Search Results for: pitch

Write Your Advertising Book

Peter · April 4, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Write Your Advertising Agency Book

I’ve written and presented at conferences about writing an advertising agency book. It could be a book book, a digital book or even a zine. Just write it and benefit.

The benefits? People will buy it. You will look like an expert. You could make a few bucks. You will get more incoming leads. Actually, it should be about getting more leads.

The Levitan Pitch — My Sales

The sales of my book The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. (look at the top of this page) are still growing. And, I keep getting leads from people that read it. This is all good. While not a goal, I even make some bucks (for me and Jeff Bezos). See a decent the two month period below. Hey, book sales are buying me my trip to this summer’s Hungarian Grand Prix (that’s Formula 1 for you NASCAR fans.)

How Digital Agencies Win Clients

Peter · April 4, 2017 · 1 Comment

How Digital Agencies Find (and Keep) Clients

I was interviewed for the DM News article, “How Digital Agencies Find (and Keep) Clients”. Were my comments brilliant? Well, brilliant might be a stretch. But here are my key points.

Referrals – The Default Business Development Tool

Where do clients come from?

“The traditional rules of marketing have not changed,” says Peter Levitan, former agency executive and owner, now a self-employed strategist. “The primary way, the default, is referrals.” Levitan says. “Who doesn’t like referrals?”

So why is it that word of mouth is the way agencies get business? “They do not have an active business development program,” Levitan says. About 60% of all agencies have no business development plan. “That is the problem of being in a low-margin industry….finding the manpower to run business development when you spend 10 hours a day taking care of the client.”

Takeaway. I love referrals and have a master plan for how to actually manage a referral program, Too many agencies are passive about getting referrals from friends, family and current and past clients. Hey, ask people to refer you. Have a plan.

However, the issue with referrals is that mot agencies rely on them to get new business because they do not have a proactive 24/7 business development plan. Referrals become the default new business tool.

The Power of Insights

“I suggest providing an insight the client does not have,” Levitan says. Google Survey is a good place to start looking for those insights, he noted. Finding that insight “will get you new business,” he says.

Levitan gave one example from personal experience. While trying to get a non-profit to sign on, he pitched this insight: the public perceived the organization as one of the five most well known, but least in need of donations.

Pitching the crucial insight harkens back to the Mad Men era of advertising in the 1960s, when ad agencies pitched on the basis of the “one big idea”. Levitan explains that today, “ad tech rules. The Mad Men days of the big idea have been pushed to the back burner.” Digital firms lead with technology, but “forget they are dealing with humans.” he added.

Actually, the non-profit story is about an agency that hired me to help them win more new business. I’ve helped them achieve their goal. One piece of advice I gave them was to lead every pitch with a very compelling insight. I bet that sounds easy. It isn’t. It can’t be just any insight. It has to be an insight that the client never thought of. But, you know that.

A great insight tool is Google Consumer Surveys. Try it out.

Or, just go to my Let’s Talk page and I’ll help you out.

How To Own A Brand Positioning

Peter · March 4, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Ah, The Brand Positioning – How Are You Going To Own Yours?

All of the medium to small advertising, PR, design and digital agencies I work with (even network agencies) are by nature, challenger brands. As in, they are not R/GA or Droga 5 or 72andSunny or today’s hottest – pick your current digital-flavor-of-the-month specialist. I’m sure you know what challenger brand means and that is one of your potential brand positionings but… Here is a nice clear definition of challenger brand from Chron.com:

A challenger brand is a company or product brand in an industry that is not the category leader. The term denotes the fact that such companies have to play from a position behind the dominant player or leader in an industry. This makes the process of marketing significant to attracting customers.

The nurturing of challenger brands is one of the marketing agency positionings that I’ve discussed on this blog and with many of my agency clients. No, it is not a brand new proposition. But, it has power since most brands are by nature challenges and, as stated above, marketing is critical to elevating a challenger brand to brand leadership. This makes having a dedication to helping challenger brands a winning proposition.

Eat Bigger Smaller Fish

I have been following the challenger brand consultancy Eat Big Fish for years. They are without question the leading consultancy in this space and their leader Adam Morgan is the numero uno voice of the challenger brand market. I have used Eat Big Fish in my agency business development recommendations as one of the benchmark agencies that I believe represents a best of class B2B marketer. As in, how they market themselves under, inside and around their positioning umbrella.

Eat Big Fish is an excellent example of a marketing company that has a single-minded sales proposition, a well-defined market and a dedication to thought leadership that… makes them, without question, the thought leader, “I must talk to them” leader in their category.

How They Do It

I think that, no, I know that, EBF (I hope they don’t mind the abbreviation, I just don’t like typing ‘fish’ too often) can offer some direction for all agencies.

EBF nailed their approach to a large hungry market. And, they appear to be early in. Or, even better, they market themselves so well, that they look like they were early in.

They nailed their brand name and logo. Ah, the British and branding.

They nailed their messaging.

Adam Morgan established his credentials in 2009 by writing the book, “Eating The Big Fish”.
Their latest book, “A Beautiful Constraint”, speaks directly to today’s time and resource scarcity. Here is how they describe the book: “A Beautiful Constraint is a book about everyday, practical inventiveness, designed for the constrained times in which we live. It describes how to take the kinds of issues that all of us face today — lack of time, money, resources, attention, know-how — and see in them the opportunity for transformation of oneself and one’s organization’s fortunes.” Oh, they have two more books. I like ‘agencies’ that write books. Here’s is a blog post on how to do that.
EBF has a hard to resist sales proposition: “We enable ambitious brands of all shapes and sizes to do more more with less.” Um like, what client would you want that isn’t ambitious and would just love it if you offered them a high ROI?
Their Our Work section delivers on their strategic focus and client benefits. Nice, clear and concise. Like, if you were a big brand, why wouldn’t you give these guys a call? Plus, they sound like they play nice with the other children – they fit in seamlessly between the brand and the brand’s agency.
EBF’s thought-leadership is, well, thoughtful. This series is timely, thought-provoking, insightful, and fun to read. It would be of interest to any client out there: “Challengers To Watch In 2017”. Cool! I love this one — Impossible Foods. Imagine trying to challenge the all-beeeeeef burger.
They give good videos. Check out their Speeches page.
They nail client testimonials. Most agency client testimonials are — boring. These are not.

And… you should subscribe to their newsletter. You’ll see why after you get one. The pitch: “Sign up to The Challenger Project and get our monthly roundup of challenger inspiration every last Friday.”

One thing I dig about their approach is that their focus is on sharing the insights and stories from the broader world of challenger brands. Whether client or not, eatbigfish get out of the way of the story.

Inspiring in an agency world where we just cannot stop talking about ourselves. Ya know what I mean?

Surprise: Inbound Marketing Works

Peter · March 1, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Inbound Marketing Works

Some inbound marketing tips about half way down. But, ya know, I just gotta start with a story.

OK, no big surprise here… I just have to say it. Inbound marketing does work. Why am I bringing up this subject that you probably think about every day? Because I have been starting to see some thinking that the overabundance of marketing content and SEO activity, especially in your B2B space (I am talking about advertising agency business development), is reducing the effectiveness of inbound. Well, it is. In fact, all forms of marketing appear to be less effective for the average marketer. But, here is the deal. A hefty segment of inbound marketers are clearly winning. They are winning because of their strategic approach, well-targeted tactics and, most importantly, how they execute. The winners use both best practices and the objective of being unignorable.

Some background.

My wife and I are building a house down here in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It will kinda look like the photo on the left – more windows and a different color. Click on the link to see why we moved down here and how (yes, I know that some of you have thought about leaving the USA too — shhhh, I won’t tell). As new house builders and ones that will need to purchase a bunch of furniture because we totally downsized when we left Portland OR last July, we need some new stuff. This got me thinking that I’d rather have people like you buy my services and send me cash vs. simply raiding my savings. Therefore, I ramped up my inbound marketing about a month ago to slightly increase my leads. Because, yes you know this is coming… Inbound works.

The Inbound Marketing Switch

Over the past four weeks, I’ve gotten inbound leads from advertising agencies in Sweden, Dubai, Adelaide, Botswana, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, and Toledo. I’ve even gotten incoming from multi-national networks.

I got these seemingly random, but very hot global leads because I flipped the inbound switch. A switch I found in 1995.

I have been doing social media and inbound marketing since the mid-90’s. Without getting into great detail, my first web business was New Jersey Online, a very early news website. We used social media in the form of viewer forums about New Jersey and New York sports (the Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Islanders, Rangers and Devils, oh and the Yankees and Mets) and all the local kid’s sports teams and entertainment to capture the attention of a huge audience. We added daily content from four news sources (they were called newspapers). We grew an audience that was even larger than the New York Time’s website (I love saying this.) We won the New Jersey / New York metro battle by using social media, the power of sharing and… inbound marketing.

Back To Today

Here are the the switches I’ve thrown since January. No, no secrets here. It is just about execution and online sales pressure. I offer these as a reminder that targeted inbound marketing activity begets sales lead activity.

I’ve been posting more often. Some are long posts repurposed from other thought-leadership platforms I’ve used.
I’ve been amplifying and reposting my current and past best read posts beyond my website via my newsletter, linkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
I agreed to speak at my client Hannapin Marketing’s big Los Angeles PPC Hero Conference. They have promoted me.
Because of the speaking gig, I was interviewed by Paul Wicker of the super-smart ad tech company ADSTAGE.
A very large multi-office agency (one I am going to give a pitching seminar to) decided to tell all of their execs to buy my book on pitching and then get reimbursed. February was one of my best selling months. The book, actually an outbound strategy, gets the word out.
HubSpot is about to run another one of my guest posts and they just invited me to present on one of their large international webinars.

—–

So, my message is simple. Inbound activity works. Google likes it and they grant you better search positioning (FYI: it took Google less than an hour to crawl this page). Increased activity stimulates the readers of your emails, Facebook page, LinkedIn Followers and your groups. Stimulation with the right content to the right people delivers sales leads.

—–

And, since I know you like infographics, here is a crisp one from StraightNorth. As they say,”The Internet marketing lead generation ecosystem illustrates how all components fit together to form cohesive campaigns. It is intended to give marketing leaders a blueprint for building a complete Internet marketing strategy that maximizes sales lead generation.”

Stuff’s Happening

Peter · February 15, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Time Keeps On Ticking

Some things on my plate. Just thought I’d share them to get out a quick personal update.

I am now into my 8th month of living in Mexico. This was a great decision and great timing!

I am in the process of writing a long(ish) blog post on lead generation -> lead nurturing -> pitching -> closing. All tailored to my advertising, digital, design, etc. agency readers.

I am writing my presentation on agency business development for my talk at the huge (fabulous, great, incredible — Thank You Donald) PPC Hero Conference in L.A. in April. This link, go to this conference, it is the largest PPC conference, gets you a nice discount.

I am getting ready to interview Peter Shankman on the gift of ADD / ADHD and its relationship to working in an advertising agency and knowing how to get the attention of B2C and B2B ‘consumers.’ This will become a guest post on HubSpot and then amplified across my social networks.

I was just interviewed by Paul Wicker for the AdStage podcast. I’ll let you know when it gets published.

I am toying with the idea of writing a new book. This one on why you will NEVER get to, or want to retire. It would be an update to my ‘traing wheels’ book Boomercide: From Woodstock To Suicide. Boomercide was my first book. It about how you can use suicide as a financial planning tool. I’m serious.

And….

I am working on my 3-year Mexican photo project GENTE.MX I am in the process of photographing my town, San Miguel de Allende. Website up soon. Two images from the 300 – 500+ series are above and below.