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Robin from PromoManagers writes about the ultimate agency nightmare client. His firm acquired the business but the client doesn’t listen to the agency advice. The relationship has been going downhil.
But they are stuck because the agency needs the income but they also recognise this client won’t ever be a huge success with the campaigns they run and won’t make them rich due to the lack of follow-through.
He says
I’ve been part of a team of people working on “the problem child” account for almost a year now. The short of it is that (a) they need more than just marketing to grow their business and (b) they blatantly ignore our recommendations and then complain that they’re not getting results.
This is clearly a failng relationship.
His article was prompted by an Entrepreneur article where the commenters all suggest their ‘best decision’ was to actually fire the customer – interesting that Robin didn’t feel he could do the same. But maybe he’s not the decision maker in his agency.
Symptoms to watch out for – Nightmare Clients from Hell
- you complain to your co-workers A LOT about them
- nearly everything they say annoys you
- you find it hard to think of something positive to say
- when you see them the first thing that jumps into your head is negative or sarky/snide / negative
- you have to struggle to be enthusiastic about your work on their brand
Any others? What do nightmare clients from hell make you do or thing?
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We had a little hissy-fit rant about Scribd a while back. I’d like to formally apologise for shooting my mouth off too early.
Scribd has added new features – and they look pretty useful for content creators.
The main thing that has been added is Analytics. Scribd has made a dashboard that looks a lot like google analytics.
It includes helpful data on:
- Document views by day graph
- Document “reads”, “Embed reads”, “Readcasts” and an overall engagement score
- Views by region / geography
- Search key words
- Top referrers
Which begins to make the service look more useful as a business development tool.
Business model revised
It seems that Scribd has revised its “free to anyone” business model to one based more on “Give and take”. When it first launched there was little difference between Scribd and Slideshare – both enabled documents to be uploaded and shared. And its sign-up self-promotion annoyed me.
Recently I was tempted back by a search that linked to a great document upload. And I found that Scribd now has refined its business model. You can read any document free. But if you want to download one – you have to reciprocate by uploading one of your own.
I wonder if it keeps tabs on the number of uploads / downloads each user does…. maybe I should keep a list of future documents to upload but not until I’ve found one I want to download.
Anyone else tried it out?
New Business Development
If yoiu are using content creation as part of your business development tactics this is pretty handy.
- First – ensure you have lots of links into your website from any documents you upload
- Second – add to Scribd any of the e-books, how-to manuals and expert guides that you have on your blog or website
- Third – use good tags and key words to describe them in the upload
- Fourth – come back and check for views / downloads and other analytics.
Just noticing that a lot of our inbound web visitors are coming from web discovery sites.
This is defintiely a new thing… maybe we’re writing more good stuff or just getting indexed more often.
So thanks to Stumbleupon and SimilarWeb who are equal first ranking in the stats at present.
Have you checked your stats recently for these destinations?
Nick Burcher is a super star… but I didn’t know that when I first met him. We had coffee together and he gave me very early advice on setting up this blog and since then I’ve followed his work.
Nick’s latest views are about the integration of advertising, marketing and social media in the context of the internet being the central plank of a brand’s marketing, recommendations and opinion-formation with audiences.
This is a really important part of comprehending how the “Old” marketing techniques are migrating to the “New”. For example, do you know how to change your communication methods so that your “old” customers are not alienated by the “New” tools and so that the “New” tools can sit comfortably alongside “Old” styles?
Nick Burcher's Paid:Owned:Earned
Take a look at the image here. This is Nick’s thesis.
There are websites whose purpose is based on payment (brands pay to advertise on them); there are others where brands own the information up there (mainly content-led) and lastly there are others where brands have earned the right to be listed.
Note that some sites (Facebook, Twitter) are listed in all three categories…. this is a really important part of the paradigm.
Your Brand needs to have communication strategies that work in all three contexts, and uses the feedback arrows at the top and bottom as well as in the ones middle of the diagram.
Here is the strategy we use for a client, Rowperfect. They sell rowing sports equipment.
Paid: Google adwords and other sports sites who carry banner adverts.
Owned: Blog content, You Tube videos, forum discussions, Twitter feed, Facebook page.
Earned: followers on FB, Twitter, YouTube and others linking back to the Owned
I was delighted to watch this video where Nick sets out the lessons behind the simple headline “Paid-Owned-Earned”.
Does this have resonance for your brand strategy? Where do you think there may be issues or conflicts with traditional brand-led marketing?
New Trends in Digital Advertising [exclusive video] from Hayko on Vimeo.
Related articles
- Paid Owned Earned – how it works [image and video] (nickburcher.com)
- Paid Owned Earned: Paid Owned Earned on Star Wars Day – VW The Force and Blackberry (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
- Advertising’s Future Is 3 Simple Words: Paid. Owned. Earned. | Story Worldwide (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
- Separate content from platforms (beingpeterkim.com)
Getting fabulous creative work from your marketing agency depends on the brand team giving the best possible brief to set up the work. Writing down what you want from your campaign and collaborating with the agency to agree the full terms of reference for the work you are commissioning is of the utmost importance.
You may be finding a new marketing agency to work with or briefing in new campaigns for your existing agency.
Both require communication of the utmost clarity.
And so whether you are a brand who uses agencies; a brand who has an internal marketing department or an agency wanting to use best practice with your brand clients, here are two slide decks and a blog post which will help you to write the best possible creative brief.
Thanks to Dare who created this slide deck as a training event for their internal staff.
How to write the brief
- Brand Proposition – what is it?
- What do we want to achieve?
- What is the one key insight?
- What do we want people to do?
- How should we tell them?
- Why would they?
In the deck the authors show good, mediocre and poor ways
B2B marketing briefing rules are different
There are times when apologies are needed in business. Sometimes we can say it with good grace – other times a forced reply through gritted teeth is needed.
Take a read of Benjamin Ellis on fine form writing about “Making an Apology”.
He writes “as a bare minimum I expect
- A genuine acceptance that what happened was wrong.
- In as far as is reasonable, an explanation of what went wrong and why (i.e. does the offender understand? Is it under control?) – Not everyone agrees with this one.
- A commitment to a) put it right and b) ensure that it doesn’t happen again (i.e. lessons learnt).”
Have you ever had to make an apology in business?
Can you tell us what the key things you felt needed to happen
What were the customer reactions?
Did something good come out of the situation?
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Do you want to know the real reasons why brands choose to meet marketing agencies?
Getting the first meeting for your credentials presentation or a ‘chemistry’ session is often stated as being the hardest part of the business development sales pipeline. Many agencies have told me that if only I could get them in front of a prospect then they’d perform a miracle and get picked for their newest campaign.
Phwaw. Piffle. Self-delusional nonsense.
I have little patience with agencies who cannot market themselves; who find their own business development hard; who cannot use the medium in which they sell advice to clients to find customers for themselves.
Call yourself a marketing agency?
And so it was a breath of fresh air to read Amanda Francis in the Alchemis blog detailing research findings of the top 7 reasons why brands choose to actually meet an agency.
Here are some top line results from the analysis of our 2010 business development activity on behalf of our clients.
They summarise why a prospect will agree to meet an agency based on calling prospects who meet the agreed criteria of vertical market, size, spend, profile and location.
- Rapport with prospect (this scored highly in those disciplines where there are neither discernible differentiators nor clear ROI, for example, Creative or Corporate communications agencies)
- Direct relevant experience supported by case studies (this scored highly in all disciplines, particularly PR and creative)
- Proven ROI supported by case studies (particularly relevant in PR and Direct Marketing)
- Unique methodology (primarily in Research)
- Niche skill set, namely in technology (mainly in Digital and Research)
- Chance of gaining insight from the meeting (mainly in creative and PR)
- Location of the agency (again, mainly in creative and PR)
So what’s the learning for your agency?
Number 1 is no surprise to me. you have to be personable, likeable and able to ‘make friends’ superficially easily in order to quickly benefit from one face to face meeting and be remembered. When hiring your own biz dev team – don’t take on anyone who doesn’t instantly put you at your ease and give off a warm and friendly vibe even in a tense interview situation. It’s no different from a pitch.
Number 6 is the one that I have personally used with the most success when I was client side.
Want to learn more about something new / different / interesting? Get an agency in to tell you about it. This works very well for any re-interpretation of marketing methodology and social media for business is the latest lever of this method.
Share your knowledge before the meeting and you stand an even bigger chance of getting onto the pitch list.
How do you do that? Join our newsletter subscriber list and receive these blog posts into your in-box.
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Woo Hoo show me the money!
- They have visited our site before (we can see the company name in red shows it’s already in our Sales Tractor database)
- The link text indicates that it’s come from a link inside their own website
This second point delights us.
We can’t find the exact link because it’s behind the firewall or intranet hosting for BBH. What it shows is that someone there has noticed us out here and linked to the site. Curiosity has been noted.
Why would BBH do this?
Well there are many reasons – someone might have been browsing the web and found our site. Nice and definitely possible.
The truth is probably that they also check links into their site and noticed clicks coming in from Creative Agency Secrets off a blog post in which BBH were mentioned. [Brands Seeking Agencies on February 17th].
So what should you do?
Research your own incoming links. And answer these questions
- Why do you get visitors from particular sites,
- Can you improve your marketing through those sites,
- What can you do to begin a relationship with visitors from those sites?
It is well known now that Google changed its search algorithm significantly last month.
The way Google searches and indexes your website is pretty important as the number one search site – if you’re not ‘found’ on Google your business loses out.
The change mainly affects sites who copy / reproduce content from other sites (commonly called farming) and do not add value to browsing readers.
What can you do?
- Produce unique content. Write or re-write your material. If you resell for others, add depth to descriptions with your own review / opinion to differentiate your site.
- Continue to write good copy in titles, metatags, HTML layout
- Make it easy for human readers rather than trying to second-guess bot readers
- Don’t waste your time working with ‘farmer’ website owners. One of our clients set up relationships with sites who were sending traffic using automated link farming – their importance will probably drop after this roll-out
- Do check your site analytics and see whether you have been affected.
- Review your SEO and steer tactics away from those not favoured by Google.
SEO experts take a look at the SEOMOZ view.
A custom report for Google Analytics from Andy Beard.
If you have e-commerce clients they should read the analysis on Practical ECommerce.
Web masters read the technical issues on SearchEngineLand.
Related articles
- Google’s Farmer Update and Its Effect on Independent Publishers (xfep.com)
- Google Analytics Version 5 (seroundtable.com)
Had a great start to the week in the agency – two new clients.
One came from an introduction – thanks Chris – and the other is a longstanding client who just ‘jumped’ big time into the online world for their marketing and chose us to implement. All very flattering.
But, cognisant of the cockiness that can follow a big win, I decided to be ultra-cautious with an other client to whom we’ve proposed a new website and content marketing programme.
Three reasons to be cautions
- He’s never been online independently before
- Times are tough and spend is carefully managed – we need to prove value fast
- He stuck his neck out to get us in after we made a successful cold call and we need to ensure what we propose is capable of being bought and will back up his career progression.
Many times after a big win, I’ve seen clients get too confident and think they have acquired the midas touch only to quickly move onto a ‘losing streak’ when pitch after pitch is lost or ‘come second’ – which is lost but worse.
So things to look to when you think you might be in the same place.
Exercise high caution
First, secure the new clients you have won. Bed them in, ensure you’re on brief and delivering what they expect and when they expect it. Make sure that income stream is confirmed and on the books.
With other proposals that you have in the pipeline, be very cautious
- Check your wording is not arrogant, over-confident or cocky. I think a quiet degree of suppliance to the client’s will and a slightly servile approch to ensure that your words are correctly conveying the offer works quite well.
- Before delivering the final pitch document – phone and meet the prospective client and all the influencers in order to double-check your understanding of their needs. I usually try to talk pricing as well as deliverables at this time so when they get the document / presentation there are few financial surprises
- Follow up in a very timely manner and ensure the trail doesn’t go cold. Check they received the document; ask when they’ll have had a chance to review it and you can speak to them about what they think; find out decision dates and key decision triggers.
Go for it – winning streaks are fantastic when you get onto them. Stick to your guns and ensure you are the agency of choice for that brand who wants you to do their marketing.
Related articles
- There’s More to Pitching Than Doing Killer Work (thedenveregotist.com)
- How To Fix A Broken Pitch Process (adpulp.com)
