Staying current with procurement purchasing and how to assess a supplier of web design can be short-circuited by reading Lance Wiggs’ excellent quick assessment of the local market.

If you’re not from his locale, still read it.

• The points he makes about Pricing for services in the Buyers Guide section is instructive.  Many agencies are still charging by the hour and it’s clear that over-charging still exists.
• Intermediation or sub-contracting is part of the process and this affects both buyers and sellers.  Transparency and honesty are the best approach here.
• The attributes of a “good client” are excellent.  Being clear about your role as the buyer is important.
• The Agency Sellers Guide has some great points.  Too many agencies rely on word of mouth promotion.
• The attributes of a “good seller” are important.  Know thyself.

And finally, the comments.  I was the first (*) but there will be many more.

Here’s my penny’s worth of commentary

Lance, great, incisive analysis as ever. Thanks for taking the time to do this work on behalf of the whole industry. I’m a newcomer to Auckland and my agency doesn’t do web design but I will comment on the two parts of your piece that are not wrong, but may mis-represent the way part of the industry is changing.

I am writing a series of blog posts called “The Creative Agency of the Future” #FutureAgency in which I’m collating examples from the business operations practices of agencies who are challenging the status quo and looking for improved ways of delivering excellent marketing services to their clients.http://creativeagencysecrets.com/category/creative-business/future-agency/
Here are two ways that leading agencies are different from the ones you researched:

1 – charging. Some agencies are moving away from time/hour charging basis and onto a fee wholly based on results, or partly based on outcomes.
2 – business development. This is my specialism. It makes me cry that marketing agencies can’t market themselves successfully. Many whine about “procurement” or “RFPs” or “pitching and coming second” but the underlying fact is that a planned approach to HOW you win new business tends to deliver MORE new business. If you don’t do it yourself, outsource. It’s the lifeblood of your agency and as you say yourself, relying on word of mouth may not be sufficient for your business survival.

Image via Wikipedia

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

1. you complain to your co-workers A LOT about them
2. nearly everything they say annoys you
3. you find it hard to think of something positive to say
4. when you see them the first thing that jumps into your head is negative or sarky/snide / negative
5. 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?

Image via Wikipedia

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.

1. First – ensure you have lots of links into your website from any documents you upload
2. Second – add to Scribd any of the e-books, how-to manuals and expert guides that you have on your blog or website
3. Third – use good tags and key words to describe them in the upload
4. Fourth – come back and check for views / downloads and other analytics.

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’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)

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.

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?

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.

1. 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)
2. Direct relevant experience supported by case studies (this scored highly in all disciplines, particularly PR and creative)
3. Proven ROI supported by case studies (particularly relevant in PR and Direct Marketing)
4. Unique methodology (primarily in Research)
5. Niche skill set, namely in technology (mainly in Digital and Research)
6. Chance of gaining insight from the meeting (mainly in creative and PR)
7. 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.

“My friend fancies you.”

Woo Hoo show me the money!

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?

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?

1. 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.
2. Continue to write good copy in titles, metatags, HTML layout
3. Make it easy for human readers rather than trying to second-guess bot readers
4. 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
5. Do check your site analytics and see whether you have been affected.
6. 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)