Creative Agency Secrets

Mark Ritson writing in Marketing Magazine (3 September 08) showcased the tie-up between Penguin Books and Match.com in a co-branding deal.

Coincidently this week I am working on a client who has a paid-for newsletter for a niche audience.  They approached me asking for ways to increase subscription and advertising revenues.

My answer, in part, includes co-branding.

And so the challenge for you is to find out whether this is an appropriate tool for business development for your company.

Situations where collaborative marketing and co-branding may be appropriate include:

• you have a good database of customers in a clear market niche or particular geography or demographic profile  
• there is little cross-over between the current customer base of either brand
• each brand can benefit from the positioning and reputation of the other
• profits from the resultant new business can be shared while both improve brand equity

Ritson suggests that if your brand fulfils these criteria, the subsequent co-branding is newsworthy and so may additionally gain you free PR and press coverage.

In the case of my client, a paid-for newsletter will hopefully benefit from an association with a free online discussion forum: those who are used to gossiping for free can read some well-reported news, which in turn will fuel the discussion forum and draw in more participants.

And so when considering your business write two short lists

• who are my customers?
• what is my brand positioning?

Then read your industry magazines and online news sources and list brands who you think might make good partners for co-branding associations with you.
Consider first who their customers are and what their brand positioning is and see if you can make a cogent argument for a tie-up between you.  Remember that if you initiate the discussions, it's up to you to set out the reasons in the most persuasive way possible.

Remember, the deal has to work well for both parties, a stronger / weaker party deal will probably fall down; similarly one where one brand is more likely to profit than the other probably won't work in the long term unless the terms of profit sharing reflect that imbalance.
 

Just had a good chat with Andrew about hiring new biz people. 

The gist was that most businesses get to a size when the MD can no longer do all the biz dev work alone.  What do you do next?

Options include:

1. train up a graduate
2. hire an experienced person with 3/4 years in the industry

My views were nicely aligned with his.  I said Oxbridge-type grads are good hires because they are bright, keen and want to rule the world quickly.  If you train them up for marketing jobs - but
for sales get a seasoned professional from another industry.  I don't think you have a cat's chance of training a grad to being a good salesperson quickly.

 There is another option that I neglected to add:

1. Train your whole client facing team in biz dev so they all go out looking for opportunities [plug - I can help with this] 

I recommended prosperconsulting.com Simon Ibson if you want to hire a sales person - key to his offer is that he doesn't charge % fees based on salary, its a flat fee PLUS he'll advise on how to use the person properly to support your business aims.

If you want to hire grads from top universities - go direct to their careers office. Usually they'll advertise your position free of charge.  That was how I found Frank Krikhaar for Pembridge.  Wonderful guy. 

 He grilled me quite solidly about my own biz dev methods… not sure whether I was teaching him to suck eggs or if there was a gem or two among the verbal downpour!

Got a reply from Robert Frost at adstorm.

 We don’t disclose details of our own marketing and advertising activities and their performance to strangers however it is probably clear to you that being specialists in online advertising,

AdStorm closely track performance and conversion of all our media, and if it didn’t work, we wouldn’t be doing it!  The general demographics of Facebook users are not ideal for business to business marketing and the targeting is not as good on Facebook as other media but nevertheless with careful set up it does bring us a certain amount of useful traffic. 

For more information about online advertising with AdStorm, visit www.adstorm.co.uk

Fair enough, not wanting to spill the beans to outsiders like me…. but I did notice the following day that their ad was no longer rendering to my profile.

Hope the readers here are all classified as 'useful'! 

Which social media tools are appropriate (and easy) for newcomers?

I had a very interesting session working remotely (backstory on remote consulting) with Prosper Consulting and Simon Ibson, the MD.

He is quite new to social media as a business development tool and we discussed the places that I use to promote my blog as a means to help him navigate and research the possible places he could do the same with the new website which isn't quite ready… (Story of my life!)And so I started with the places that my professional profile is listed:
Facebook
Plaxo Pulse
Linked In
FriendFeed/RebeccaCaroe
Twitter

Facebook occupies a curious cross-border place in my toolkit because I principally use it for friends and family but there are some great groups I belong to hosted there which are clearly work not play.  I favour the groups "London Girl Geek Dinners ", "BIMA British Interactive Media Association " and "What I saw at the Direct Marketing Revolution " as really active with new items posted regularly which really interest me.
Plaxo is a surrogate Friendfeed but has more professional contacts in there.  I use Friendfeed to funnel stuff into my Alert Thingy stream which is a great way of posting to Twitter and it has a tinyurl plugin that really works!

And then there are aggregator sites where I can set up the RSS feed from this blog to send stuff over automatically.  This is a fabulous service, if (and only if) the site has got itself a good audience and is well-managed.
UTalkMarketing
Marcom Professional
Marketing Services Talk

Ragan

Of these, MArcom Professional set up by Philip Sheldrake is my favourite.  It has a better range of comment and is less 'managed'.  I used to check in to Ragan a lot but it's very US oriented and mainly aimed at PR folk, which I'm not.  Plus, I loathe the weekly email from Utalk but haven't managed to unsubscribe from it.  Maybe I dream that one day they'll pick up one of my posts to print…

And so how should you work out the places that your profile (corporate or personal) should be online?

My suggestion is to start with Linked In because you really can't go wrong there.  Take a look around the people you know on there and start an active campaign to connect to the ones you know.  If you have the energy, also ask for recommendations for those you've worked for.

In order to find sites that may be helpful for you try this checklist

1. Go to Technorati.com and use a key word search that describes what your company does
2. Read the blogs it lists and sign up to read a few that seem a) prolific b) have good, informed commentary c) post regularly d) score highly on the Technorati Authority score
3. Search Google or Yahoo for the same key word + 'blog' or 'news' (that'll filter out your competitors' websites)
4. Repeat step 2 and find those who write well.  Sign up to read…

As far as the others go, take a month to regularly read what's on them from people you know (ask someone to let you log in to their feed / pulse stream).  You can also ask your trusted colleagues and clients which they use and / or know about. And make your own mind up.

Simon was curious about what copyright I chose to exercise on this blog.  I told him that I publish it all under the Creative Commons license - detail on creative commons.

Simon recommended two books to me. Alan Weiss' "Million Dollar Consulting" and "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug  

Prosper Consulting is a talent acquisition specialist that works hard on building long term relationships with client companies, delivers recruitment solutions and doesn't work on success fees.  And so if you want to hire top talent and don't want to be spending percentages of their salary on the agency, check out Prosper Consulting .  

Update on yesterday's post about using Facebook to promote your agency …..

I got an immediate auto reply from ClickyMedia …

Dear Rebecca,

Many thanks for your enquiry! 

A member of our internet marketing consultancy team will be in touch with you
shortly to see how we can help you.

In the mean time we have attached a Case Study for you to read.

We look forward to speaking with you shortly.

Kind Regards,

Sending a case study was a nice touch!

And then 40 minutes later, a reply from the Managing Director - Oliver Yeates

 Thanks for your email.

We do indeed generate business from Facebook advertising and it is entirely down to the levels of targeting we use.  We have specifically selected individuals whose job title includes the keywords "marketing" - this is why you will have seen our ad.

Here at Clicky Media we like to practise what we preach and our ads have certainly introduced our services to a number of Marketing professionals.

As with many on-line marketing opportunities which are arising after the huge success of Google Ads, click prices are relatively cheap and as such a very attractive return on investment is available.  Afterall we only pay for clicks ad the brand awareness and association is something we cannot afford to miss.Feel free to use this email on your blog.

Doubly nice.  And permission given without being asked! (well it is in my email signature….).

And so there's a really simple brief if you want to use FB - target job titles.  And from the logos on their site, FB is clearly one of the target areas they specialise in.

Well done. 

Thanks to Nico Macdonald for inviting me to chair two sessions at his Media Futures Conference next week.

I am going to be up there with Alex McKie and the guys from Plot…. Wicked! 

11.00:    Research in the real world – Alex McKie

11:30:      Meet the people formerly known as… users – Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant, Plot

He twittered it here 

Really looking forward to this. 

THe good just got really great.

sending unsolicited and inappropriate marketing messages has always been close to what we now call spam.  

In the blogosphere, this direct approach without first establishing an online relationship and credentials / rights is considered more invasive and inappropriate than in the offline or email-only world.

Bloggers are very good at negative publicity.  And at campaigning / lobbying.

This wiki suggests that people blog these PR companies' URLs.  I.e. get no email at all from them (and probably report them to spamcop and get the domain blocked at server level). And heres a list of individual email addresses blocked by the author of "The Long Tail" and editor of Wired Magazine.

How damaging will that be to your business?  Imagine, no emails getting through certain servers and to some key journalist/blogger individuals - and all because a colleague made a mistake… 

ACTION - check your PR company is not on that list and your individual PR representative isn't either.  Your brand is doomed online.  Move your business elsewhere. 

Companies that I know who are on the list include [note I am not linking this text] Edelman, Bigmouth, Bite, FourtyThree, Global Results, Lewis, Ogilvy, Porter Novelli, 

Wise up. 

I have written before about ways and means of doing this for yourself.

the simplest method is a Google Alert for your brand name (and any obvious mis-spellings).

But have a look at these alternatives

Bloppy
Co.mments

Bloppy juust tracks web posts and comments

Tired of losing track of the comments you wrote on blogs you like? Missing comments from other users? So was I! But fear no more. Now you can receive notifications on your email of new comments on your favorite blog posts! 

Co.mments also tracks posts but calls them 'conversations'

co.mments helps you stay on top of the conversation by keeping you updated of new comments. Just bookmark, track and follow.  

I am hosting my third breakfast event.  "Should Brands be Broadcasters?" on Wednesday 18th June, 2008 at One Alfred Place 

I run these breakfasts in order to showcase new ideas and innovative marketing thinking.  Past speakers include Adriana Lukas on Social Media and Mark McGuinnes s on the Enneagram. 

Three speakers will give their unique points of view on this issue:

Charlie Robertson, Red Spider speaking on extending brand strategy to the online world

Sign up here to come along!

PS if anyone is willing to blog the gig for me, please get in touch! 

Working today with a new client we discussed some basic stuff to do with knowing how you are represented online (particularly in places where you do not control the content).

1. Set up a Google Alert to search weekly on a 'comprehensive' basis for your name.  Set this up in quotes so that it searches for your names concatenated.
2. Google your own name. 
3. Google obvious mis-spellings of your name [Rebekah Carrow]
4. Check out Zoom Info for your name and click the button to say 'this is me' and edit the information to reflect your current contact details.

That's for starters.  Go for it!