digital marketing

Please Sign Up For My Newsletter

Peter · July 31, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Ask And Ye Shall Receive.

Going direct and actively “asking” a prospect to do something is one of the most important and effective pieces of business development advice that I deliver to my agency clients. So, why not do it myself.

If you sign up below by just typing in your email address, you get a very valuable white paper (I know this from reader feedback) and get to be close to me, digitally that is, every week.

The newsletter is simple, easy to read (its a synopsis of the week’s posts) and its very non-spamy.

Go ahead, it won’t hurt.

Thanks.

Do You Hug On LinkedIn?

Peter · July 31, 2014 · 1 Comment

I love LinkedIn. It is a key element in my inbound marketing program. In the past 30 days alone, LinkedIn delivered over 250 visitors to my website and my posts on LinkedIn have been viewed by lots of nice folks. I’ve written about how to use LinkedIn as an inbound marketing tool a few times on this blog. Here is a list of past posts.

The LinkedIn Group Hug

I also post and comment occasionally in my LinkedIn groups. Some groups are better than others and a quick look to see if they are spam heavy helps me figure out which ones are run professionally. That said, one thing I haven’t done is to contact and send out hugs to fellow group members. I may do so when my book comes out but I won’t make direct contact unless there is a very good strategic reason to do so.

My friend Steve Klinetobe, the master of The Cartoon Agency, has a very funny take on how shared group membership alone might not be a powerful reason to get other members to hug you back.

Sign up below for my weekly email, get the free guide to making a fortune in advertising and you will hear when my book on pitching hits the market. I am shooting for September.

Advertising Agency New Business & Inbound Marketing

Peter · July 2, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Along with positioning and outbound marketing, I help my advertising agency clients plan and execute their social media based inbound marketing programs. These programs are designed to attract the clients that they want to their messaging and get the email lights to fire up. Allow me to state the obvious:

Inbound marketing is marketing a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, newsletters, white papers, SEO, social media marketing and other forms of content marketing. Inbound marketing is essentially an attraction strategy based on strategic scheduled content marketing that helps clients find you. The inbound program should attract the right traffic to your messaging (as in on your website), convert this traffic to leads and help you convert these leads into meetings.

Inbound marketing ~~can become~~ is complex and very time consuming. It is imperative that you do not overreach. Trying to do too much, more than your agency staff can and will handle, will result in visible inconsistency. The web is littered with way too many agency-ignored, virtually empty advertising agency blogs, Twitter feeds and corporate LinkedIn sites. Plan accordingly. Looking empty is… lame.

There is a valuable secondary benefit to doing inbound marketing. It is important to note that agency clients are looking for agencies that have a deep understanding of how to do inbound, social and content marketing. Therefore, your inbound marketing program will serve as proof of your expertise. Walking the talk is a good thing. Looking empty is… lame.

Does inbound marketing work to win new business? Like, is it worth the effort?

At the end of the day is all of this blogging, Tweeting and LinkedIn action worth the time?

Yes if you have a plan with clear objectives and target clients and categories.

I have concentrated on inbound marketing to drive interest in my agency business development consultancy for the past year. Search engine marketing coupled with a sound social media program works. I have lots of happy clients (who find me) and I am making a very good living after selling my advertising agency. Yes, there is a life after advertising agency ownership.

Yesterday, I repurposed a one year-old blog post — Advertising Agency New Business and Cold Calling. – by putting it up on LinkedIn’s self publishing channel under the new title, Dump Cold Calling. Go Warm Calling. This activity delivered 607 views on my blog as of 1700. FYI, my best blog day netted 2,052 views (I put a quick screen grab of my blog stats below.)

My blog’s subject on my 2,052 day was about the art of pitching. I am rather happy about this one because pitching, how to pitch so that you greatly improve your batting average, is the subject of my soon to be published book: The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches.

So, yes, all the effort, if well planned and executed does work.

Sign Up:

Give me a shout and we can discuss how to use social media (and… outbound marketing too) to grow your leads. Or, just sign up below, get a detailed business-building white paper and I’ll let you know when the book is out.

Mesmerizing From Google Trends

Peter · June 30, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Seen Google Trend’s real time look at the global search ecosystem? Sports, music, celebs – rule search in USA. Search other countries to see what excites them. Very cool.

Go here and click where you see the arrow.

I Wanted To Like Grip – But No KISS

Peter · June 23, 2014 · Leave a Comment

I friend sent me to the funny infographic “The Anatomy of An Agency” from Canada’s Grip Limited. It’s at the bottom of this post. The infographic nails advertising agency culture and, based on the number of comments, got well distributed making it a much higher trafficked post that the great majority of agency blog posts. Most of them appear written for the agency itself or their close friends.

OK, nice job so far. I even like the blog’s editorial content in general.

OK, a good first impression so I go to the agency home page (not that easy to get to cause there isn’t a direct link.) That’s where things go horribly wrong. The Grip website is simply too wildly dizzying. Panel after panel. Here are two views of the site. The second view collapses all of the panels.

And, maybe this will work better for you than me… I can’t get the site to scroll up and down and I tried two different browsers.

My point: please do not build websites that make lives more difficult. Keep It Simple Stupid.

This one is one of the most difficult to use ad agency websites I’ve ever experienced. I am sure that there are clients that will get past the design to the really great advertising, thought leadership and cool personality. But, I couldn’t.

Now for the infographic: