The Unignorable Advertising Agency Wins New Clients
There are lots of ways to win a new account for your advertising agency. You get a referral (the default for many agencies); you have unique expertise (let’s say e-commerce); you are known as a specialist in a category or geography; you have a kick-ass thought leadership program that gets read and passed along; you are an SEO genius and are listed on page one for your Google keywords.
I’ll show you one more approach below.
An Unignorable List
But first, here’s a list of ways to avoid getting a prospective client’s positive attention. Even worse, some profound ways for you to be very very ignored.
- Send them a one-off copy-heavy email and hope they respond.
- Send them a series of emails about how wonderful your agency is (not them or their issues), and then hope they respond.
- Find other special ways to bug the hell out of them. Multiple voicemail messages anyone?
- Ensure that your agency sounds exactly like the other agencies trying to get the client’s attention. Here’s a list of me-too advertising agency positionings. Where are you on this list?
- Make sure your agency’s website looks just like your competitor’s website. Similar jargon? WordPress templates, anyone?
- Hope that the prospects will go on and on to find your position on Google that’s on page 4 of the listings for your competitive agency set.
- Start, stop, start, stop, start your inbound and outbound business development program.
- Make new business an “oh, we’ll get to that” proposition.
And on and on. I’ll stop so I won’t bore you. Or worse, scare you.
Maybe smarter… here is a way out.
Why Not Try Being Unignorably Creative?
Clients are smart. Clients get social media. Clients can produce their own content these days. Clients understand marketing (sort of). Even worse, many clients think they can bring all of that in-house.
But what they can’t do is be unignorably creative thinkers. Just can’t do that. Not in their DNA. Nope. But it’s in yours, and it is a major reason for your existence (unless you are just data marketing or apps geeks, etc.) and, if used intelligently — your creative secret sauce.
One of the ways that the leading (and famous) agencies get incoming new business inquiries is by being ‘unignorable‘ and you know the usual agency suspects because you hear about them every award season and read about them in AD AGE. The thing is that you know how to be famous too. Many in our industry are chasing technology when they should be chasing and proving their creativity. In the advertising industry, creativity breeds fame.
Chase Unignorable – Canada Style
There’s a Toronto agency that has been building business leveraging the idea of ignorability for a few years. In fact, I borrowed the word ‘unignorible’ from them. Here’s their rap…
john st. is a creative collaborative that uses digital, social, advertising, technology, PR and design to make our clients’ brands unignorable.
In our world of media overstimulation, having individual brands and services be ignored is way to easy, is a critical client issue and is a very serious top-of-mind pain point. You can solve this problem. You. Not that in-house agency.
Unignorable Agency Videos
OK, enough yapping.
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