Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

social media

Inbound Content Marketing & Ad Agency New Business

· · Leave a Comment

Here is a sweet chart from a study on content marketing from Eloqua. The bottom line… create smart, targeted, strategic content (think blogs, white papers, SlideShare presentations, etc.) that will work as inbound marketing tools and client magnets. Content marketing works for me. That’s how I get my qualified leads. Here is the chart.

www.oracle.com webfolder mediaeloqua documents Content Marketing Kapost Eloqua ebook

Easy Plan

Here is a fast micro plan for how to do it. Of course, the devil is in the details.

  • Go get a blank media / creative brief and write it like you would do for a new client program:
  • Determine who your target audience is. Is it any client with over $1,000,000 to spend? The dentist down the street? The entire automative category?It probably isn’t the art director at the competitive agency so stop writing the 7,000th blog post on responsive design with keywords only a web developer will be interested in.
  • Determine what you want your target audience to do. Like, call you up. Or, join your mailing list.
  • Create a two – three month content plan. Think like an editor. What will  the subjects be that will be of interest to your audience? What are the keywords they use to search for information?
  • Assign someone to mange and at least a couple of people to write the blog.
  • Start with at least 15 blog posts of from 500 to 1,000 words.
  • Keep at it. As the chart shows, it takes a loooong time to get up to speed.
  • Tie the blog automatically to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Then…kiss your new clients.

 

My First X Rated Advertising Post

· · Leave a Comment

Behold a brilliant campaign from PornHub. If you don’t know who they are, well, they are using you and me to tell their X Rated advertising story. Take a look at the website that asks…

Do you have what it takes to be Creative Director of the world’s #1 adult website?

I love this type of marketing. It builds their brand and reach while entertaining us and… it may land them a great Creative Director. God knows there are a lot sitting around wondering if they will ever have fun again in the ad biz.

Pornhub Creative Director Challenge Bus station campaign. Submitted by Itamar C.Here is one of my favorite executions. (And there are many great ones. Oh, yes, this is a rather rich subject.) Who knew outdoor could be so effective?

Coca-Cola And The Future of Advertising Agencies

· · Leave a Comment

download (1)Today’s Wall Street Journal article, A New Marketing World Requires New Skills, gives us a sweet opportunity to get into the head of Joe Tripoldi, Coca-Cola’s Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer. Joe shares what he expects from his marketing organization as the world of marketing makes some dramatic and fast-paced shifts from old-fashioned brand-building to digital marketing.

This deep look also provides client-side direction for advertising and digital agencies to better understand where the world of marketing is headed. Not that any of this informations should be news. However, it is reinforcement for the way all agencies should be thinking in March, 2014. Thinking means designing agency services and hiring the right talent for the future. If Coke wants analytics, digital, social, mobile and gamification expertise — all clients will eventually want this and agencies need to plan accordingly.

“The biggest issue for CMOs today is the critical need to ‘re-skill’ their marketing organizations and build new capabilities in areas like big data/analytics, digital, social, mobile, gamification and design.

“This is not just about hiring a few subject-matter experts, but building a depth of knowledge leaders and practitioners in these critical new competencies. If they don’t, marketing organizations will be stuck with traditional 1980s and ’90s brand-building skills in a 21st-century world of an ‘always on’ consumer. The times, they are a-changing.

“You cannot slide over people in your current organization because they have loosely dabbled in these areas. You need to go to the millennial marketplace for ‘natives’ who have lived and breathed these disciplines for much of their lives. Individuals who have passion for connecting brands with people in new ways.

“The talent is out in the marketplace, you just have to be creative to source it in nontraditional ways through communities or networks. Then you have to understand that you may only retain these people for a short time, but the positive, disruptive impact and the knowledge they can impart on your organization is game changing.”

Advertising Agency Self Promotion #2

· · Leave a Comment

A couple of days ago I wrote about a small advertising program that my Agency Citrus Ralston360 ran 7 years ago. I just took a look at the post and it got me thinking about what else Google had stored in its memory about how we promoted the agency. This led me to an article about a podcasting self promotion we ran for the agency close to ten years ago.

Way back when, I decided that podcasting, because of automated distribution via RSS and inclusion in iTunes, was a platform for the future. If you have been following the world of podcasting, I was both right and wrong. Podcasting is still hot but RSS (Really Simple Syndication) didn’t really take off. Sure, podcasting is out there but the RSS thing was a bit too complicated for most web users. In fact, I think its promise of automated delivery has been taken over by apps. But, that’s another story.

So back in 2000 something, we promoted our expertise in podcasting by 1) having our own marketing interview podcast, Ralston360 View (it had a large following on iTunes); white papers, speaking engagements and a nifty video that was embedded inside an iPod looking gizmo graphic. You spun the interactive FLASH-based dial to select different instructional videos. I wish I still had the videos but they are long gone. This is what it looked like:

360_podcasting

This sweet tool garnered press for the agency and helped us with our very early social media prowess. It burnished our image. We became known for our thought leadership.

I continue to be a major fan of the value of thought leadership when it is targeted to the right audience. I recommend the art of thought leadership as win-win self promotion to my agency clients.

Need some strategic leadership ideas? I’ve got a whole bunch more. Give me a shout.

 

 

 

 

 

How Advertising Agencies Should Find Clients

· · Leave a Comment

The RSW/AgencySearch New Year Outlook Survey is out. It was completed by 150 senior level marketers in December 2013. I haven’t had a chance to review it in detail but I found the section on how clients find agencies (or conversely, how advertising agencies should find clients) particularly relevant to my current agency new business clients.

I had two meetings yesterday where we discussed the balance between inbound and outbound marketing. I can’t see an agency only doing inbound marketing (social media, etc.) as suggested by some of my agency new business colleagues. Is is simply too passive and the great majority of agencies are not so specialized or well-positioned that they get a high level of incoming leads. I believe that its a mistake to put all of an agency’s chips on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. I stress “all.”

The research shows that agencies need to directly target clients and make the “call” — a warm call. Agencies also need to have a referral strategy to stimulate referrals from current and past clients, friends and family. Yes, even cousin George.

I have written about “warm calling” and how to grow referrals. 

Back to the study. As you can see, 32% of marketers find out about agencies from direct contact and 48% use referrals. To not go directly to clients with the right message and not stimulate your referral base would be a huge mistake. You need sound strategies for both.

www.rswagencysearch.com images_and_uploads 2014 RSWAgencySearch Agency Client New Year Outlook Report