Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

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What’s Your Smart Guest Blog Pitch?

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I’ve done a fair amount of guest blogging on advertising and marketing industry websites to drive my awareness within the advertising agency market. Based on this experience, I strongly recommend the guest blog opportunity to my agency clients and give them both strategic and tactical methods to amplify their messaging on OPW – other people’s websites.

As you might suspect, how one delivers the guest blog pitch is critical.

To start, these are the core objectives of the guest blog (care of Neil Patel):

Positioning yourself as an authority and well-known name in the industry. (This is especially important for an advertising agency that wants to get in front of a specific target market that reads their large audience industry blogs.)

Getting exposure (traffic) back to your website.

Building backlinks to your website.

An Incoming Guest Blog Request

I recently received a request to guest blog on my website. I believe that the incoming email provides a teachable moment. Here is the email from Piyuesh Modi of Amsterdam + Bangalore + Melbourne’s PagePotato Digital Marketing.

Hi,

Hope you are doing great.

I was searching on relevant influencers talking about content marketing and stumbled upon your blog
https://peterlevitan.com/the-history-of-podcasting-9181/

Being the co-founder of Digital Marketing agency and sketching enthusiast, I have tried to put my sketching skills to use and made sketch notes on topics related to content marketing. The attachment has one example and this has many more
https://pagepotato.com/content-marketing-doodles-sketch-notes-piyuesh-modi/

Entrepreneur.com and YourStory.com have found it interesting and went ahead to publish them (the links will take you to the published blogs). This made me think that content marketing readers are finding it useful. Since I saw that your blog is already helping a lot of readers, I thought it would be a good idea to reach out to you and offer my content marketing sketchnotes FREE for use in your blogs or in your social media.

I am not expecting anything in return for this. However, if you choose to share it with your audience, it would encourage me to keep doing this 🙂

Moving a step further, if you have any valuable fresh content, then I would also be interested to share with my audience.

Thanks,

Piyuesh’s Guest Blog Pitch

Let’s break down Piyuesh’s guest post ‘pitch’. [Read more…] about What’s Your Smart Guest Blog Pitch?

Advertising Agency Marketing and Getting Past Sameness

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Beyond Sameness: An Advertising Agency Marketing Objective

This mini-thought-piece is about getting away from the awfulness of advertising agency marketing ‘sameness’.

First of all, of course, all advertising agencies are by nature the same. All dry cleaners are the same. All bars are the same. All optometrists are the same.

All advertising agencies make or deliver ads. Dry cleaners clean clothes, bars serve drinks and optometrists check out your eyes.

However, some agencies get past sameness and stand out from the pack. How do they do that?

How To Leave Sameness Behind?

Sameness sucks, but if you are like me, you do have your favorite dry cleaner (mine looks very modern); bar (mine is on a roof) and optometrist (mine is young and knows the latest methods and speaks English) I live in Mexico.

How can you get your advertising agency away from acting and looking like the agency down the street?

It isn’t by delivering the same message. “We are cool” / “We are smart” / “We know social media” / “We are creative” / “We have nice furniture” / We have a very human culture” / “We know content.”

The way out of this mess (the mess is huge given that there are over 4,000 ad agency-type choices) is to make looking and sounding different a goal. I call it being “Unignorable.”

6 (Easy) Paths To Being Unignorably As IN Un-Same-Ness Advertising Agency Marketing

Get past sameness. Make not being the same, make not being IGNORABLE an agency objective. Here are some things you can do.

  1. Market the hell out of your agency. This means having a super smart plan, a plan that you run 24/7. Good news for you… most agencies do not do this. Just by running a solid business development program, you will be not same-like. How is your outbound program? Your account-based marketing calendar? Your must-read blog? Your Linkedin program? By the way, could you swap out your name and put in another agency and have all of your marketing activity be too same-like — as in not branding you? If so, you are screwed.
  2. Get specialized. Pick something narrow to be known for. What’s available… Think expertise. Be the micro-expertise digital specialist example: Own search engine marketing like HawkSEM. Own data marketing expertise like Delve. Own category expertise like Red Interactive and entertainment.
  3. Own geography. Portland’s Grady Britton is not only one of the oldest agencies in Portland, but it also supports the city. Check out its Portland non-profit grant program.
  4. Own a high-interest demographic. Miami’s Viva owns multi-cultural marketing. Linda Gonzales, its leader, is a recognized expert. She gets the calls from the trade press about anything related to cultural marketing.
  5. Own a personality. The essence of getting past sameness is having a personality. The clients you want, buy people (you are in a people business). Australia’s Tiny Hunter does a couple of things right from the go. First, they tell the market that they specialize in family business marketing. Second, they introduce you to the leadership team right away via a home page video. Tiny Hunter is all about people: the type of client, the client’s customer and the agency leaders. How clear are your agency’s message and personality?
  6. One more. Have a website that isn’t interchangeable with your neighbor agency’s site. And, remember, ask for the order. Your website is a sales tool.

If you make sameness your enemy, you will become unignorable.

 

Advertising Agency Strategic Planning And Insights

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How Your Advertising Agency Can Leverage The Value Of Strategic Planning And Insights For Growth

I am sitting next to a 1.5-inch three-ring binder from Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Worldwide called “Saatchi Insight. Strategic Planning Tool Kit”. This book was our advertising agency strategic planning and insights bible.

 I took this tome with me when I left Saatchi in 1995. At that time, I was running business development across North America and, sadly, this was the last year that Maurice and Charles Saatchi ran the company. No, don’t be too sad. The brothers went on to build the smarter M&C Saatchi and I moved into digital marketing and publishing. I believe, as do many, that 1995 was the end of the great Saatchi & Saatchi reign.

The “Saatchi Insight. Strategic Planning Tool Kit”.

This toolkit includes 15 sections with strategic process brand names like MASTERBRAND, BRAND Detonator, The Saatchi Temple, The Consumer Connector, Funneling, The Media Monitor and Scenario Planning (at a time when this term was rarely used outside of Saatchi). The brand names helped position us as super smart in our new business pitches and, of course, with resolving existing client issues.

I’ll be hitting up insights from this book in a few blog posts because I think that advertising agency marketing-oriented strategic planning is an underutilized agency specialty. I strongly believe that having a clear and compelling strategic program can be a differentiator for today’s look-alike advertising agencies. [Read more…] about Advertising Agency Strategic Planning And Insights

What Ad Agency Clients Want

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The Client Need-Scape = What Ad Agency Clients Want

There is no single type of client. But, most clients want a similar array of attributes and deliverables from their ad agency. From an agency business development perspective, clearly enunciating that you understand the client need-scape, the what ad agency clients want from you, is critical in the early stages of your marketing.

So, What Do Ad Agency Clients Want?

I believe that although clients range from “I want to be cool and plugged into the culture” to “I need measurable incremental eCommerce sales”, they all have at least these three core needs. These are the needs that you must address in your outbound and inbound ad agency business development program.

Here’s my list. Your mileage may vary. But, I bet that you have to hit all or some of these points sooner or later.

The Need For Results – Think ROI

Many ad agencies lead with the ‘we are creative’ story. As an ex-agency owner and client, I fully understand this lead point. This is, without question, a key requirement for virtually any client that is trying to get there marketing noticed and break out of their competitive pack.

However, just saying that your ad agency is creative is simply not going to cut it. After all, being creative is a highly subjective point (like, how do you prove this to a wide range of clients – yes, awards do help) and even worse, being perceived as creative can be fleeting. Yesterday’s creative agency is quickly replaced by today’s. This happens every year. Remember when Crispin Porter + Bogusky was the hot shop?

Having a results-oriented – think ROI – positioning or just a serious and clear agency brand statement about meeting this need is a must have in 2018. Marketing is a tough game.

CMO’s come and go based on their sales success.

Procurement departments want measurable returns for less.

CEO’s want increased shareholder value and to make their performance bonus.

Owners want more cash in their pocket.

Therefore, address these results-oriented needs and pain points. At issue, is understanding your target market’s or brand’s definition of positive results in your marketing will be a bit tricky. Tricky? Yes, because the definition of results will vary by client type.

Some clients just need more qualified leads. Think B2B.

Some need measurable sales. Think eCommerce.

Some just need more targeted digital traffic. Think the travel category.

Some want engagement. Think fashion brands.

Some want to improve their image. Nike anyone?

Regardless of the type of results – clients want to hear you talk about how you know that they know that you will deliver a high return on investment. Need an example of a digital agency that gets it? Visit HawkSEM and see how they immediately message ROI. Of course, they are a type of agency that can put ROI right in your face. But, you get the idea.

Last point. Ad agency leaders worry about inroads by marketing consultancies. They should. Why? Well, one point. These guys fully understand what the ad agency client’s want…  Here is a direct quote from McKinsey’s About Us page.

We help our clients make significant and lasting improvements to their performance and realize their most important goals. With nearly a century of experience, we’ve built a firm uniquely equipped to this task.

You Have To Understand The Client’s Business And Industry

Prospective clients want to know that you understand their market, consumers and competitive landscape. They do not have much time for your education. [Read more…] about What Ad Agency Clients Want

Is Saying Fck (You Know What I Mean) Cool?

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Can you say ‘fck’ in your B2B marketing?

(Before I start, a side note… I originally had the URL: www.peterlevitan.com/issayingfuckcool  I now know that Google does not like the word Fuck – so I took out the “U” from any Google heat seeking search missile.) We’ll see if this post gets indexed now. See at the bottom of this post for an article about Google’s no-mas potty-mouth.)

I have a client, a brilliant agency client in the data-marketing space. A real data scientist. He grows brands leveraging the best of Adobe and the Google Marketing Platform (here is how Google describes the GMP):

Google Marketing Platform brings together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help you plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. Google Marketing Platform helps you deliver more relevant and effective marketing, while ensuring that you respect your customers’ privacy and give them control over their data.

Data marketing rules. But, he has a problem. He only aims to work with clients that really want to leverage data to grow their business. Apparently, it is difficult to find the clients that actually GET IT. That said, he gets lots of inquiries. However, many are either poor leads for many reasons (many need lots of training) or are not willing to take the multi-month plunge/commitment to work into a very successful data-driven program.

‘Fuck’

Last week we discussed the use of the word ‘fuck’ to arrest attention and to help cull out the serious leads from the explorers. In this case, can you say ‘fuck’ on your home page? Essentially, something like this (just an example)…

We Are Looking For The Best And Brightest Clients That Want To Fucking Kill It Using The World’s Best Data-Marketing.

I pointed to Gary Veynerchuck as an example of a media personality that uses ‘fuck’ a lot to, yup, help cull out the serious leads from the explorers. It is difficult to paraphrase Gary but his mantra is hey, get the fuck on board the digital train.

Find Your Active Words

This is not a long blog post on the use of challenging words. But, I do want to make that point that you might want to consider actually telling the people that visit your home page that you are looking for the right fucking clients. The use of the word might even net you the balls to the wall clients that you want.

If the ‘F’ word scares you… just try having some attitude.

Oh, the Google article:

F***=off, Google tells its staff: Any mention of nookie now banned from internal files, URLs.