New Business Intel

» Jump Start Your Ad Agency Blog Using Email

Quality and Reach

If your ad agency has or is considering writing a blog, deciding how to spread the word to acquire readers is important: If relevant corporate marketers aren't reading it, the time you invest in writing may be in vain.

Common ways to promote your blog include:

• Email marketing
• Twitter
• Links from your website

This post is a guide to using email as a blog promotional tool.

Your most important decision is choosing between using an internal email list or purchasing a list. There are pros and cons of each:

Your list - pros

• You own it.
• It's free.
• It has your clients and some prospects on it.

Your list - cons

• It may be out of date.
• It may not include all the prospects you should be pursing.
• It may be too small (you need at least 1500 good names to kick-start your blog, and more will get you there faster.

External list - pros

• It's the most effective way to increase the size of your list.
• The right list will allow you to reach the corporate marketers that exactly fit your prospect profile: by the geography, industries, titles, company size(s), and media spend that are appropriate for your agency.
• The right list will be high-quality (i.e. clean), with a low (5%) bounce rate.
• Certain list companies will completely update their email list multiple times per year, and/or will offer to correct or replace emails that bounce.

External list - cons

• There are few, if any, opt-in lists for corporate marketers.
• You'll get what you pay for: low price usually equates to not being able to effectively target as described above, or you'll experience a high bounce rate.

The opt-in question is tricky: to my knowledge, highly targeted, opt-in lists of relevant corporate marketers just aren't available. Our clients tell us they've purchased opt-in lists from many different list companies - and they're universally terrible. We've tried them internally and experienced the same result. I think the reason is fairly simple: the corporate marketers you want to reach just don't opt-in very often. However, that doesn't mean they aren't interested in relevant content.

Your next decision is to choose an email provider. I recommend you look for one with as many of the following features as you can get:

• Overall ease to use.
• Easily manages opt-out requests and out-of office replies.
• Tracks soft and hard bounces, and opens.
• Creates browser-friendly, text-friendly, and HTML-friendly formats.
• Allows you to test different subject lines to see which ones work the best, with follow-up emails going to non-opens of the first message.
• Allows you to easily manage scheduling: days, times, time zones for each send.
• Easy, one-click analytics / reports so you can effectively measure your performance over time.
• List management features like merge, purge, drip marketing, etc.
• CAN-SPAM compliant.
• Telephone support - if you need it.
• Integration with your CRM system.

Promoting your blog well makes the effort it takes to write all the more worthwhile, and email is a great way to do so.

Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions.

» Save Time and $ Using Jigsaw-like Services for Ad Agency New Business?

Look before you leap, and measure carefully

It's really tempting for an ad agency new business person to look at inexpensive data sources (call them "Jigsaw-like") and get enticed by their low-price business models.

We get asked about services like this all the time, so I thought it might be helpful to provide a framework to review them.

Of utmost importance: Accuracy. These services usually claim an accuracy rate of around 75%. Taking this number at face value, they're admitting that 25% of the data is wrong.

Now, the reality of measuring accuracy. Unless these services are actually cleaning their data themselves, they really have no idea how clean it is. The questions to ask yourself are, "Am I okay knowing that one out of every four contacts I get is inaccurate?" And, "Am I okay wasting 25% of my time?"

When you're purchasing data from a service that relies on users to keep it clean, be cautious about data accuracy claims.

Why does this matter? When you think of accuracy, think of this formula: accuracy = time savings. The more accurate your data provider's information, the faster you'll reach your intended decision-makers. The less accurate it is, the more time you'll spend researching, trying to find your intended prospect.

With this in mind, here are some Pros and Cons of "Jigsaw-like" services:

Pros

• Wide variety of contacts
• Inexpensive
• Exchange out-of-date contacts with another
• No long-term contract

Cons

• No industry focus - you'll sort through lots of companies and titles to find good prospects
• Inaccuracy
• No research support
• Highly competitive - millions of people are going after the same people
• Value of your time - if you have a minimal amount of time to spend prospecting, how quickly you can get to decision-makers is critical

The best way to evaluate various data sources is to do some measurements. For example:

• Out of 100 contacts, how many are incorrect information? More than 10 incorrect data points and you're dealing with inaccurate information.
• How long does it take you to find the contact you're looking for? How does this compare to your current data provider?
• Once you have your desired contact, do you have the (correct) email, direct dial, address? If not (or it's incorrect), how long does it take you to get this information? Does your current information provider have it? Is it accurate?
• What's the value of your time? Calculate it as follows: (annual salary+bonus)x1.3 / 2080. This will show what it costs your agency to employ you, and takes into account taxes and benefits. If you apply this rate to the time it takes you to do what you've identified above, and extrapolate it annually, you'll have a true measurement of what your data really costs.

With this information in hand, you'll be able to decide whether a "Jigsaw-like" service is right for your agency.

» Is Crowdsourcing a Threat to Ad Agencies?

Interview with Victors and Spoils' John Winsor

Brent Hodgins of Mirren recently interviewed John Winsor of Victors and Spoils, which calls itself the "The world's first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles." John is a serial entrepreneur: Victor and Spoils is the fourth company he's started and the eighth he's invested in. He most recently worked in a very senior position at Crispin Porter & Bogusky in Denver.

What is Crowdsourcing? John defines it as:

The act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and giving them to a group of people or community, through an "open call” asking for contributions. Hence, provide all of the services that a traditional agency does, from brand strategy to creating TV spots and branded digital tools.

How is it used? Does it work?

John cites two examples of crowdsourcing advertising from this year's Superbowl:

• "Doritos and Career Builder both outsourced their ads from a crowd of consumers", cutting agencies out of the process.
• Google in-sourced their ad from their employees.
• The Doritos and Google ads were rated among the highest.

Victors and Spoils is applying crowdsouring to the way they work:

We feel like an ad agency. But we work like a crowdsourcing platform. At the core of our agency is our creative department. A creative department made of everyone from art directors and copywriters to strategists and producers who come together to solve strategic problems. A global digital community that will not only be rewarded for the solutions they develop (both individually and as a group) but also for participating in the community itself.

Why create an agency like this, and why now? In John's words:

• The business of marketing and advertising is in the midst of a massive cultural shift.
• While crowdsourcing is certainly the buzzword of the moment, there’s actually a much bigger and deeper change going on with the way work gets done that is changing not only marketing but many other industries.

He continues...To me, there are three disruptive forces [at work]:

1. The expectation of transparency;
2. The further digitization of the workforce; and,
3. The rise of the curator class.

John believes that:

Companies need an alternative to both current ad agencies as well as current crowdsourcing platforms. One that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today, but one that also delivers the engagement, cultural relevance, results, and return on investment that crowdsourcing (if managed and directed well) can deliver.

John will be providing his insights on Crowdsourcing at the Mirren New Business Conference 2010. I've attended the conference since its inception and recommend it. If you plan to go and haven't registered yet, you'll receive a discount if you use this code: LIST2010. [Neither I nor The List have any financial interest in the conference.]

» What’s Working in Agency PR to Generate New Business?

Guest Post

Janet Northen is Partner and EVP Director of Agency Communications at McKinney. She's been in agency PR for many years, including significant stints and Fallon and The Martin Agency. When I think of agency public relations and how to do it right, I think of Janet. She graciously accepted my invitation to write a guest post on its state of affairs.

First, I'm happy to say agency PR is working.

It’s been a tough ride for agencies large and small and while agencies might look at this area as a place to decrease resources, most agencies are keeping their agency communications pros in place. Staff size may be smaller and budgets for travel tightened but the overall need to keep your brand top of mind is just as important as it ever was.

What’s been the impact of social media?

It’s one more very powerful way to help tell your agency’s story. At McKinney, we’re always working to reinvent the conversation to build more powerful connections between people and brands. So I keep that top of mind when I do any outreach on behalf of the McKinney brand. For me, it’s a real balance of traditional and non-traditional methods. 

Let me tell you a story. I was at a recent industry event. A reporter I’ve known a long time said it must be hard for agency PR folks like me. I asked him what he meant. He said with newsrooms shrinking, there are fewer and fewer folks to pitch. I just about dropped my obligatory glass of chardonnay. What rock is he living under? 

Just that day, I had reached out to a wide array of journalists and bloggers with several different ideas for adding to the conversation. I had encouraged one or two of our agency’s bloggers to blog about same idea on our agency’s blog. I checked to make sure work was going to be uploaded to YouTube. And scheduled pending news story for our agency web site news feed. And that’s just one idea for one conversation we were hoping to join or even create.

Now one more note. For fear that that reporter or anybody else thinks I sit in my office and “check the boxes” to make sure I’ve dumped our stuff in all the social media buckets, that’s wrong thinking. I make sure there’s a strategy for using social media in the first place. Maybe it’s right. Maybe not.

Are you worried about the decline in traditional print media?

I hate to say it: I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the decline in print media. Instead, I am reading, viewing, listening and experiencing every kind of media out there to determine how McKinney can add to the conversation. Of course, if anybody, repeat anybody, ever takes my Sunday New York Times print edition away, I will tell the reporter living under that rock to move over. I’m coming in!

» Forwarding is the New New Business Networking Strategy

Cultivate your network with relevant information

It wasn't that many years ago that you'd send snail mail that included an article with a note attached that read something like this,

Saw this and thought you'd enjoy it.

The approach was simple and effective. It showed that you were thinking of a friend, colleague, prospect or client and wanted to send them something that they probably hadn't seen on their own. The recipient appreciated the thought and effort you took to stay in touch and provide them something of value.

Yesterday I read a post by Tom Davenport in Harvard Business Publishing (click here to read), which suggests that this tried-and-true networking strategy is alive and well. (It's good to know as I haven't stopped doing it.) Of greater interest to me, though, is that it's a natural addendum to my last post.

Naturally, snail mail is just about a thing of the past, so we're talking about forwarding information of value via email. The trick is do it as personally as you would were sending snail mail, which is a good way to ensure you don't cheapen the impact of your efforts.

Here are three "rules of thumb" that Tom suggests we keep in mind:

1. Only offer information of value. You need to know the people in your network well enough to know what they value, and what they don't.
2. Selectively forward information. Just as you would with snail mail, think carefully about who will benefit from the information you've found. Be sure it's relevant.
3. Never forward to a long list of people. Doing so depersonalizes the impact and networking value of your action.

There's no silver bullet here, just common sense things to keep in mind. Forwarding information has never been easier (think "retweet"). My suggestion is to remember "snail mail" before hitting "send" on an email blast.

If you didn't have the convenience of email, who would you send this information to? Let that drive your new business networking efforts.

» Social Media, a Good List, and New Business Karma

Helping your network with no expectation of ROI

One definition of karma is "actions that bring bring upon oneself inevitable results". I was intrigued by a recent conversation with Jane, a new business person, who claimed that this was the key to her success.("Jane" asked that I not use her real name.)

Jane's approach is simple: Give and expect nothing in return.

It has two well-integrated tactics:

1. Grow and manage a large network
2. Offer no-strings-attached help

Grow and Manage a Network

Jane is a networker. She uses LinkedIn and Facebook to grow and manage her large network. She combines that with The List, which she uses to identify people she wants to reach via her network, many of which she can't find on LinkedIn. She works hard to stay in touch with her contacts, connect people, and offer help.

Offer Help

Jane puts herself out there as a go-to resource for ideas on marketing (interactive is her specialty), finding a prospective marketing services partner, helping her network manage an existing agency relationship, as well as connecting her network with companies and people that may offer a service that will benefit them. She'll occasionally offer to do small projects free of charge through her firm, but this is rare. Normally, she operates independently, doing whatever she can to help her network.

The most interesting thing to me is that Jane appears to do this out of a genuine desire to help, with no expectation of getting anything in return, which is why she feels she is creating (good) new business karma.

Throughout the year she receives "blue birds" - calls out of the blue requesting her firm's help. They're almost always from "referrals and reputation" sources, which are the very best new business leads. People have heard of her through her network and call. She believes they do so because they've heard they can trust her.

Is this a strategy you can use? It's certainly not for everyone. The challenge of trying to emulate it is that it's unlikely to work if there's even a hint of disingenuousness in your approach.

What do you think? Is this a method you use or do you know someone who does it successfully?

» 8 First Step Goals For Your Ad Agency New Business Blog

Tips from a ProBlogger

I noticed a post by Darren Rowse on ProBlogger that may be of value if you're looking to create an ad agency blog to generate awareness and drive new business.

Every big goal needs to be broken down into small, very achievable steps. Darren does that here. The rest of this post is his (with a few minor edits on my part) and can be viewed in full here:

1. Publish 10 posts.
2. Get your first comment from someone you don’t know.
3. Get your first link from another blog.
4. Build your readership up to more than 20 readers a day.
5. Hit a level of 20 RSS subscribers.
6. Get your blog indexed in Google.
7. Be invited to write your first guest post on another blog.
8. Have someone (not you or your mom) tweet about your blog.

Note: Other goals might relate to design, platform, metrics, etc.

To someone who has been blogging for a while these kinds of goals might seem rather small and insignificant - but for a new blogger they’d be where I would start.

For new bloggers these goals might also seem a little insignificant also (in fact the blogger I was talking to told me I was thinking too small and dismissed my idea) - however I’d argue that to get to your big dreams there are a lot of steps in between - many of which might not be glamorous or fun to think about. However, sometimes it’s helpful to visualize the very next steps that you need to take in order to move towards your goals.

Tangent: I once had opportunity to meet a guy who had traveled the world climbing some of the highest mountains. When I said to him that it must be an exciting thing to do he told me that there are moments of exhilaration and excitement but that the reality is that much of what he does when climbing a mountain is pretty boring. It’s one foot in front of another type activity through foothills, carrying a heavy pack and not feeling like you’re making much progress. Of course, once you make it to the top or conquer challenges along the path you have moments of excitement, but it all starts with setting out from base camp and with the goal of getting to a point where the climb starts in earnest.

Once you've achieved these first goals start to increase them. You might want to double the numbers for the next step (although for different bloggers the numbers will no doubt be different) - then double them again, and so forth.

» Is Social Media Making Prospect Databases Irrelevant for New Business?

How will you obtain and connect with prospects?

A client asked me recently, "How will the rise of social media sites impact how I obtain and use prospect information?"

To me there are two ways you need to consider the issue:

1. How will social media impact how I obtain contacts at companies?
2. How will I contact prospects once I've put them in my internal database?

I'm thinking about this from the perspective of how agencies and other marketing services firms will do business in the future. I also encourage you to consider how this will impact how you obtain and use data for your clients' campaigns, if that's something you get involved with.

How will I obtain prospects at companies? Today, you can purchase a list for single-use; you can purchase a subscription to an online data provider; or, you can go it alone and use social media sites to try to identify companies and contacts you want to reach out to. At the moment, I believe that a blending of purchased information and use of social media sites is appropriate. Here's why:

• Social media sites are not list-friendly. Trying to create prospect lists by industry, title, and geography is difficult.
• Social media sites are populated by users, not by a research team looking for contacts that are relevant to clients. With these sites, you get who's registered, and can't ask someone to find a certain title or email, or to research a new company.
• Social media sites are self-updated. There is no "cleaning" process to validate information. If someone chooses not to update their profile, or creates a duplicate profile, you have bad information. If someone dies, they're still alive on the site. Try this with companies you know well (or your own): watch people you know or former employees - what percent regularly update their information? You may be surprised by the results.

How will I contact prospects at companies? If you load your prospects into Act!, Goldmine or Salesforce.com, social media presents a challenge. Here's why:

• You can't send communications to prospects directly from your database (e.g. you can't use LinkedIn's internal email with Act!).
• Social media is true one-to-one communication, and often through a mutual contact. A large direct mail or email campaign is completely inappropriate.
• While database tools like Act! and Salesforce.com will continue to be relevant for a while, if they don't evolve to become helpful and to save time in a social media-connected world, they are likely to lose market share to those that do.

Social media is about starting a conversation, and how you communicate is critically important.

I'm certainly thinking about this issue as an information provider, as that's what my company does. We also reach out to prospects on a daily basis using a traditional CRM platform. So, we are experimenting, just as you are.

Given the pace of change and the experimentation taking place, I'd love to hear from you: what are your challenges with obtaining information about prospects from social media sites? How are you connecting? Is your internal database tool useful? Becoming irrelevant?

» The Ad Agency CEO’s Lifelong New Business Learners Permit

Leaders never let their minds shut down, always strive to learn more

In college, I don't think there was any way to comprehend what a professor meant when he said, "learning is a lifelong occupation". All we wanted to do was graduate and not have to take another exam or write another 25-page paper.

It was when I went to graduate school four years later that I realized how little I knew about business; the first time I really messed up a management situation when I learned how little I knew about managing people; and the pain and pressure associated with learning how to manage a large sales force when I learned how little I knew about sales. And that's when I remembered that learning was supposed to be a lifelong occupation. If I wasn't making mistakes and learning from them, I wasn't growing.

In a recent Forbes article, Sangeeth Varghese, founder of a leadership organization in India, describes three ways leaders keep learning and growing:

1. They learn constantly. They actively strive to learn at every opportunity, even in their sleep (that's my best time for processing information).
2. They learn continuously. They will not let themselves be distracted. (He also notes that, "Research has shown that it is more efficacious to study for one hour straight than for two hours with interruption.")
3. They learn cyclically. They know that life is three-dimensional, and they study things from every angle. They also learn best from repetition and regularly reviewing what they've learned.

This reminds me of something Michael Gass predicted I would benefit from social media: the opportunity to get out in front of topics that will impact my companies, our clients, and ad agencies in general. And he's right. It's another steep learning curve, but one that's becoming more and more rewarding and relevant. And I have not doubt that it is going to have a significant long term impact on ad agency new business.

The subject of learning is as important for any CEO as it is someone who is an up and coming leader. New technologies are rapidly changing the way we work and interact with people. Staying current is essential if you want your agency to grow and prosper.

So, are you learning constantly, continuously and cyclically? Are you encouraging your employees or coworkers to do the same?

» Gen Y, Shapeshifting, and What the Future May Hold for Ad Agency New Business

The greatest change of our work lives is on the horizon

Michael Malone's new book, The Future Arrived Yesterday hit bookshelves on Monday. You may remember his name from the early 1990s prediction that work was going to become increasingly virtual. He got that right!

He now predicts that:

The best companies in the world will use the latest information processing, communications, and social networking technologies to become shape-shifters, constantly restructuring themselves to adapt to changing circumstances and new opportunities. They will become protean.

"These new protean corporations...will behave like perpetual entrepreneurial start-ups, continuously changing their form, direction, and even their identity."

We need to plan for the following fundamental changes to our business worlds:

• Technology: digital devices will be ubiquitous; new management tools will be required to manage a globally diverse and scattered workforce.
• Organization: we'll see accelerating de-centralization and destruction of hierarchies in larger enterprises; also, frequent restructuring - in a matter of weeks or months, which will require employees to continuously find their place in the new organization.
• Historical - there will be a continuing trend toward more web-based, mass-customized, "smart" products and services; a company's history, myths, values and culture will be what keeps it together.
• Generational -Gen Y is an entrepreneurial generation whose impact will be making the new technologies work right; they will demand that their work be as challenging and change as frequently as the rest of their life.

Malone also suggests that the tools for success already exist for becoming protean, and cites companies like Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia as being early-stage protean, as well as some large, well-known companies like HP, Intel and IBM.

How will these changes impact agencies and new business? Here are a few of my recommendations and predictions...

• Stay current with the latest technologies. Those agencies that fall behind will be left permanently behind. Marketers will need to be incredibly adaptive just to survive the coming upheavals in their own companies and industries, and will depend on marketing partners who are more knowledgeable than they are.
• The continuing destruction of corporate hierarchies is going to make it harder to determine who's in charge, and that responsibility will change and morph more than it already has.
• There will be increased opportunities to communicate a company's myths and history internally to widespread and diverse employees. Everyone will need to know what the company stands for; effective communication to all stakeholders will be critically important.
• One of the greatest opportunities will be harnessing the creative, entrepreneurial energies of Gen Y employees.
• New business development will also change shape, and will likely be driven by connections that will begin and grow digitally through social networking. Meetings are likely to take place more virtually than they do today.

What I don't predict will change: people will still do business with people they like. The ability of your new business person to "connect" with your prospects will be as important as ever.

This book is likely to become a business bestseller. Change is coming and you'll want to keep up with it.