Nice chart from SumAll on how long should your tweets, hashtags, Posts, subject lines and on and on should be based on some number crunching.
social media
Advertising Clients Want More Digital And Social Media: Surprised?
What Do Advertising Clients Want? No Surprise… Digital and Social Media Marketing.
Advertising / design / digital / social and PR agencies need to spend more time thinking through what the world of 2015 clients say they want. Here are some of the findings from Ciceron’s nice infographic — CMO’s 2015 Digital Priorities.
- CMO’s say that they will increase their digital marketing budgets by 10.8%
- Social media will represent 21.4% of total marketing spend in the next 5 years.
- 95% really dig content marketing.
- Analytical skills will grow in importance.
- 87% say that social media is the most engaging. However, CMO’s say that social media is often poorly integrated into overall marketing programs.
What should your agency takeaway from this? I’d sure offer….
More digital. But, consider how you are going to express this. Today “all agencies” offer digital. Just saying “digital” is no longer enough.
More social. This is another area where you will need to find a way to look and sound like you have a secret sauce that the agencies down the street don’t have or can’t express.
More tracking / analytical skills. Clients need help in determining what platforms and program deliver results. If you can deliver on this need, you are golden.
Strategy. All of the above will come from sound strategic thinking. As usual, strategy rules.
Google Said Don’t Promote @adweak To Advertising Agencies
Oh Google man. It must be nice to be a monopoly. Ja?
First it was metadata, then keywords, then backlinks… Now you are telling us not to have short posts on our website / blog / world of content. As you say, being brief (less than 1,000 words) isn’t very authoritative. Short isn’t what true experts do if they want to: be content honey / SEO smart / category experts / lovers of the algorithm.
Really? Please, oh Google engineers, get it together.
So, here is an un-authoritative short post… if you are an advertising agency I want you to Follow:
@adweak on Twitter.
Just do it. The truth is well spoken on this rather funny Twitter account. Need some examples:
BREAKING: Facebook’s New Algorithm Places Higher Value on Posts That Make the Company Money Over Anything Your Friends Have to Say.
BREAKING: Agency’s Trademarked Term “Engageovation” Met With Blank Stares From Client.
BREAKING: Veteran Art Director Attempts To Resurrect Career By Re-Laying Out Old Print Ads As Digital Ad Units.
OLD FAVORITE: Agency That Claims to be Experts in Social Media Has Difficulty Explaining Why They Only Have 74 Twitter Followers.
BREAKING: Agency Pretends to Give a Fuck About Client’s Kid’s Soccer Tournament Last Weekend Prior to Creative Presentation.
@adweak will make you wonder WHY you didn’t get a computer science degree so you can tell people why funny / smart / insightful but short posts are not relevant.
After you’ve laughed, go buy my book and win more pitches so you can send your kids to Stanford and then Google and then they will buy you a house.
Ad Agency: Why No Sales Methodology?
I came across the revealing ad agency business development infographic below on the RSW/US website. The infographic highlights some of the findings from RSW/US’s 2014 Agency Marketer New Business Report.
The infographic sucks. Um, no. The infographic doesn’t suck, but it points out one critical agency fail that… SUCKS!
According to the RSW/US report, 66% Of Ad Agencies Have No Business Development or Sales Methodology
What? 66%! Having run ‘sales’ (sorry, it is sales) at Saatchi, my own agency and two Internet companies, I know that a company that has something to sell in the B2B marketplace cannot succeed without a biz dev plan and implementation methodology. Cannot, full-stop. No methodology means no plan and no plan means no growth no growth means lower income. So, let’s solve this problem. [Read more…] about Ad Agency: Why No Sales Methodology?
Thanks To HubSpot, Ad Contrarian & Advertising Week
Making Friends Is Good Business
I was on a plane from Portland to Boston yesterday. I spent some of the time reading John Jantsch’s new book “Duct Tape Selling”. He is a big fan of making friends with bloggers and other industry influencers to advance your own brand awareness and authority. I make friends and it works.
I am here to speak at HubSpot’s Inbound 2014 conference. I am up on Thursday speaking about how advertising agencies (and all B2B marketers) can write and publish a book in 6 months. True. I’ve done it twice. You can see my presentation here.
I was invited to speak because of my guest posting relationship with Agency Post, an advertising industry blog that was purchased by HubSpot. The strategic friendship with Agency Post delivers awareness for my advertising agency consultancy and now this connection to the all-powerful HubSpot marketing machine.
I am also a friend of San Francisco’s Bob Hoffman. Bob is the best selling author of “101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising” which is Amazon’s #1 selling advertising book, “The Ad Contrarian” and “The Ad Contrarian” blog, which was named one of the world’s most influential advertising and marketing blogs by Business Insider.
Today Bob published a blog post about my book. Actually, he published the interview I did with him about his views on advertising agency pitching.
Bob makes 7 points about pitching. I’ll riff on the headlines. You’ll have to visit Bob’s blog to see what he wrote.
Or, if you really want to get the full Levitan Pitch treatment (and all of my interviews with experts)… buy the book.
Here’s Bob on pitching:
- You can’t be everyone’s girlfriend: Simply put, don’t’ pitch everything that walks.
- Do what you tell your clients to do: Look and sound different from your competitive agency set.
- Be clear on your objective at each stage: Run your pitch like a strategic marathon, not a sprint. Read Bob’s words to see what I mean.
- Make the presentation you want to make, not the one you’re asked to make: Be authentic.
- Only let the good presenters talk: Bring your best. The one’s that will win.
- Have a strategy and stick to it: Run a smart, strategic presentation.
- The best new business program is a good reputation: I’ll use Bob’s word here… Duh!
I also write for Advertising Week Social Club. Because of this, I am going to Advertising Week New York as a journalist. This is a major conference and I will be able to promote my book to industry leaders. I am also starting to work with them to see if I can put on a program at Advertising Week Europe.
I could go on about the obvious benefits of making friends but I suspect that you get it.
However, there is one key point I have to make.
Your relationships need to be a two-way street. Make friends to make friends first and the goodies will flow. Follow rule number 8:
Do Not Be Obnoxious.