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Ten Important Questions For Your Advertising Agency

Peter · October 31, 2023 · Leave a Comment

Ten Important Questions For Your Advertising Agency Ten Questions Every Advertising and Digital Agency Has to Answerer to Lead the Market

But First… Some Pain. The Why I Wrote: Ten Important Questions For Your Advertising Agency 

There is a high degree of fear, doubt, and uncertainty in the Advertising Industry. According to the 2023 RSW/US New Business Report:

            “This year (2023), 58% of agencies report obtaining new business has been harder, or a lot harder, compared to the previous year.”

            “38% of agencies said the number of opportunities for new business decreased this year, versus 26% last year.”

As an ex-agency owner and the Director of Global Business Development at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Worldwide, I know these facts are insane and worrying.

Frankly, only kick-ass agencies will survive.

Here Are Ten Questions (and Thoughts) That Will Kick-Start Your Agency’s Success.

These are food for thought. This is where I start with my advertising agency consultation clients.

  1. Do You Update Your Business Plan? How hard do you look at and possibly adjust your business plan? How will you generate maximum revenues and profits moving forward? Do you adjust? Do you understand your Total Addressable Market (TAM)? I have a one-page business plan guide in my book, “How To Build A Kick-Ass Advertising Agency.”

  2. Have You Defined Your advertising agency positioning? This is a tough and hard look at your primary brand proposition. Stand out. be clear. Be compelling. Be an expert. Expert agencies win more clients and get bought faster.

  3. Do You Have a Competitive ++ Sales Oriented Website? This is one of the first places that anyone sees your agency. How do you rank vs. your competition? What do you say (fast!) that will get a prospect to pay attention and want to dig in? In many cases, you only have around five seconds to make me pay attention, decide you are right for me, and stick around vs. the other 3,999 advertising, digital, etc. agency websites. Your website is a sales tool. Sell!

  4. Is Your Business Development Plan A Winner? How have you managed your plan over the past year? My blog has 850+ blog posts discussing how to market your agency. Plus, I’ve written two advertising agency “guide” books just for you on this rather critical

  5. Have You Perfected Account-Based Marketing? You do this, right? If so, how? I am blown away by the number of new, smart, easy-to-use AI-based marketing tools designed to energize and streamline your marketing. Ask me about them.

  6. Are You a Thought Leader? Are you an active and efficient thinker, blogger, LinkedIn guru, or podcaster? How do you look on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok? Are you perceived as a category thought leader? What do your analytics tell you?

  7. What Is Your ‘findable’ quotient: Can I find your advertising agency if I search for you or your expertise? You should be everywhere I might search for you. Your competition will probably be there.

  8. How Is the Client List? Does your client list look powerful to an outsider? Do you know how to position your client list for business development? Do one or two clients account for too high a percentage of your revenues? If so, go out and get new clients. And love the one you are with.

  9. Got Intellectual property? Do you have any IP? Something that will differentiate and add sustainable value to your agency? You can do this. I know how to make this happen by hyping your current client-facing systems and licensing white-label tools.

  10. Do You Manage Your Creative Vibe? How does your creativity stack up, and how do you prove it? I am talking about the vibe of your creative ideas, use of media, and just plain methodology to help clients stand out.

One More BIG One. Man Bites Dog.

Is your agency, as in, for example, #digitalagency Unignorable? If you are, um, ignorable, you will not win. It is that simple. I concentrate on how to make agencies UNIGNORABLE.

Dog bites man, isn’t unignorable. Man bites dog is. What is your breakout message?

Here It Comes – An Unignorable Offer

Take me up on my free Godfather offer. This is an offer you can’t—or rather, shouldn’t—refuse.

Need a starting point? Let’s talk for 15 minutes—just 0.25 on the timesheet— to discuss your agency’s issues & opportunities and how I will help you build a more powerful advertising agency business development program. You will leave the call with at least one powerful business development idea. I guarantee it.

Here is my calendar: www.calendly.com/peterlevitan

Smart Advertising Agency Lead Generation

Peter · October 14, 2023 · Leave a Comment

Unignorable Marketing Program Delivers A Smart Advertising Agency Lead Generation System

Smart Advertising Agency Lead GenerationThis is a thought starter for how to deliver on and support the promise that your advertising agency can make a client, its services, or its products unignorable. Deliver an unignorable message to develop a smart advertising agency lead generation system.

To prove your point and demonstrate your unignorable belief system your advertising agency will need to think about how to express its own marketing messaging in an unignorable way. Your advertising agency will need to tailor its promise based on its own skills and history.

You have to walk the talk.

Now, consider this…

“My brain is full.”

It is common knowledge that we are bombarded by 24/7 news, social media content, incoming alerts, messaging and emails, digital notifications, and multiple forms of advertising every day. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people and brands and sales messages want our attention.

“My brain forgets”

Even worse than message bombardment is the fact that we can hardly even remember the messages that we want to remember. Neuroscientists tell us that, at best, 90% of what we hear and see will be forgotten. These scientists have even invented the Forgetting Curve chart to help us to visualize how much does not sink in.

Marketing clients understand the high cost of this cognitive problem and are looking for marketing techniques, systems, platforms, and efficient solutions that help deliver sales messages that get noticed and are memorable. These clients are looking for marketing communications agencies that can offer marketing that cannot be ignored.

I call it getting to being Unignorable.

Unignorable delivers smart advertising agency lead generation.

What is the definition of Unignorable? The online dictionary Merriam–Webster defines “Unignorable” as being – unable to be ignored: not ignorable.

 According to me, the opposite of being Unignorable is to be ignored. Being ignored is a marketing disaster. A waste of everyone’s time and money.

Your Advertising Agency’s Must-Do Approach to Delivering Unignorable Marketing.

OK. How to express your advertising agency’s solution to current and future clients? [Read more…] about Smart Advertising Agency Lead Generation

Improve Your Advertising Agency Brand

Peter · September 27, 2023 · 1 Comment

The Power of Personal Chemistry and the Advertising Agency Brand

The advertising agency brandI’ve talked a lot about how a stand-out, unignorable advertising agency brand can make or break your agency’s ability to attract the attention of a new client. Plus, the personal side of an agency brand can determine if you can win or lose a pitch.

Yo People Power

There seems to be one aspect of pitching that keeps coming up over and over and rises to the top of almost everyone’s list. That is the idea that agencies ultimately win or lose based on interpersonal chemistry and corporate culture alignment. How do I know this? I’ve asked a dozen advertising agency consultants about what works and does not in a pitch since so many agencies sound and look alike.

People win pitches.

Manage Personal Chemistry

My fear with the chemistry thing is that it can appear to be something that is just nature vs. something that can be managed and created. There is a school of thought that says that you either gel with the prospect or you don’t. Sorry, Advertising agency Business Development Director, it’s all about a managed chemical reaction, and that’s why it is called chemistry.

Yikes. After preparing a smart, tight presentation, are we ultimately at the mercy and vagaries of some mysterious and unmanageable human thing? Pheromones, anyone?

I refuse to think that we don’t have any control. I don’t like the idea that after the long and expensive journey from an agency’s business development outreach to RFIs, RFPs, and then on to the final presentation, it all comes down to fate: the client either digs you, or they don’t. It just sounds way too passive.

So what can we do to build chemistry?

Let’s start with what not to do. Do not make any of the mistakes discussed in the early chapters of my The Levitan Pitch. book. Think of it this way: if you are twenty-something and you are going out to find your mate, you shower and dress accordingly. If you are a surfer, you wear Hurley’s. If you work on Wall Street, you wear Prada. Once you’ve defined your target prospect and aligned persona, you know that you need to do the obvious: make eye contact and act interested in the other person’s story. You will try to avoid any conversation-killing words. Even better, you will lean in and listen and make adjustments to your side of the conversation to demonstrate your interest. You won’t bore them with endless stories that are all about you. You will flatter them.

OK, you get it. Avoid the things that you can control. Yes, I believe we can.

But can we manufacture and/or control interpersonal chemistry to drive the advertising agency brand? Or, is it just up to some form of automatic business-related pheromones?

New business chemistry gets even more complicated when you introduce the idea that chemistry must be built between two groups in addition to individuals. Sure, some pitches are won because of an agency’s charismatic leader. However, in most cases, it is your team that is being evaluated. In order to develop chemistry between two separate groups (clients and agency presenters), the presenter group, as a whole, needs to demonstrate an understanding of the client group’s challenges, a commonality of purpose, matching emotional commitment (passion), empathy for shared problems, and a common language. Ultimately you will build rapport with the client group if they think that you are all in sync, as in on the same wavelength, especially in understanding their business issues. This is one of the reasons that you always need to remember that the pitch is much more about them, not you.

Two key words to keep on the top of your mind and manage are values, as in having and demonstrating shared values, and trust, as in building confidence in your agency’s integrity and reliability. Building trust is particularly important in service pitches where the client will be committing to a personal relationship. Trust is more easily given between two similar groups; groups that have already established commonalities. You are like me, therefore I understand you better and can trust you more easily.

Cultural alignment is also critical. Assuming that there isn’t a total disconnect between the client’s values and yours (this is something you should have figured out back at the RFP stage), cultural alignment can be managed. To get there, make sure ahead of any meeting that you read up on the client’s Mission and Vision Statements, review their brand values, and understand their corporate goals. If the client is a public company, read their annual report. It provides a comprehensive overview of the company’s business and financial condition and its dreams.

Find commonalities between the client and your agency, and subtly reinforce these in the meeting.

An Advertising Agency Brand Example – Be Delightful

As I mentioned earlier in the book learn everything about the client you want.

My ex-client Sara Lee’s Mission Statement states that they want: “To simply delight you… every day.” Surely your agency could find a very creative way to mirror the idea of “delight” in your pitch and even (very sparingly) use the word “delight” to reinforce rapport.

12 Advertising Agency Pitch Mistakes 

Peter · September 6, 2023 · 3 Comments

12 Advertising Agency Pitch Mistakes

Advertising Agency Pitch Mistakes Here are my 12 favorite advertising agency pitch mistakes. Delivered as a ‘must do’s’ cartoon series – see below.

Now that my new book How To Build A Kick-Ass Advertising Agency is on the market (and doing well, thank you – buy it) I thought I’d revisit a core message from my first advertising agency advice book.

The fact is that way too many agencies continue to make avoidable mistakes – especially in the world of Zoom-like meetings.

One of the biggest mistakes is that advertising agency leaders do not recognize the importance of interpersonal chemistry. The agency pitch consultants I interviewed for The Levitan Pitch book all told me that many agency selection decisions are made by the client determining that they LIKE the agency and its people. This is because way too many agencies are kinda look-a-like. OK, and sound alike. Work on YOU, INC.

Here they are… The 12 Advertising Agency Pitch Mistakes

I’ve purposely served the pitching mistakes up as advice, as things to do. Why? As you will see throughout my paperback and eBook, The Levitan Pitch. (especially in the interview section) many advertising agencies, pitch leaders, and team members, make these crazy mistakes. According to the 18 agency search consultants interviewed in the book, these pitch mistakes are made all the time. Agencies make them despite knowing that they will lower their batting average. This is quite baffling.

Here are five of my all-time favorites:

  1. The agency hasn’t worked at being distinctive. There might even be a fear of being “too” different. Strange, but true.
  2. The agency hasn’t done a good job of planning the flow of the presentation. They haven’t approached the pitch as theater.
  3. Agencies often leave their best presenters behind because it is someone else’s turn to go to the pitch. Huh!?
  4. The agency presents way too many strategic and creative ideas.
  5. The big one: the agency spends way too much time talking about themselves and not the client. Here is an example from the book:

“Agencies spend far too much time talking about themselves and not enough time addressing the problems of the client. Clients want to hear solutions to their problems, not how great the agency thinks it is. Best advice to agencies – focus on the client, demonstrate real understanding of their issues, unearth commercial as well as consumer insight, keep it simple, and make it memorable!”

C/O Brian Sparks, Managing Director: Agency Assessments International, UK and Ireland…

How did we all get to this not-so-special place? I think that some of the primary issues haven’t been addressed:

  • The speed at which agencies start to work as soon as they are invited to pith an account. Rarely do they stop and think through the entire process before all hell breaks loose.
  • Most agencies do not have a clear methodology for how they are going to run pitches. It is almost as if they are starting with a blank page every time they are invited to pitch for new business. I recommend a few things to do to manage the pitch including having a standard agency checklist. You can see one in my Pitch Playbook.
  • Worse, most agencies don’t even have a master business development plan.

To help resolve this dilemma, I offer my 12 deadliest advertising agency pitch mistakes as counter-intuitive must-dos illustrated by a series of cartoons from my friend Steve Klinetobe.

 

Mistake Poster

 

 

[Read more…] about 12 Advertising Agency Pitch Mistakes 

How To Win New Advertising Agency Business

Peter · September 6, 2023 · 2 Comments

How To Win New Advertising Agency Business

How To Win New Advertising Agency BusinessMy thoughts on how to win new advertising agency business from those wonderful clients that you want… was one of the first blog post messages I ran for my advertising agency business development consultancy. I started the consultancy in 2013 after I sold my Portland agency. Whoa: About 850 blog posts ago.

It was a great, useful blog post about, yes, how to win new advertising agency business and got the attention of my ad agency market. The idea is still useful.

“Wait a minute, who are you guys?”

That was the question we got from Harrah’s Las Vegas after they received our iTunes gift card. We told them who we were, thanked them again for their help and a relationship was born. Here’s how we got there.

About 10+ years ago, my Portland ad agency Citrus needed a more distinctive brand positioning. As I suspect you know, finding a new brand position for an advertising agency, especially a “full-service” agency like ours, isn’t easy. While full-service is a highly relevant service offer that many clients seek, it isn’t a particularly distinctive sales proposition in a world with thousands of similar ad agencies. The fact is, full-service sounds rather platitudinous.

There are probably 2,000 advertising agencies called full-service.

Here is how we broke out.

To refresh our brand (and get more notice) we initiated a strategic branding process. We employed the account panning skills of Lynette Xanders, one of the Northwest’s best strategists. Lynette helped us gain a better understanding of the agency’s existing positioning, insights into how our staff perceived the current and future agency, an examination of relevant industry shifts, and a deeper view of our goals and dreams. We added in a competitive review to advance our understanding of what clients need and want from an agency.

Next – We Used A Survey As A How To Win New Advertising Agency Business Sales Tool

Our next step was to create an online survey to show a set of alternative positioning statements to marketing decision-makers – our clients and target companies. We wanted to get past our own internal navel-gazing.

We took the branding exercise and added a new business spin.

We used our new business database to select a list of A-level client prospects and used the positioning research as an introduction to Citrus. The program had 6 low-cost elements.

  1. A list of 5 positioning statements were listed in an agency research section on our website. In addition to the survey, this helped us to drive the responders to our larger agency story.
  2. A Survey Monkey online survey.
  3. An email list compiled from our The List Inc. database. Now WINMO.
  4. Three-stage email outreach.The offer of winning a $50 iTunes gift card twas added as an incentive.
  5. The prospect group’s response rate was surprisingly high at about 30%. Sometimes if you ask nicely people will want to respond.

Winning Harrah’s

One of the respondents from our outreach list (wanna-be client types) was a corporate marketing manager at Harrah’s (now Caesars Entertainment.) After the manager answered the survey we sent her a nice note and the gift card. Her response was, “Wait a minute. Who are you guys?”

This question led to more emails, phone calls, and a trip to Las Vegas. The meeting resulted in our working on Harrah’s national Las Vegas Meeting’s By Harrah’s program that sells thousands of room nights per year for Harrah’s 8 Las Vegas casinos. Our work included a new website, a direct marketing program, and a print advertising campaign.

This was a rather decent result from sending out a couple of emails, asking for some help, and the delivery of an iTunes gift card. Remember iTunes?

Oh, in addition to a new client, our research also netted a new agency brand positioning.

The Message – If you want to know How To Win New Advertising Agency Business – please be different. Or as I call it… be Unignorable.

Oh… I have written lots about advertising agency brand positions. Here.

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