Creative Agency Secrets

Have just updated the earlier databases work to include some which came out of the comments (thanks Tomas and Chris).

Here is new summary document. Databases summary April 08

These are not my questions… but they are good ones.  I have added in my own in italics.

1. What are "desirable" customer experiences, and how can you create them? And continue creating them regularly?
2. How can marketers turn customers into brand evangelists? 
3. And is WOM the only method they use to promote your brand?
4. Which social technologies help marketers better understand customer feelings, affinity, and sentiment? 
5. And how to engage through social media without appearing trite and mee-too-ish.
6. What is customer-centric marketing planning, and how should companies practice it? 
7. What is the role of marketing agencies in planning and supporting customer engagement? 
8. And how do specialist agencies collaborate around the client’s marketing campaigns in an appropriate manner?
9. How can you measure involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence?
10. And do these 4 Is replace the 4 Ps of yesteryear?
11. How do B2B and B2C engagement tactics compare? And contrast.
12. How will marketing budgets change as a result of the focus on customer engagement?

I think the last question is spurious, customer engagement is far less of a force for change than media fragmentation…. but hey, that’s my view.

Any other things we should be planning for in 2008?

I recently met the InHouse team and they told me that they’d secured an interview with my old boss, Don Peppers for their InHouse Village site.

Well, Don is a key man in my life for having jumped onto cluetrain very early and added the dimension that explained the future of direct marketing was integrated…. and that it needed to be supported by a new principle treat different customers differently.
His methodology for CRM was 4-steps: Identify your customers, Differentiate them by value and need; Interact with them and learn; and Customise your offering to their needs.

in his interview (published in short chapters…. two are up right now), he has developed his theme somewhat.

Key quotes

You can’t un-Google yourself
If your dialogues with customers don’t result in spontaneous replies from the customers - they are not authentic [he fails to add that this is PR not dialogue and that you might examine whether your offering is hitting the ’spot’ with customer needs
The key brand trait today is TRUST.  A company should always act in the interest of its customers and not just in pursuit of profit. [nicely put - and a key part of WOM online]
When considering which brands your agency wants to work with, think carefully how many brands actually do hire an agency to work on their marketing.  Most don’t.  Target your approach.
When he was doing biz dev - Don kept a ring binder with one page of notes for each target brand he wanted to work with.  [A great low-tech means of keeping data to hand, up to date and focused.]

So far in the interview, it seems Don is just saying the same stuff about 1to1 marketing but realising that today’s digital world actually enables a lot of his past-10-years-theorising.  That’s fine.  What I want to know is what are leading companies actually DOING?  Now?

When you see what you think is a holding page on a website what do you think?

Take a look here

and here

Which looks like a holding page and which is just crass arrogance?  How gorgeous and famous do you need to be in this world before you don’t actually need a website at all?

Are they courageous, confident or blind?

A theme has been emerging from a couple of meetings I’ve had in the past days.  It’s a subject that appears dull but can be the strongest possible boost to growing your business.

Lead Management.
What is it?

The process by which prospective customers are attracted to your product or service, make themselves known to you and from which you move them towards a purchase.

Vital.  Consider it a chain of events that lead to a conclusion that in itself can become the start of a new chain.  Sometimes called "closed-loop" marketing.

Write down the chain as it happens in your company. 
Are there any breaks in the chain; anywhere that information can be ‘lost’, forgotten or drop down the cracks between one person and the next in the chain (technically called a hand-off).

I was talking to the Manager of a consulting firm who felt she couldn’t keep track of the pipeline and the current jobs the firm was handling.  They use ACT! as their sales tool. 

I made two suggestions
1 - keep a spreadsheet for two months of your prospects and clients fees and use the weekly team meeting to update it
[this is a near-manual work-round - but it should serve to keep a regular focus on prospects, invoicing and revenue streams.  When they’ve used it for a couple of months, I suggested creating a report from ACT! to subsitute and automate the process]
2 - tracking current client jobs.  Write a single page template summary for each job.  Keep them in a marked coloured folder on your desk, i.e. somewhere public, and hand-write updates on job stage, sub-contractors, payment terms, next action dates. Then each team member can access the file at any time and it’s readily at hand when you have a quick thought or something changes.
3 - Put a recurring diary note in to block out time each month to write your monthly report with a reminder to email the team 2 days earlier to send in their information for your report.

Oh, that was three suggestions…
I am out of the office now but will add the spreadsheet template later for anyone who wants to use it.

I was browsing a rowing blogger, Rowena Hullfire and saw she ordered from Potomac Rwing.  They used to be a great catalogue retailer in the US and I’ve never found them online before and so I followed the link to find this error message

Potomacrowing.com expired on 09/11/2007 and is pending renewal or deletion.

Yikes
crisis.

Never, ever let this happen to your site.  It is simple death to your business. The search engines stop indexing you and it could take months of hard work to recover.

Checklist to prevent web domain expiry happening

1 - Find out the expiry dates of all your domains
2 - keep a central record of all expiry dates
3 - write your own diary reminder one month before expiry
4 - put into electronic diary as annual / biannual reminder.
5 - Add a reminder alarm
6 - check the alarm is really on
7 - when the alarm goes off, do something that day.  Don’t put it off.
8 - if you work for a business that one day you might leave, put this information into the Bible / Handbook of your job so the next person to take over doesn’t screw up, or add it to the corporate calendar.

I got a timely reminder from Hotel Chocolat on Friday by email. 
If the Royal Mail strike affects your business - make sure your customers know:-
1.  what to expect from you during this period
2.  how you will overcome the situation
3.  that you value their continued custom.

Here’s what HC sent to me…. copy at will!

Stand and Deliver!

It takes a lot to stop us getting your chocolates to you
and to your gift recipients.  So, whilst the planned industrial action by the
Communications Workers Union is affecting Royal Mail deliveries, we’ve been busy
making alternative arrangements.

All deliveries during this time will be
upgraded and handled by a carrier unaffected by the industrial action – at no
extra cost.  That means you can rest assured your chocolates will arrive in mint
condition and on time!  Peace of mind at no extra cost.

So if there’s a
gift that needs delivering, you can order online at www.hotelchocolat.co.uk
and be sure it will arrive, come what may

Only Dick Turpin can
stop us now!

Kind regards

Angus Thirlwell
Co-founder
& Managing Director

These are things I enjoy and so do well.  I’ve done most of them many times and can give you references, if you need.

In no particular order….

1 - Mentoring and coaching anyone with business development responsibility or who has to collaborate with biz dev to do their job better and get results

2 - Moving the whole company to an Enterprise 2.0 operation.  This is a more open relationship with its customers and prospects though using web 2.0 techniques (for yourselves not clients) and creating the open culture internally that enables outsiders to recognise the ‘personality’ of the agency - bypassing traditional outbound communication methods

3 - Facilitating an away day for a client or your senior team

4 - Improving your new business methods and, particularly, pitching

5 - Running a training session on "New business for non-new biz people"

I have posted in the past on how to generate a pipeline of sales leads for your business. Here and here.

But reading Brian Carroll recently he added one with particular poignancy for me today.

The velocity of inquiry follow-up matters. Your
response time say’s more about you then you realize. If your
competition takes 24 hours to respond and it takes you days to respond,
you’re in big trouble. And don’t just send a canned response either.

I received a lead for Rowperfect by email…. I answered the enquiry the following day (which is later than I normally do but I had a great excuse - but it was an excuse not a reason).  And when I spoke to the chap, he’d bought elsewhere.  Darn and double darn. 

Dan is the Head of Business Development for FHD, a design agency and part of AMV/Omnicom.

He’s done a fabulous job taking the company slowly online as part of a suite of things he has implemented for his business development role.

1.  Salesforce.  Good move.  First thing he did when he joined.
2.  C level reporting line.  Great planning by FHD.  He reports to Adrian and Robert - MD and Creative Director.  As it should be.  Biz Dev is so important that you can’t afford to let it go below this level of radar.
3.  "e-presence".  His word.  Driving a new brand (launched the rebrand 11.06) with a brief to make it known as a design business with personality, improve FT listing of top 20 places to work and a fun place.  He has launched an internal blog (censored!!!) and a public ‘forum’, explicitly not a blog!.  They are using LInked in, Facebook and pay per click….newsletters still to come.

Good practice.  Copy what he’s done and you will be fine for starters if you are in Biz Dev for an agency.

We had some ideas for collaboration…. more to come on that.

And I got onto my soapbox about publishing creative work that clients don’t buy.  Whether it’s a pitch you lost or a design that isn’t chosen.  Why not use it to show off your creativity?

Every agency describes itself as creatively led or an ideas agency.  So show off what you have got.  Use creative commons licensing to get credit for the source.  Let others see how good you are en route to the end design not just "da darrr - here it is the new logo for xyz co". 

We nearly agreed…. on some points.

Here we are …. thanks Joanna and Alex for passing by with the camera!

Dan’s own blog What’s the Beef just for the private ‘angle’!

PS nice link-up with Alex Pearmain who commented on my rowing blog and found me online…. thought he’d introduce me to Dan, his boss, and found Dan already knew my work! Neat.  That’s how it’s supposed to work.