Another grand slam for Nike and Portland’s Wieden+Kennedy. This time its for my real home town Yankee’s Derek Jeter. This might be the only thing that will make most New Yorkers cry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X03_bNuihLU
marketing
Advertising Agency New Business & Inbound Marketing
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 becomeis 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.
Magazines & Advertising Agencies Are Doing Marijuana
A friend recently gave me two copies of Northwest Leaf, the Pacific Northwest’s leading medical marijuana magazine. Get this: four-year-old Northwest Leaf ‘s May 2014 issue is 104 pages of jam-packed original content and … an unbelievable amount of marijuana industry advertising. Its monthly circulation is 30,000. Check out the issue here.
Should Magazines Be Doing Marijuana?
Should they? Well, you are some of the last people that I have tell that the print publication industry’s circulation and advertising are in steep decline. The FIPP World Magazine Trends 2013-14 chart (sorry about the fuzziness) shows what the future has in store for the print industry. Clearly no big news here.
The big(ist) news for me is that that the marijuana industry is driving the fast-paced growth of a local publication in a state where one of its major daily newspapers shut down a couple of years ago. There is so much interest in this new advertising category that the publisher of Northwest Leaf will be launching Oregon Leaf in July. How many print publishers are launching new publications in these digital times? Not too many.
Should Advertising Agencies Be Doing Marijuana?
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Is Your Advertising Agency Positioning “Normcore?”
The June ’14 issue of WIRED reports that “normcore” is a jargon word to watch. Normcore is so vanilla that it reminds me of at least 50% of the advertising agencies. That’s all agencies. Here is WIRED’s definition.
Averageness as a personal style. The apotheosis of anti-fashion, being normcore entails blending in – wearing a baseball cap to the ballpark and a velvet suit to the disco – and always acting like you’re totally into whatever you happen to be doing.
Yo, Is Your Agency Normcore?
How are agencies normcore?
They sound alike. See my long post on advertising agency positioning.
They say the same things: consumer conversations; media agnostic (yes, some still say this); full-service; we are problem solvers; we are creative; we are nimble; we came from large agencies… and on.
They even like to have photos of their reception area on their website.
They serve beer from real-life kegs on Fridays.
I’ll help you free your agency from being normcore. I do it every day for agencies that know that the only way they will succeeded is to be abnormal-core.
Where Am I?
Look, if you have your act together, you will eventually sell your advertising or design agency and get to work from San Miguel de Allende (I just had drinks from this bar.) Dig?
This is not an impossible dream, it just takes some planning. Don’t be a me-too agency. Me-too has no value. Zip. So, you 50+ agency owners, give me a shout.
