The most effective new business processes turn prospects into leads by educating those prospects on how your products and services can solve their specific problems.

But when creating a proactive new business program, many teams struggle to know where to begin. We always point to these three areas to start your plan of attack: Audience, Content and Execution.

Audience

The first and most important step you should take when deciding how to begin your proactive outreach to prospects is to determine who your audience is. You need to know who your target audience is so you ask the right questions – who, why and what – to help narrow who you are marketing to. You must clearly define who your “right to win” clients are. If your team is perfectly positioned to provide the best service possible to a prospect in your niche, that’s a right to win client, and they should be working with you.

After you create your right to win list, you can begin including additional targets you see as great fits, which are a slight reach from your perfect right to win group. Agencies will often limit themselves by “fishing in too small of a pond,” or creating lists of prospects that exclude too many winnable clients. Create a realistic and appropriately sized group of contacts to attack with your approach. A great way to start thinking about Audience is to ask the following questions:

• In what areas is the agency most profitable?
• Who are you talking to now?
• What kind of business do you walk away from?
• What brands should be clients?
• What areas are most interesting to the team? What is the team passionate about?

By asking these questions, you’ll be able to determine who your audience is in a very specific, lead-driven way.

Content

Content drives just about every aspect of what we do in our lives—professionally and personally. In new business, you need to provide content that your new, specifically targeted audience wants to consume and share online. When getting started with your content strategy, start slow and don’t overextend yourself.

We’ve found that when teams commit to too much, too soon, one of two things happens: a) they burn out quickly on the process and it becomes a chore creating unique, branded content or; b) they begin building too much around a single whitepaper/eBook. Long-form content can be beneficial to your content strategy, but be careful not to let it consume hours of labor or hinder your ability to pivot across multiple audience groups.

When deciding what content should live on your editorial calendar, ask yourself questions like:

• 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 your agency?
• What type of work is outside of your scope? (this will help you drive more qualified conversations)
• What business problems do you solve for the identified prospect categories?

Content plays a key role in advancing your new business strategy, and increasing your prospects both within your targeted audience and outside of it.

Execution

We all dream big about winning new business, but you can’t approach that dream in an ad hoc manner. You need to have a plan set in place that is consistently repeatable, with very defined goals, measurements and activities. Your plan should involve everyone in the new business process—from Sales and Marketing to Management. At Catapult New Business, our goal is to always set a process in place that can be seamlessly transferred when changes to the team take place. During the execution phase, these are important questions you should ask:

• Who from the in-house team will be fulfilling each role in the sales/marketing process?
• What technologies do we currently have in place?
• How do we want to approach new prospects?
• How have we approached prospects in the past? What has worked best?
• Who has typically been the most receptive to our messaging?

A critical part of execution is how you leverage the content you’ve created, and the process your sales and marketing team uses that content to drive 1-1 sales conversations. By using your content to engage more often with prospects, you’ll see more opportunities to win clients.

Need help identifying a strategic plan of attack for winning new business? Contact us to learn more about how Catapult New Business implements successful new business processes for agencies.

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)