Ad Industry Link Love

I tell ya, summer has been busy. I will get back into the swing of things soon. In the meantime, check out a few goodies:

• 10 takeaways from Ad Age’s small agency conference
• 7 emails you should never send
• 5 outside-the-box marketing jobs!
• Hmm, advertising transparency or trickery? POM sues Minute Maid
• A game I do not get, but completely appreciate the devotion users have towards it gets branded?
• I need to get one of these accounts
• Agency reviews seen as a sign of recovery

Cheers!

Preparation Really is Key to New Business

This spring’s vocab word is “duh,” meaning “I knew that already,” or “Yeah, so?”

One such post that exemplifies spring’s word is “Specificity and the New Business Email Conundrum.”  Here, I simply regurgitated email marketing best practices for new business; reason being that sometimes we all overlook the basics.

Today, we will quickly go over the importance of good preparation before a new business campaign kicks off (duh.) In the spirit of maintaining a low word count (and finishing early so I can go play outside), I have outlined a crucial new business agenda that should be completed before outreach leaves the office.

Part 1: The Agency Overview:

• Define agency’s capabilities, offerings, recent work and categorize agency niche and expertise for differentiation
• Define new business goals and milestones
• Take an inventory of existing new business assets currently being sent to prospects and edit according to niche and direction

Part 2: Targeting:

• Define targets and verticals based on the differentiation and direction discussed above; provide compelling argument for targets based on agency services, past work and future goals
• Create at least 3 messaging touch points for targets (html, plain text, landing pages and copy)
• Create specific messaging sequence (email 1, phone call 1, email 2, phone call 2, etc.) based on prospect interaction (e.g. if prospect opens email 1, prospect receives phone call 1; if prospect does not open email 1, prospect receives email 2 before phone call 1)
• Define additional means of outreach outside of phone and email (webcasts, agency blog, events, PR, etc.)

Part 3: Metrics and Measurement:

• Define “success” in terms of deliverables, outreach and numbers
• Define what it takes to meet goals (is it a conversation with a CMO at a company long on your agency’s hot list or is it a project on the table from the CMO?)
• Develop milestones to gauge success

Preparing for a new business campaign launch requires an intense understanding of your agency’s capabilities and personality, market feedback, necessary outreach and a clear definition of success for a given point in time.

The better prepared your team is, the easier that first meeting will be (duh.)

A New Way to Think New Business

With a new moon and a new month approaching, I would like to give some thought into slightly weaving my love for fashion and great music into this business development blog. The images in each blog post do not correlate with typical business blogs (no facts, figures, numbers, charts, bald guy pulling his hair out), and so I’m sure readers understand the use of metaphor and plain, old pretty pictures that accompany each post. And so, why not add a bit more excitement to the posts?

With that being said, let’s talk print for a sec. I am one of the few lone wolves still smudging my sticky fingers with the New York Times print edition and magazines. One particular magazine, Elle, is a favorite for many reasons: the fashion photography is beautiful, the typography is unique, the articles are aspirational (vacation home in the French countryside, please) and it just feels better than the typical women’s magazines on the newsstands today.

Specificity and the New Business Email Conundrum

Spring has officially sprung and everyone is delightfully chirping a new tune. I’m keeping up with my New Year’s resolutions (for once!) and feeling in charge and on top of all  things new business. (Hint: the travel and tourism industries request that no one dial them for at least forever.)

I’m seeing email campaigns really take off this year; a simple plain text email has turned up many meetings with just a reply and an openess to listen on the part of the marketer. Of course, these “plain” emails are quite calculated in their approach and response. The fact is that marketers in almost every industry are being bombarded with introductory capabilities requests in Q2 so yours better be good.

What I have found to be the most successful in Q1 is good old specificity in both my target verticals and my outgoing messages. What I mean by specificity (my new favorite word) in my target verticals is that I don’t just run and research data lists for a vertical and call it a day – I make damn sure to nail down the right titles and categorize companies within the vertical to match the agency’s most compelling work samples.

Getting New Business Started and Staying Motivated

The New Year is well underway; in fact, we are halfway through the month of February and getting closer to the holiday invented for those poor, unfortunate souls in relationships (I kid, I kid).  There’s no sugar-coating how much 2009 sucked – layoffs, pay cuts, low morale, chaos, you name it and we all lived it. A new year, and a new decade for that matter, brings a new sense of calm, clarity and motivation. I’m fortunate to have kept my job in 2009 and proving my talent, abilities and drive will not prove fruitless in 2010.

5 Assets Every New Business Program Needs – Outreach

A few pointers when it comes to outbound b2b marketing:

•  Successful outreach requires cold calls
•  Lots of cold calls
•  Cold calls can be tough
•  Cold calls can be fun
•  Successful outreach requires emails
•  Lots of emails
• Emails can be monotonous
• Emails can be a better way to reach call screeners
• Proper outreach is the most critical component of business development

At this point, we have covered targeting, messaging, database management and now we’re ready to dive into the cold calling.  The most successful new business campaigns follow a sequence; I haven’t perfected a sequence necessarily, but I have had success with a hybrid of the following:

New Business Webinar

Catapult New Business is hosting a new business webinar, titled Agency Business Development 2010: Strategy and tools to deliver more new business leads, Wednesday, December 9 @ 2 PM EST.

We’re covering insights into successful new business campaigns and the tools that drive them, including:

• Integrated media use in planning new business campaign sequences
• On and off-page web optimization
• Inbound marketing tools
• Required outbound touch-point metrics and analytics

Sign up here and if you can’t make this one, don’t fret - there are plenty more to come. 

Cheers!

5 Assets Every New Business Program Needs – Research

First came planning, now comes research.

Planning is all about preparing the outreach strategy and accompanying assets. Your messaging strategy must revolve around an actionable insight to stand out from the clutter (for more tips on messaging strategy, click here).

Once you have determined a niche and insight to bring to a particular category and audience (CPG, automotive, retail, QSR, etc.), you can begin to populate a contact database.

There are generally two approaches to contact list generation: paid and unpaid.  For those agencies that may not have much time or energy to hunt, scour and mine contact info, purchasing a database from a provider may be the best solution.

For those who already have a robust, working database and/or lack of funds may be better off developing contact lists. If you fall into the latter, a few contact research tips:

New Business Link Love: Second Wind

For all you small to midsize agencies out there: the Second Wind network is a vast collection of industry tools, tips, and resources for all your business development needs.  The site does have certain areas that are catered to paid members, but there are plenty of whitepapers and ideas to bounce for free.

It’s worth a look.

Cheers.

5 Assets Every New Business Program Needs

The traditional new business cycle is similar to dating:

1) Make a call

2) Build a relationship

3) Uncover an opportunity

4) Lose opportunity

5) Begin again

6) Onward and upward

7) Uncover opportunity

Traditional new business is cyclical, nerve-wracking, a numbers game and ultimately, a game of luck and chance, of being in the right place at the right time. Now, we have two choices in new business: we can either sit back and wait it out (via referrals, word of mouth, networking, search consultants) or we can proactively seek new business (via a plan, research and dedicated outreach).

Here’s the thing about proactive new business: your competitors are already doing it, and if you aren’t actively controlling business development initiatives, the cyclical nature of biz dev will ultimately control you.  Without targeted outreach and strict measurement, you won’t have the ability to predict growth or when extra outreach is necessary to make up for the financial lull of the times.

In a nutshell, here is the first of five agency must-haves for new business: