Blogs Can Convert Visitors into Leads for Ad Agency New Business

The chief benefit to your agency from using social networking is “getting new business leads.” Creating a community of followers through Twitter and a regularly updated stream of content on a blog builds engagement, can boost your agency’s presence on Google and ultimately bring in more prospective clients.

Don’t just take my word for it.

Inbound online marketing platform HubSpot’s The State of Inbound Marketing report that inbound marketing can double average monthly leads for small and medium-sized businesses. It can also generate leads for less money  inbound marketing bring leads for less money.

“This report is designed to help businesses and marketers understand the current usage and results of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and its products.

Inbound marketing is becoming widely accepted because it complements the way buyers make purchasing decisions today — using the Internet and related media to learn about the products and services that best meet their needs.” – Hubspot

Three key takeaways from this report:

  1. Businesses are generating real customers with social media and blogs. The use of social media and company blogs as marketing tools gets your company better brand exposure, but it also generates leads that result in real customer acquisition.  41% of companies who use Twitter for marketing have acquired a customer from a Twitter generated lead. 41% of companies using LinkedIn for marketing have acquired a customer from that lead generation source. 43% of companies using Facebook have acquired a customer and 46% of those using company blogs have acquired a customer from a blog generated lead.
  2. Inbound Marketing channels continue to deliver dramatically lower cost per lead than Outbound Channels do. Respondents who spend more than 50% of their lead generation budget on inbound marketing channels report a significantly lower cost per sales lead than those who spend 50% or more their budgets on outbound marketing channels.
  3. Inbound marketing budgets are increasing while outbound marketing budgets are decreasing. As a percentage of the overall lead generation budget, inbound marketing expanded slightly from 2009 to 2010 and outbound marketing contracted. The net effect is that the gap widened from inbound marketing having a 9% greater share of the overall marketing budget in 2009 to a 15% greater share in 2010.

An additional report highlight that I thought was interesting: Customer acquisition through blogs is directly related to frequency of posts.

The report concludes that, “Traditional outbound marketing techniques – including direct mail, print advertising and telemarketing – are becoming less effective. Buyers are not only finding ways to tune these messages out, but more importantly they now have the capability to evaluate the products and services they need on their own.

Click here for a downloadable copy of this report. There’s also a free Webinar On Demand: The 2010 State Of Inbound Marketing

Here are five things that you need to incorporate into your blog to have success:

  1. A genuine passion for the topic
  2. Expertise, credibility, authority
  3. Honest recommendations that really work
  4. Welcoming, helpful, rewarding information, given freely
  5. Demonstrate value

These are the things we should incorporate into any agency new business program. A blog is a great tool that almost forces you to do these things.

A blog is a new tool for agency new business. It is possible to stop chasing business and have business chasing you.

In celebration of Fuel Lines’s 500th post, here 10 agency blogging resources:

  1. Ad Agency New Business Leads From a Blog? The AIDA Formula
  2. 6 Writing Tips to Make Your Ad Agency’s Blog Effective for New Business
  3. 25 Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Ad Agency’s Blog
  4. How to Write Your Ad Agency’s Blog
  5. Top 5 Benefits for Having an Agency Blog
  6. Top Ten Reasons Your Ad Agency Should Blog
  7. 40 Ways to Take Your Ad Agency’s Blog to the Next Level
  8. How to Write Your Ad Agency’s Blog
  9. Agency Resources for Blogging and Social Media
  10. Ad Agencies: 8 Ingredients for Blog Post Success

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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. Great post. I think businesses need to understand the quality time that must be invested in social media so that relationships are developed–it is something that can be done in a couple of minutes a few times per week.

  2. Great read! It’s important to think of social media as a new lead generator and not just “some Internet thing.” I think by investing the right amount of time and support for social media functions, businesses can make a real difference in the leads during a down economy. Check out David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules for Marketing and PR, he really touches on some great things that changed my thinking towards new media.

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