Creative Agency Secrets

Thanks to the boys at Web Liquid for their insightful and blissfully short post on Consumer Generated Content.

Key thoughts
1.  Among the many points of difference between the broadcast and online
models of marketing is the notion of service over solicitation.

We are here to serve you the customer or potential customer.  We aren’t trying to sell you stuff.

Question for your business…. online can your customers find out about your service, product, ask questions in public and get timely, accurate answers.

As an agency, what could I put up to enable this for my website? 

• How we treat our clients,
• Our service level commitment to our clients,
• What happens when you are not happy with our work or our service,
• Public places for new brand ideas - got an idea for our clients’ brands? Post it up and come and work with us as job experience to put it into practice (we pay you if your idea grabs our client),
• Ideas we have pitched and failed on - but we still think are good ideas.  Help yourself - but please credit us under creative commons license.

2. CGC presents a valuable research opportunity CGC is Word-of-Mouth
but online it’s also a public record of those conversations and
consumer sentiment relative to your brand and that of your competitors.

An ideal point-in-time temperature gauge of your brand and its relationship with key audiences.  What could your agency be doing in this area?

• online poll of viewpoints - latest campaign, cool employees, what the MD said at a conference, hiring policies, graduate training scheme,
• If you are only as good as your last campaign - how is that measured and reported on?  By competitors, by clients, by staff?
• What was the killer reason you won your last pitch?  Be brave and publicise.
• Looking for a brave brand on which to exercise your talents - ask for small brands to challenge your creative juices - the deal is they run with one of the campaign ideas you have and you use it to showcase a new service / new approach / new or young team

3.  CGC presents the opportunity to engage customers and potential
customers at the most critical time in the purchase process - right
when they’re looking for the information about a product or service.

• How to find a brand when they are looking for an agency?  Get known as the place that posts up ideas which others’ can take and use as long as they credit you.  See David Airey who regularly posts business card ideas
• it’s more than testimonials, it is the real grit of the day to day work that should shine through and be available to be seen.
• Post up questions that you WANT clients and prospects to ask you.  Really Hard Questions.  And have some honest answers ready.  Extend that playing field onto your territory.

4.  For a brand to engage in this conversation with a strategic approach
including a deep understanding of what’s being discussed online and its
influence, there is a great opportunity to more effectively reach
qualified consumers and position the brand as an authority on the topic.

So there you go.  It is possible for an agency to do this.  Who’s gonna be first, guys?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Change Management, Creative Business, Marketing, Web 2.0 for business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.