Inbound: Being “Found” When Prospects are Looking
for a New Agency
Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency
That Was Then – Agency new business processes have largely been modeled on networking
with known prospects, pitching anything that came across the desk, and using the rolodex to
cold call any potential prospect that would listen. But substantial new business success rarely
comes with this non-strategic approach.
Phone
Social
Digital
This Is Now – Just like you tell your clients, control has passed to the customer.
And for agencies that means the brand marketer decides IF and WHEN they will
consider your agency as a potential partner.
Brand marketers are bombarded by marketing and business solution vendors daily.
The competitive set of who is approaching the brand marketer continues to
expand - traditional agencies, digital agencies, specialty agencies, data analytics
providers, media & tech companies, and even business consultancies are treading
on your turf.
Meanwhile, most agencies still push content that talks about the agency, the
awards won, the clients roster, their unique approach to business. You need to
ask…
Why should the prospect engage when they don’t have a clear view of who your
agency is and what you stand for?
Why should they accept your call and participate in a dialog with you?
The model for new business has changed
Why is the Agency Prospect so hard to reach?
The typical brand marketer ‘customer journey ‘ shows that by the time a prospect is ready to “try” a new agency,
they are deep into their decision making process:
The key to success is to get into the consideration set early, when the prospect is seeking information and open to
hearing new things (which is far ahead of the RFP). Timing has always been the $64M question. The good news is
that there are many opportunities to help prospective clients understand:
• Who your agency is
• What your agency stands for
• How your unique agency POV positively impacts the prospect’s business
The key is to provide this information in content vehicles that allow the prospect
to engage on their timetable. Once they have engaged they are ready for “lead”
conversion. This is Inbound Marketing.
Awareness Education Evaluation Trial
75 - 90% of Customer Time 10% Time
Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agencycy
Just 15% of CEO’s will work w/ a
vendor they don’t know *
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing brings Content Marketing to life … by optimally leveraging a digital platform to create
and distribute content for new business prospects. You can gather rich visitor/profile data, content consumed,
keyword strength, social media activity, and prospect intelligence. software tools allow you to monitor the
prospect’s engagement with the content to determine how far they are along the sales cycle (Customer Journey)
to warrant personal, outbound contact moving them from interest to trial.
Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency
Growth Strategy
Sales
Content
SEO
Social Media
Lead Nurturing
55% of CEO’s will work w/ a vendor they are
familiar with from online
content/events
The 6 Keys to Inbound Marketing
1. Growth Strategy – to focus the program on:
The highest value target verticals you need as clients
The business challenges they face
How your agency can help solve those challenges
The customer audiences your prospects care most about - Millennials? Tech Buyers?
2. Content Development:
Format your content in bite sized, multi-channel opportunities
Distribute via email, social media and on your web site
White Papers/eBook Newsletters Blog Webinars
3. SEO Optimization - audit your agency’s web site and social content to improve your agency’s rankings
on key search engines.
Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency
The 6 Keys to Inbound Marketing
4. Social Media – Make sure your agency appears where your prospect’s are looking for
information. Twitter, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn are business tools to monitor your prospect’s
interests and engage them about your POV on their challenges.
5. Lead Nurturing – Through Prospect Profiling identify when a prospect is “lead” ready for outbound sales
follow up. Only a small portion of your database will be “lead” ready via inbound alone. But once the right
engagement behaviors are identified these prospects become higher involvement opportunities.
6. ROI Reporting – To identify the value of your Inbound Marketing program, create reports that
outline which campaigns generated the most leads. The reports can also highlight the results of your
outbound programs (direct mail, PPC) and integrate w/ CRM systems to ensure all data is captured.
Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency
Leads from
Inbound have
an 8x
greater
chance of
conversion vs.
other leads
How Does Inbound Generate a Competitive Advantage?
The customer journey provides the blueprint for aligning the right tools to engage prospects at the right time.
Generating Awareness
The purpose of this stage is to engage as many potential high and medium value prospects as possible. Set them up
in your database and segment them based on criteria that you can address to move them through the sales cycle.
(Industry, role at company, pain-points). Provide content that demonstrates your agency’s knowledge about their
needs. Write blogs, send via email and social media.
Educating Prospects
Move the prospects further into the cycle by providing more knowledge about your agency with tighter content.
Create white papers, serve up case studies relevant to the industry, create landing pages with call to action forms.
Identify which prospects are opening and clicking on your content and/or visiting your web pages.
Awareness Education Evaluation Trial
Blog
Keywords
Social Media
Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency
Forms
Call To Action
Land Pages
How Does Inbound Generate a Competitive Advantage?
The customer journey provides the blueprint for aligning the right tools to engage prospects at the right time.
Encourage Evaluation
Set up prospect engagement scoring (Marketing Automation) so once prospects reach critical engagement points
(e.g. - 3 open emails, 1 click-through, 1 download), then put them into lead nurture. Follow them on social media as
an individual, send a custom email, make a series of custom phone calls, invite them to a webinar. If they are
showing the right behavior signals its time to get them into “trial” discussion.
Trial (RFP)
The purpose at this stage is to determine if there is a proposal opportunity in the short term (or long term). Set
up a qualifying lead phone call. Identify their business challenges and how your agency could address them.
Awareness Educate Evaluate Trial
Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency
Behavior Signals
Webinar
Events
Phone call
Conclusion: How your agency benefits from an Inbound Marketing Program
It allows you to create a systematic approach to reach your prospects throughout their customer journey.
It helps you evaluate which content and distribution platforms are most efficient at generating response.
It provides your agency the ability to generate awareness economically with a deep list of potential prospects.
You can evaluate a prospect’s level of interest to determine when they are ready to dialog with you and
potentially be open to working with your agency.
Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency
Agency Growth Planning Series Overview
The Agency Growth Planning Series outlines the key stages an agency
needs to consider in order to optimize their brand and accelerate their
new business growth. Other whitepapers in the series include:
Part 1: Positioning to Attract the Agency Game Changer – The
first step in accelerating your agency growth, is to identify the ideal
growth target and how the agency needs to position itself to be credible
in the prospect’s eyes as a real alternative that understands their
business challenges.
Part 2: Content Marketing through Intellectual Capital - The
next step in building a successful Agency Growth Plan is to ensure that
you have the right Intellectual Capital and content for credibility, thought
leadership, and successful marketing campaigns.
Part 3: The Power of Inbound Marketing – Provides the strategy
and platform to create content, distribute it and monitor prospect
engagement for lead generation and sales conversion.
Part 4: Targeting & Stakeholder Mapping – How to identify the
RIGHT target brands and contacts to grow your agency. Including how
to segment content for key stakeholders unique needs and channels.
To learn more about how Linkergy can accelerate your agency’s growth
contact us at 312 422-0255 or email Janet Vinci at [email protected].
Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency
About Linkergy
Strategic new business is critical to
the long term success of every
marketing agency. Understanding
how to create a sales pipeline of
engaged, high-value prospects
enables your agency to focus on
growing with the right kinds of
clients. Linkergy’s mission is to
create customized new business
programs to accelerate your growth.
Linkergy outsource programs are
built to provide as much or as little
focused new business support as
your agency needs. Services include:
Growth & Engagement Strategy,
Content & Intellectual Capital
Development, Inbound Marketing,
Outbound Lead Generation and Sales
Consulting/Training.