Unconventional Times Call for Unconventional New Business Methods

I’ve built my new business consultancy to small-to mid-size advertising agencies primarily through my FUEL LINES blog. The blog helped me to be focused and differentiating that has been appealing to my target audience. I’ve steadily built traffic through SEO, good content, email newsletters, Twitter, PRWeb, Surveys, Polls, Facebook, LinkedIn, article marketing, white papers, etc. It has been a tremendous learning experience for me and has helped both personally and professionally. I’ve been able to assist clients in developing and enlarging their online footprint. To experience new media for themselves.

This is an exciting, revolutionary time to be in advertising. We’re riding a wave of new communications tools that are extremely effective. Once you experience them for yourself, your marketing mind kicks in and you see how they can be used to promote your agency as well as promoting client services and products.

I’ve found that helping my agency clients create their own blogs, provides lots of added benefits:

  • Helps them to differentiate themselves, find the right messaging
  • Focus on a target audience, category or discipline or a combination of these
  • Compels them to always lead with benefits for their clients rather than boast and brag about agency capabilities
  • Helps them to build trust and relationships and we all know that prospective clients like to work with people that they know and trust
  • Positions the agency as being experts and having a keen understanding of the challenges and obstacles of their target group
  • Allows for new business beyond an agency’s location, networks and referrals.
  • Agencies can create a strong appeal to their target audience and the prospective clients will actually initiate the call, when they are ready and that conversation will be much further down the road than a cold call.

David Armano, AdAge, writes, “As an individual, my blog is one of the most effective manifestations of “marketing” I could have produced for myself.

Speaking from personal experience, I could not have predicted many of the outcomes I have had since launching a blog, but I believe following an“unconventional” path is a core reason behind everything that I’ve learned from it. For a couple of hundred dollars a year and a whole lot of dedication and effort it’s been priceless to me. So as I think about how times are becoming more unconventional — with unpredictable financial markets and political change in the air — I can’t help but think that it’s more important than ever to get serious about what it takes to do these types of initiatives right. It just doesn’t look like conventional marketing — it’s different. And unconventional times call for unconventional tactics.”

Read David’s article Unconventional Times Call for Unconventional Marketing
And That Requires New Processes, Lessons From a Blog

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About Michael Gass

Consultant | Trainer | Author | Speaker

Since 2007, he has been pioneering the use of social media, inbound and content marketing strategies specifically for agency new business.

He is the founder of Fuel Lines Business Development, LLC, a firm which provides business development training and consulting services to advertising, digital, media and PR agencies.

Comments

  1. Morgan,

    I just received a forwarded email from one of my clients. It was from a prospect and the prospective client had this to say:

    “Also, I just wanted to tell you that I like what you guys are doing over at Locomotion. You guys are starting to build some buzz. I rarely heard anything about Locomotion until the past year so I thought you guys might want to know that your efforts are making an impact.”

    The buzz has been generated through the execution of a new media plan for the agencies new business. Another agency, Off Madison Ave is generating 5 inbound new business leads per day using new medial.

  2. Michael – Seems like agencies need to evolve their new business philosophy to “give and you shall receive”. Give through blogs, making relevant comments, contributing, adding new thought rather simply answering RFP’s and hoping for the best. Great article.

  3. Nish, I agree. Thanks for taking the time to comment.

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