working with specialists.

Take a read – in a new window: Ad Age Small Agency Conference Podcast.

A Bit Of Set Up To “How Small Advertising Agencies Can Win Big Clients”

The book, “What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire” by Daniel Bergner is a best-seller.

The title and reviews like this from The Atlantic, “…Shatters many of our most cherished myths about desire” got me thinking about what the new clients you want desire from an agency. Understanding this can help small agencies win big clients.

So… What do the big clients want to see from smaller agencies and is your agency set up to deliver it?

Mondelez-ImageHuge Client Mondelez And Small Agencies

Maureen Morrison’s AdvertisingAge article, “How a Small Agency Can land A Big Client Like Mondelez” sheds some light on this universal question. The article is an interview with Mondelez International’s agency scout Deb Giampoli. Deb shares her tips on the do’s and dont’s of how to get her attention.

The Truth: Small Advertising Agencies Can Win Big

Here are Deb’s tips and my take on her perspective.   [Read more…] about How Small Advertising Agencies Can Win Big Clients

More Advertising Agency Resources

· · Leave a Comment

Even More Advertising Agency Resources – August 2019

Its Friday 30 August, the ‘end‘ of summer, so I thought I’d shoot y’all some new advertising agency resources that could help you grow your agency. Or, at least, provide some much-needed efficiency. I’ll list these here and then add them to my The Big Advertising Agency Resource List.

Side note, thanks to all of the people that send me their favorite resources that I can have my huge staff of resource-munchkins review and pass on.

Go Ahead Play With These

Awesome Screenshot. Awesome Screenshot captures images, the whole image or a selected area, and records my screen so I can put the images on this very blog or use in my white papers and recommendations. For convenience, it sits on my Chrome bar.

Bulk.ly. I use Buffer to schedule and send out (as in LinkedIn and Twitter) my current and best-of past blog posts. But, I have to admit that it can be a pain in the ass to remember to do it on a regular basis. Bulky helps to automate the system and keeps a Buffer queue full-up.

Checkbot. Checkbot check’s your site (or others) to see and fix SEO, speed and security issues. Are you doing better than your competition? How are your clients doing?

ContactOut. I’ll use ContactOut’s words: “Find anyone’s personal email and phone number.” And, “ContacOut is used by recruiters at 30% of the Fortune 500.”

FormSwift. FormSwift has forty or so forms on their website that you can use to create and edit important documents. Documents include employee handbooks; employment contracts, non-competes, lease agreements, balance sheets, and my favorite: a resignation letter.

No Mas Verano

That’s it for summer, well soon. And for today.

Seasonality is interesting. I know from my years of working with advertising agencies on their growth and profitability strategies, that my incoming lead email will light up a bit once the summer passes. While I know that we’ve moved beyond the days when ad agencies got real quiet in the summer, there is still a deep-seated sense that September means that we all should get our business development acts in order. So, go ahead… give me a shout.

Let’s talk about growing your business. You are in a hurry, right?

Contact me now and take me up on my impossible to refuse 15-minute Vito Corleone offer. 

Time To Kill Your Advertising Agency Blog?

· · 2 Comments

Is It Time To Kill Your Advertising Agency Blog?

advertising agency blogI’ve updated my 2017 blog post about the power of the advertising agency blog and the question of should y’all continue to go for it or kill it. To blog or not?

I think that this is a big question that should be reviewed every year. Another question. Would anyone miss your blog?

To help answer these, I am going to discuss the pros and cons of advertising agency blogging. The kind of content creation that has been considered an integral element in an agency’s business development program. Blogging has been a key element of an agency’s Attraction Strategy.

Me

I have been consistently blogging since the early 2000’s. I started blogging as the CEO of my Oregon agency Citrus (I covered both advertising issues and the late 2000 recession’s effect on marketing).

The advertising agency business development blog you are currently reading has over 650 blog posts and acts as the core of my inbound marketing program. Good news for me, it fills my new client pipeline. Blogging has been very good to me.

But, but… my opinion about blogging, well at least for low volume advertising agency blogs, is that they are losing their power to attract a targeted audience, as in client leads. I see a few reasons for this.

  • There are zillions of blogs and blog posts every day. There has been a dramatic increase in the last five years.
  • There are hundreds (thousands?) of advertising agency blog posts and insights posted every week.
  • Most agencies write about the same subjects over and over.
  • Many agencies do not use online SEO tools to determine what blog post subjects will attract the most readership. I great way to do this is to look at what works for your most successful competitors.
  • Most agency blogs are boring.
  • Many client prospects are moving to podcasts and videos for their marketing information.

OK, Back To You. Should You Maintain Your Advertising Agency Blog? Or, Get Real And Just Kill It.

I look at a lot of advertising agency websites and their blogs. Many of the blogs are informative and brand building. However, way too many are just me-too blogs that actually deliver very little benefit to the agency.

The benefits should, stress should include the generation of incoming new client interest, showing that the agency Thinks Different (in a world of thousands of agency and advertising services options), help sell the agency as being on top of the advertising market, reinforces current client perceptions, demonstrates that the agency get content marketing, and demonstrates some personality and chutzpah. I call the chutzpah part… being Unignorable.

Start Here: Some Huge Blog Stats

The world really does not need another blog. As Steven Pressfield says in the title of his must-read book: “Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: Why That Is And What You Can Do About It”. [Read more…] about Time To Kill Your Advertising Agency Blog?