Peter Levitan & Co.
The New Business of Advertising
This is what is going on in crazy data-land every minute on the Internet (well, much of it. Domo left out PornHub.)
This has many implications. One is that the clients your agency is trying to attract via social media and content are, um, distracted.
Here is an article worth reading about the power of personality to driveB2B social media readership.
I read CBInsights newsletter every day. In addition to its making me smarter, it is fun to read.
You can be informative and boring. Or, you can be informative and entertaining. I’ll take the later.
Some words about CBInsights’ non-boring approach from Tearsheets “Anand Sanwal is bringing love to finance data”.
Every evening at around 6 p.m., over 300,000 people get a love letter in their inbox. After some charts, random news bits and some snark, it ends with an over familiar (and some might say downright creepy) sign off: “I Love You.”
That’s the trademark of Anand Sanwal, the 43-year-old CEO and co-founder of a B2B data company, CB Insights, and self-proclaimed introvert.
“The newsletter affords me the ability to be a little bit outlandish,” he said. “In person, I prefer to be anonymous. In the little geek circle we play in, it’s become tougher to be that way.”
Sanwal did, and the newsletter exploded. With the right tone, humor and a hint of irreverence, Sanwal and his team have made data fun and developed character that connects with its readership. The newsletters highlight terrible charts on the Internet, pick through troves of CB Insights data and data visualization and even include hate letters from readers.
Sign up to get CBInsights. Read it for two weeks. Decide that interesting is better than boring. Take a hard look at your thought leadership content and decide for yourself…
Just in case you haven’t seen Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends 2017, here it is. Highlights include (care of Quartz):
My primary takeaway for advertising agencies – “MOBILE”
OK, we all have bad customer service experiences. I get it. But when the bad experiences go across four Expedia service phone conversations (that lasted about three plus hours over two days) and another six back and forth Twitter direct tweets and the customer who is spending over $5,000 on the trip is still unsatisfied (that’s me), there must be something wrong with how Expedia runs the humanbeing (vs. digital) sales service side of its business.
Stick with me because this blog post is actually about a way to grow your agency – a way that requires a bit of chutzpah. However, before I get to your agency and an unignorable sales tactic, I have to share a tiny bit of customer service related background to set up the chutzpah recommendation.
A few weeks ago, I used Expedia to book two tickets from Mexico City to Budapest for a summer trip to see the Hungarian F1 Grand Prix race. This week, I called Expedia to change the trip by adding a few days up front and move the original first destination from Budapest to Vienna. I knew about and was willing to spend the extra $500 flight change charge and, before I called, I had also looked at all of the available flight options. I was prepared for the service rep call. But, I was not prepared for the following:
Expedia’s phone system could never recognize my itinerary number or phone number (the ones that are listed on Expedia’s original flight plan document). I knew I was in the system because when I finally got to a rep, she recognized the numbers. What’s up with Expedia’s automated phone system and the interface with its database?
While it took me about 30 seconds to get to the Iberia Airlines and Expedia sites to find my reservation detail, it took the multiple Expedia reps I talked to at around two minutes.
I was repeatedly asked if Mexico City was my origination airport (I live in Mexico) and if I was to change flights in Madrid as stated on my reservation. Um, yes.
The reps took forever to find alternative flights although I was helping them find the alternatives. And on. I won’t bore you with more including the third rep who apologized for how sloooooow Expedia’s computer was working.
Taken individually, these don’t appear to be too onerous. However, in aggregate, they were and I gave up without making the flight change.
OK, two more points.
I was so pissed off that I sent LinkedIn InMails to three Expedia marketing execs gently complaining about the service and asking them if they ever sat in on customer calls – consider this action an internal “Store-Check”. It’s been four days since I sent the emails. Any response? No. Sure these folks get lots of emails. But, I used attention-getting customer-centric subject lines.
Some inbound marketing tips about half way down. But, ya know, I just gotta start with a story.
OK, no big surprise here… I just have to say it. Inbound marketing does work. Why am I bringing up this subject that you probably think about every day? Because I have been starting to see some thinking that the overabundance of marketing content and SEO activity, especially in your B2B space (I am talking about advertising agency business development), is reducing the effectiveness of inbound. Well, it is. In fact, all forms of marketing appear to be less effective for the average marketer. But, here is the deal. A hefty segment of inbound marketers are clearly winning. They are winning because of their strategic approach, well-targeted tactics and, most importantly, how they execute. The winners use both best practices and the objective of being unignorable.
Some background.
My wife and I are building a house down here in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It will kinda look like the photo on the left – more windows and a different color. Click on the link to see why we moved down here and how (yes, I know that some of you have thought about leaving the USA too — shhhh, I won’t tell). As new house builders and ones that will need to purchase a bunch of furniture because we totally downsized when we left Portland OR last July, we need some new stuff. This got me thinking that I’d rather have people like you buy my services and send me cash vs. simply raiding my savings. Therefore, I ramped up my inbound marketing about a month ago to slightly increase my leads. Because, yes you know this is coming… Inbound works.
Over the past four weeks, I’ve gotten inbound leads from advertising agencies in Sweden, Dubai, Adelaide, Botswana, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, and Toledo. I’ve even gotten incoming from multi-national networks.
I got these seemingly random, but very hot global leads because I flipped the inbound switch. A switch I found in 1995.
I have been doing social media and inbound marketing since the mid-90’s. Without getting into great detail, my first web business was New Jersey Online, a very early news website. We used social media in the form of viewer forums about New Jersey and New York sports (the Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Islanders, Rangers and Devils, oh and the Yankees and Mets) and all the local kid’s sports teams and entertainment to capture the attention of a huge audience. We added daily content from four news sources (they were called newspapers). We grew an audience that was even larger than the New York Time’s website (I love saying this.) We won the New Jersey / New York metro battle by using social media, the power of sharing and… inbound marketing.
Here are the the switches I’ve thrown since January. No, no secrets here. It is just about execution and online sales pressure. I offer these as a reminder that targeted inbound marketing activity begets sales lead activity.
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So, my message is simple. Inbound activity works. Google likes it and they grant you better search positioning (FYI: it took Google less than an hour to crawl this page). Increased activity stimulates the readers of your emails, Facebook page, LinkedIn Followers and your groups. Stimulation with the right content to the right people delivers sales leads.
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And, since I know you like infographics, here is a crisp one from StraightNorth. As they say,”The Internet marketing lead generation ecosystem illustrates how all components fit together to form cohesive campaigns. It is intended to give marketing leaders a blueprint for building a complete Internet marketing strategy that maximizes sales lead generation.”
