Over the years we have seen tons of case studies used as calls to action with varying levels of effectiveness. There are many different kinds of mistakes agencies make when creating these. The top mistakes we often see are simple:

• The case study is too long
• The study only focuses on the solution

Who hasn’t been sent a case study that is a 10-page PDF on all the intricate pieces of a campaign? Next question: Who actually reads all 10 pages? My guess? None of us. Not at first anyway. That level of detail is great, if you have really interested me in taking a deep dive into your agency. But most agencies don’t take the time to develop the problem and results to effectively use their case study as an effective call to action. A case study is not a good intro piece.

Our solution to help make your agency’s case studies more effective as lead magnets is to break it into two completely separate pieces: a teaser and a deep dive.

Teaser case studies are most likely a short landing page that quickly sells the idea and value of the case study. It’s going to concentrate on the three main components of a case study, while highlighting two of them more heavily: problem and results. This is done in small bursts, a paragraph for each at max.

• Problem – Clients want to know that you understand their pain and what they’re going through. Be sure that the problem highlighted in your case study aligns carefully with that pain trigger in your marketing communications.
• Solution – You need to be able to talk about your proprietary solution while staying at a high enough level that you don’t lose their interest. Remember, at this point they care more about their problems and the results we will give them more solutions later.
• Results – You need your case study to show measurable results. Show the reader a shocking statistic. Something that shows what actually resulted from your project. Real numbers are more impactful than words.

The importance of this teaser is that your marketing CTA is driving people over to something that should be both compelling and quickly consumable. Most people are busy and cannot commit to 10 pages of a case study. But if we hit them with a teaser page that gives them compelling problems and results, we can then ask them to commit a larger amount of time to us and our solutions via a deep dive study at a later point.

Those that agree to commit time to your deep dive study are highly qualified, and more likely to engage in a real conversation following their online activities. That does not mean you don’t reach out to those that hit your teaser page. But you should focus on those deep dive prospects immediately.

Understand that case studies tend to be more focused on you and your agency. But our prospects are focused on themselves. Make your CTA all about your prospect, and the teaser study all about your prospect’s problems. Once they are truly engaged, we can tell them about us.

At the end of my last webinar, one of the overriding requests that I received from everyone was help around their positioning statement. Many times I see positioning statements on websites that are overly general, similar to their competitors, or just plain uninspiring. Our goal with any positioning is to achieve two things:

• Be unique
• Be a sales driver

I know, there’s that sales word that I like to throw around. The fact is that when someone first visits your site in their buying process, you want to make sure your positioning statements are always coming from a place that immediately lets them know what you all can do for them, in a very real way. “We produce results” is neither unique nor compelling, and it won’t help you make a sale.

Crafting something unique and compelling is a lot of work, but below are some questions to make your life a bit easier when you are first sitting down with a group (or by yourself) to craft that new positioning statement.

• Why does your agency exist? (less about what and how)
• What’s the one thing you do better than anyone else?
• What are the benefits of working with you?
• Let’s talk about what you don’t do
  • Consider us when…
  • Don’t consider us when…
• Why do you win? Why do you lose?
• Based on business challenges, where do you have the greatest opportunity?
• Is every piece of content you are producing pushing your unique selling proposition to a specific prospect type?
• Does your website properly convey exactly what you do better than any other agency?
• Is it clear to anyone who sees our content exactly who your “Right to Win” clients are?

Once you have an initial framework for that positioning statement, take a few minutes and look at your closest competitors’ websites. How similar are you to them in your positioning? Are you creating space between yourself and them with this positioning statement? Do they do a better or worse job of highlighting their uniqueness? Once you feel confident you have differentiated, test it on some folks who do not know your agency as intimately as you do. Ask people outside your agency bubble what they think about your positioning versus your closest competitors’ and see what emotions get stirred up in them.

This process is not normally a short one, and definitely not something to be taken lightly. Take the time to think, test and retest, because the content you build in the future will all hinge off this positioning

In today’s marketplace, social media should be an integral part of growing your agency. Of course that’s not news to you, but in order to be successful with it you need to practice patience and stay consistent.

We’ve spoken to many agencies about how they’ve used social to push their new business efforts forward and have learned a few things along the way. When it comes to social, some platforms work much better than others, LinkedIn and Twitter being the main two that businesses use. Here are a few strategies about platforms we believe give you the most bang for your buck in your push to grow new business.

LinkedIn Referrals

AgencySquared recommends that agencies craft a LinkedIn referral engine. This process entails consistent outreach and the suspension of reluctance when it comes to leveraging LinkedIn connections. Even if you may not know them personally. We like to call them “unknowns.” Who do we mean by unknowns? If you have 1,000 connections, the number of real connections—connections that you personally know—are probably less than 20 percent of that number.But all those other connections hold tremendous value. Yes, those 80% of unknown connections can drive serious new business your way.

Don’t be shy in asking for referrals from those connections, just do all of the work for them. Here’s what I mean:

• Ask specifically for the person you would like to be introduced to
• Craft the intro/referral message for your contact to send
• Ask for a specific date of referral
• Have something timely to offer so that the date of referral is more important.

Most of those “unknown” connections that you have will have no problem forwarding your message along, because (for the most part) we’re all trying to grow our networks and increase our sphere of influence. I always try to be of help to others when/if I can, and I find most people fit into this category as well.

This referral process will help you not only learn more about your network, it will also increase your potential prospect list. More prospects, more leads, more sales.

Twitter Business Opportunities  

Twitter is another great way to grow business opportunities. While LinkedIn is about connections, Twitter is all about conversations. It’s a perfect vehicle for quick conversations you can engage in and strike up during any event. Be sure to follow people in your space (who doesn’t love being followed?) as these will be quality users whose interests align with yours.

You can search for people who tweeted about a topic of interest and follow them. I highly suggest that you do this; any conference that is of interest to you–whether you’re at the conference or not– find out the conference hashtag, and begin following every user that uses it. Most times you’ll get a follow back, and I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve had at conferences from following someone and then them finding me in the crowd later. “Hey aren’t you the guy that just followed me?!” Boom – conversation started.

Your goal should always be looking to develop a targeted audience. A larger number of random followers may give you social media cred, but it does nothing for your new business goal. A Twitter following with a small core of highly targeted follows is twice as valuable as a large audience of random followers.

Participating in Twitter chats related to your industry is another way to prospect. Joining an ongoing conversation is a great way to develop a rapport with like-minded individuals and it is much easier to join a twitter conversation that is currently happening than jumping in mid conversation in person.

Timelines in both LinkedIn and Twitter are changing every minute, so be sure to set time aside to review new developments. I personally block off specific time on my calendar every day for Social Media prospecting. This forces me to send out at least one referral request each day and find a new twitter conversation to take part in.

Leveraging the power of social media for your business marketing can take time and energy, but in the end your efforts will be rewarded if you stay consistent. Not every platform makes sense for everyone, so do your homework, experiment, and don’t be afraid to leverage those “unknowns!”

You need email lists and you are not alone. Every day marketers struggle to figure out how to reach larger audiences for their content marketing campaigns. Without a robust database, your content marketing plans can take much longer to gather lead generating momentum. Since we all want more sales, that means generating more leads, let’s look at how successful agencies create larger databases.

There are a few ways marketers build databases:

• Buying lists: You can buy names and email addresses based on certain demographic information.
• Renting lists: You can identify a segment of prospects to email, but you don’t own the list. Without ownership, you’re unable to email them beyond the agreed upon rental period.
• Opt-in List: You’re given an email address by the prospect themselves, giving you permission to continue to send emails. These people may pick and choose certain content they want to see.

There can be drawbacks to purchasing prospect lists if you do not research carefully. Find out who the company is that you are buying from and how they go about sourcing their information. Understand that since nobody can sell you an “opt-in list,” the prospects you are buying are cold. Those cold contacts can be gold for your sales team. Just make sure there are quality, up to date decision makers within those brands you are hunting.

Opting in is important, and we want people to do it as much as possible. As long as you abide by all Can-Spam laws, there’s no reason that you should not be able to reach out to contacts on a purchased list who have not opted in yet. The issue we see a typical agency run into when trying to build a list from only opt-ins is that time is their enemy. It takes a long time to build these from scratch. How much time? Let’s do the math.

Most small to medium agencies we speak with average 50 or less unique visitors a day. Most of them are probably only converting 1-2% of those contacts into opt-ins regularly. If we were able to increase that to 4% conversion, we would still only have 500 Opt-ins at the end of year 1.

For an effective content marketing campaign, we’re looking for a contact goal of 3,000-5,000. If you are generating 500 opt-ins a year, you would be looking at taking 6 years to generate just the minimum amount of contacts! Not a lot of New Business Directors have 6 years to wait for quality prospect lists to develop. Our goal is to always kick-start that process of building opt-ins, by buying targeted lists.

Quality content is huge in driving up your traffic and conversion rates. But while your team is building up that content, you need to be supplementing contacts from somewhere. At AgencySquared, we use a sophisticated platform called Winmo. Winmo helps salespeople generate targeted prospect lists instantly. It uses search filters for a wide range of areas like media spend and geography. This enables sales organizations to prospect on a much larger scale. They can build to that target number of 3-5,000 targeted prospects much faster.

Buying lists can be an indispensable part of your marketing strategy. Especially if you’re building to that large-scale prospecting list. Agencies should of course do their own math to figure out what will work best for them, but we recommend looking at the numbers above. We think that the winning equation is: Buying + Building lists = more leads, faster.

Your website is an organic creature. That means it’s a living, breathing entity that demands fuel to stay in tip-top form. Alex Chris from Digital Marketing Pro says that “Updating is the core action of content marketing.”  Without content you can’t do much online. With good content, an agency can find a way to FINALLY stand out in our overcrowded marketplace.

Content is any information that conveys a certain point to the reader. It is quite possibly the most important element of your website. Content takes various forms—not always consisting of long form blog posts. It can also be whitepapers, case studies, videos or status updates. Regardless of what kinds of content you have on your site, you always need to be continually adding more content to your site.

The tricky part is determining how much content is enough. Is there a prerequisite amount you should be creating and putting up on a daily basis? Is there an amount that is considered too much?

As a general rule, we look for our agencies to be adding around 3,500 words per month. If you run just one blog post each week of the month, that means you need to write five short blogs at 700 words a piece.

So why 3,500? A few different reasons:

1. It’s an attainable number. Most of our agencies are busy producing for their clients. Internal marketing and blogging tends to get pushed to the side. Creating one post a week, at 700 words each, is something that can be spread across a team of people, and does not overextend one person. Having multiple writers keeps ideas fresh. It lessens the burden on individuals, and gives professional development opportunities to younger employees. Not every post has to be from the President!
2. SEO Ranking. Google loves fresh content. Google indexes frequently, so a site that updates 2-3 times a week is part of the Google annexing. This is helpful if your aim is to improve your SEO rank. The addition of continuous content also means more keywords. This increases the chances for you to grow your web traffic, and most importantly leads!
3. Consistent thought leadership content in the form of whitepapers or blogs gives your New Business Director built-in marketing materials to share with prospective clients before, during, or after phone calls. These pieces, while great for SEO, are fantastic calls to action for other marketing initiatives. That will drive new conversations for your New Business team.

With 3,500 being such an attainable number (5 blog posts a month), why do most fail to hit this? Why are there empty blogs across agencies all over the U.S.? Simple:  Most agencies lack a structured process around getting this content created. Our suggestion, create a small team to lead the initiative. This team can set non-negotiable due dates for when each blog is due. If everyone is clear on their responsibilities and the team’s goals, it becomes much more difficult to miss a due date. Nobody wants to be responsible for the team missing a goal.

Last note: All these words do not have to be in the form of short blog posts. Many agencies love creating whitepapers, which can be a fantastic lead generator on any website. My only word of caution – be careful of biting off more than you can chew. Remember the old adage: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Sometimes a whitepaper can be a big bite. It might choke your other content efforts if you do not have a consistent process in place before you start that project. The extra research, time and effort that goes into one can be worth it from a lead standpoint. It just needs to be carefully planned around other short form content as well.

The last thing any of our agencies want is to have an empty website. By adding 3,500 words each month, you are taking the time each month to sit down and educate your prospects on what your team believes. This will fundamentally change your conversations with prospects. You’ll go from you telling a prospect about your services, to having a conversation about their needs. But that is another blog post in and of itself (and I’m already over my 700 words)

Agencies might go about generating new business differently than large ad sales teams, but it doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of great sales techniques through marketing automation.

Any successful new business strategy starts with knowing who your target audience is. As an agency you’ve likely already homed in on your unique value proposition and are ready to start engaging with prospective clients.
A critical piece many agency new business professionals miss out on is making sure they have a broad enough target audience to sell and market to. We find that [twittee tweet=”Fuel your #marketing and #sales efforts with a targeted AND substantial audience.  via @AgencySquared” content=”the key to fueling your marketing and sales efforts is an effective, targeted AND substantial audience.” ]  

When working with our clients, we’re often asked, “How many prospect records do I need?” To get the most from your outreach, we recommend a minimum of 3,000 with the goal of having 5,000 that you can continuously engage with.
Those numbers might seem like a lot but keep in mind there are tools to help you build out your prospecting database. In fact, many of your agency peers are likely using one. According to the 2016 Mirren/RSW Mirren New Business Tools Report, 9% more agency executives are investing in list building tools (compared to 2014) to help grow their new business. Our clients typically use Winmo, however there are other resources like Hoovers, Data.com and LinkedIn to help you create hyper-targeted data sets.

The importance of audience segmentation.

As you continue to grow your prospecting audience, segmenting the data into relevant batches is very important. We often segment prospects into these three groups to help us prioritize outreach and customize content:

1) Right to Win
Right to Win clients are those that are a perfect fit for our solutions. We set parameters for what a perfect client is for our agency: what issues they have, where they are and what they specialize in. If they fit those criteria, then they HAVE to be working with us.

2) Great Fit
This will be your biggest group of prospects. They have a problem we can solve, but may fall outside our parameters on a few criteria here or there. Maybe they are a bit outside of our typical region, or they’re an industry we do not normally operate within. They still have a problem we can solve however, and that means we want to talk to them.

3) Stretch
This is may be the smallest group, as they are more of ‘passion projects’ from the team – or the ‘great white whales’ that would be incredible to land. They are probably not worth committing the majority of your new business time to chasing, but landing one could make a huge difference in morale or revenue
Keep in mind this is just one way to segment your data. Every agency has a different strategy, and how you go about slicing your sales intelligence might be very different. Some find that the easiest way to group prospects is simply by industry vertical, while others choose to base their groupings off of job titles. Taking the time to think through who you want to be working with, and more importantly, what your prospects care about, will help you determine just how your agency should be dividing your prospect target list.

Yes – broadening your audience might seem like a lot of extra work, but the payoff is well worth it. By getting your message in front of more prospects that have a need for your services, you’re more likely entice qualified conversations with the brands you want to do business with.
Go ahead, the odds are in your favor.

In today’s competitive business environment, turning prospects into leads requires a strategic and proactive approach. Educating potential customers on how your products or services can solve their problems is essential, but starting a sales content process can be a challenge for many teams. We recommend focusing on three key areas to get a sales enablement content strategy started: Audience, Content, and Execution.

Start with your audience in mind. 

The first step is to identify your target audience. To do so, you need to ask the right questions that enable you to define your “right to win” clients. These are the prospects that your team is best positioned to provide the best possible service. Once you have identified your right to win clients, you can expand your list to include additional targets that are slightly outside of your perfect right to win group. To create a realistic and appropriately sized group of contacts to approach, you should consider factors such as:

• In which areas does your agency generate the most profit?
• With whom are you currently communicating?
• What kind of business do you choose to walk away from?
• Which brands align with your agency and should be your clients?
• What areas are the most interesting to your team and align with their passions?

By asking these questions, you can determine who your audience is in a specific, lead-driven way.

Create sales content with intent. 

Content is a critical element of new business success. To advance your sales content strategy, you must provide content that your audience wants to consume and share online. When creating your sales enablement content strategy, it is crucial to start slow and avoid overextending yourself. To determine what content should live on your editorial calendar, consider questions such as:

• What is the purpose of your agency’s existence? (less about what and how)
• What is the one thing your agency does better than any other?
• What are the benefits of working with your agency?
• What type of work is beyond your agency’s scope? (this will help you drive more qualified conversations)
• What are the business problems that you solve for the identified prospect categories?

By creating sales content that is relevant to your audience’s needs, you can aid your prospects in determining why they should work with you over another partner. 

Make a sales content plan that is achievable. 

To achieve your new business goals, you must have a well-defined plan that is consistently repeatable and includes well-defined goals, measurements, and activities. Your plan should involve everyone in the new business process, from sales and marketing to management. During the execution phase, consider these questions:

• Which members of the in-house team will be fulfilling each role in the sales/marketing process?
• What technologies are currently in place?
• In what way do we want to approach new prospects?
• How have we approached prospects in the past, and what methods have worked best?
• Who has typically been the most receptive to our messaging?

A critical part of execution is leveraging the content you have created and the process your sales and marketing team uses to drive 1-1 sales conversations. By using your content to engage with prospects more often, you can increase your chances of winning clients.

To turn prospects into leads you must identify your target audience, create relevant sales enablement content, and have a well-defined plan in place. By focusing on these three key areas, you can support a proactive approach to new business and increase your chances of winning more business with your most sought-after clients.

In the digital world in which we now live, marketing automation is perhaps the most important way to both streamline your operations and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. According to HubSpot, the types of nurtured leads generated by marketing automation make 47% larger purchases than those who were not. More than that, a full 91% of marketers believe that their use of marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of ALL of their efforts according to Marketo.

Making the decision to move to marketing automation isn’t as easy as flipping a light switch, however. It will take a great deal of time, effort and preparation to build the foundation necessary for your marketing automation efforts to thrive.

Break Up That Sales Funnel

If marketing automation is one of the best ways to guide your leads from one end of the sales funnel to the other, it stands to reason that the first step towards preparing yourself for this shift involves defining all stages of your sales funnel. What shape does initial contact with your lead take? After how long do you begin to deepen your relationship, investigating suitability? What is your value proposal to continue to nurture your lead over time? What does your follow up look like? These are all important questions that you need to answer as early in the process as possible.

Getting to Know Your Target Audience

If you don’t truly understand the people you’re marketing to, how can you ever expect to give them what they want or even speak their language? Who are these people? What problem do they have in their lives that only you can solve? What specific features of the product or service that you’re offering are going to attract their interest the most? What might get in the way of a sale? What are they worried about? What other products and services do they like to spend money on?

The answers to all of these questions will not only help you craft more compelling marketing materials, they’ll help provide a true focus for your efforts to guarantee the highest level of effectiveness at all times.

Match the Right Content to the Right Stages

Once you’ve made a list of all the various types of content that will appeal to your target audience (including blog posts, reports, how-to manuals, whitepapers, case studies and more), AND you’ve spent time creating the type of high value content you know they’re looking for, the next thing to do is make sure you’re getting the right content into the hands of the right person at that oh-so-perfect moment.

To do this, you’ll need to identify a few key things. Which of the pieces of content you’ve created will be valuable enough to your target audience that they’ll be willing to exchange their content information for it? What content is more practical and actionable in nature and, as a result, will be ideal for helping to guide them farther down the sales funnel? Most importantly, which of this content do you have and which do you have to create from scratch?

Once you answer all of these questions as they relate to not only your product or service but the unique audience you’re trying to attract, you’ll find that you’re more than prepared for the benefits that marketing automation brings to the table.

Looking to make the shift to marketing automation? AgencySquared works alongside your team to answer all of the above, making sure that you’re prepared to optimize your efforts and see results. Get a complimentary consultation.

 

Are you not seeing the leads you need from your email marketing campaigns? You could be using email the wrong way. This powerful tool can produce results, but following best practices is key. Here are some of the top proven practices heading into 2016, and how they can help your business grow!

 1. Collect More Email Addresses

It’s time for easy math: The more email addresses you collect, the more leads you can obtain. As a marketer you should be generating fresh, new email contacts regularly. Your contacts’ email addresses may become stale over time as contacts move jobs, opt-out of your email campaigns or abandon old email addresses. As a result, there are many ways for companies to increase their email leads, simply by encouraging more customers to sign up for email messages, promoting a contest or sweepstakes online, creating newsletter-only deals, or offer a birthday club to give something away on their special day.

The most useful tool in accomplishing this is to develop an automatic CTA (call to action) which appears to all website visitors. This simple pop-up form needs to be easy to understand, quick to complete, and rewarding to use.  

2. Offer Value in Exchange for CTAs

We mentioned that a call to action should be “rewarding to use” and its important to understand the value of this tactic for both CTAs and the emails you send to your customer list. People don’t like to give away their email addresses in exchange for nothing, so offer regular rewards for viewing emails and collecting lead opportunities. A classic example is sending an email with a unique link to download a discount code for a product purchase. Without that email, the consumer doesn’t get the discount. This confirms early on the value of signing up and reading emails from your brand. It opens the door for more effective conversions down the road. Also, remember to clearly show the value offered in your email headlines!

 3. Don’t Go Too Hot – or Too Cold

How many emails do you send out to customers each week? Send out too many, and customers will block your emails or leave them to languish in the “promotion” section of the email client that no one ever visits. Send out too few, and consumers will trash your emails because they don’t even recognize them when they do show up. The middle ground is important to find here. Studies indicate that one email per week is around the best rate to avoid the pitfalls.

 4. Format for Mobile and Easy Consumption

If customers can’t read your email, they won’t. If they have to go to extra effort to read your email, they won’t. Due to more and more consumers accessing email via mobile devices, it’s vital that you optimize your messages, make them responsive for mobile devices, and make them very easy to read (avoid that dreaded newsletter format if you possibly can). Ensure that your calls to action appear early in the email, are large, invoke your logo colors, and whisk consumers away to better content.

5. Personalize and Automate

We know that these are both popular buzzwords, but they are also revolutionizing email campaigns. Personalization taps into customer data about recent purchases and viewed products to make customized recommendations and offer unique deals to past customers – results that guarantee a higher number of successful repeat sales. Automation helps save a lot of time and makes sure that customers get emails when they are supposed – right after signing up, after making purchases, when the company has important news, and so on.

Remember, the best email campaigns take advantage of the strengths you already have; When in doubt, consider what already engages your customers and wins their loyalty. With the right timing and format, those things will work through email channels, too! For any additional questions or a look at the latest ways email marketing can help your business, visit AgencySquared.com