Advertising, design, PR and digital agencies are always searching for the next pot of gold. Determining which revenue pot to aim for (I know “pot” sounds kinda awful) is part of business development planning. As we move deeper into the digital age, we need more tools and insights to help us figure out the best plan and agency structure to meet our client’s rapidly evolving needs.
eMarketer, with their daily charts and information, has been a very insightful guide for business planning. For example, they called the future of mobile advertising fairly early. Some smart and increasingly successful agencies figured out that mobile could be their future and built an agency around delivering mobile services.
Radel Artida of Staff.com, a global recruitment platform, recently sent me the infographic posted below that shows the IT jobs with the highest pay. I think that it could be used by agency planners to help determine where the money is and is going. The fastest growing categories for IT professionals are mobile development (with Android jobs up 129% and iOS up 190%), cloud computing and gaming. Website development continues to grow, however at a slower pace.
My bet continues to be on mobile. Here’s an idea: I suggest that agency managers start to think through having a thought-leadership program that explores and explains the mobile space for their clients. This serves a couple of purposes. It would force a mobile-lite agency and its staff to begin to learn about the mobile advertising platform, it positions the agency for the increasing move to mobile and it starts to build some mobile SEO honey for the agency blog. It is also a powerful business development strategy.
