By Category: New Business and Social Media
Quality and Reach
Published on July 28, 2010
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- It may be out of date.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.
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Look before you leap, and measure carefully
Published on July 07, 2010
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.
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Interview with Victors and Spoils' John Winsor
Published on March 25, 2010
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]:
- The expectation of transparency;
- The further digitization of the workforce; and,
- 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.]
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Guest Post
Published on October 27, 2009
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!
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Cultivate your network with relevant information
Published on October 07, 2009
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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