The expanding reach of the Internet is increasing competition for clients, making it difficult to find the right marketing mix to generate new business. Fortunately, using online tools to aggregate your marketing efforts can streamline your business development initiatives and boost your gross sales. In particular, comprehensive online marketing platforms tend to be the best tools for winning new business.
Online Marketing Platforms
If you’re having a hard time managing ad campaigns, lead generation campaigns and your marketing research objectives, then online marketing platforms can make a substantive difference in your life. You can perform all of these functions and more, simply by logging into a single platform that aggregates these services for you. There is no reason to log in and out of multiple applications to win new business, when a single platform makes the process easier.
In addition to making the process more efficient, these platforms also enhance the quality of your activities and the results you generate. You’re able to generate real-time analytics that can help you optimize the way you gather leads, and who you actually gather them from. Whether its higher sales conversions and sales, lower levels of bad debt and higher repeat business, online marketing plaforms can change the dynamics of your business.
Additional Resources
In addition to online marketing platforms, online marketplaces can help you generate new business without a lot of additional marketing costs. Online marketplaces help you reduce everything from your operating expenses to your cost of sales, because the marketplace maintenance is typically handled by a third-party service provider. You can advertise your services to clients all over the world and conduct transactions is a single currency, depending on the construction of the marketplace.
There are also organizations that specialize in content marketing and online marketing strategies that can help your advertising agency generate new business. The content you put out to the world has a high impact on your ability to generate and retain business, making it one of the most important marketing factors to master.
5 of the best online tools and resources for new business development include:
DailyVista
Winmo
Content Marketing Institute
Guru.com
Elance.com
Winning new business is a process that requires research and effective online marketing tools that help you leverage the power of the Internet to grow your company. Be sure to use online marketing platforms to optimize your marketing campaigns and advertising strategies.
With 71% of agency new business professionals saying it’s harder to break through to prospects, and traditional channels aren’t working like they used to, it’s more important than ever to align marketing with your sales outreach. A recent Webinar we hosted entitled, “How the Most Successful Agencies Market Themselves,” discussed what a highly successful ecosystem looks like and the tools needed to support it.
Agencies who nail this start generating sales-ready leads on a more consistent basis, and most importantly – work with the clients they actually want to do business with.
One of the biggest mistakes that a marketing agency can make is trying to be all things to all people. At first glance, casting a wide net seems logical. After all, isn’t it the best way to ensure that your message is seen by as many people as possible? It is, and that’s the problem. Here’s why: Most of those people would never have been interested in your offerings anyway, so your message is lost on them–and so are your efforts, time and money.
Instead, define a very specific target audience on which to focus your efforts. In doing so, you’ll get way more bang for your marketing buck and will set the stage for long-term growth, profitability and success.
Five Tips for Identifying the Ideal Vertical for Your Agency
With a clearly defined target audience, it will be much easier to know where, when and how to market your products and services. Keep these tips in mind to more easily define a target vertical on which to focus your marketing and branding efforts:
Get to Know Your Current Customers – Much of what you need to know can be found in your sales records. Who currently buys your products and services? What needs are they trying to fill by using them? What kinds of things do your current customers have in common? Consider things like age, interests, education level and the like. While you’re at it, closely examine your biggest customers. What traits do they share? This research should give you a great head-start in defining your ideal audience.
Scout Out the Competition – Take a look at your closest competitors. What do their customers look like? Who do they appear to be targeting with their marketing efforts? Don’t attempt to go after the same exact audience. Instead, look for niche markets that your competitors may be overlooking, as they could be your best opportunity.
Consider the Benefits of Your Products and Services – Painstakingly list each of the products and services that your agency provides and the benefits that they provide. Next, consider the problems that these products and services solve. Who typically experiences these problems? These are the folks who could benefit the most from your offerings.
Define Your Target Audience – Consider the kind of person who is most likely to buy your products and services. They should not only need to buy them but should be able to also. Jot down a list of the demographics that they share, including age, gender, income, education, marital status and occupation. Dig deeper by considering their shared interests, attitudes, values and other personality traits.
Assess & Grow Your Newly Defined Target Audience – Finally, make sure that marketing to the target audience that you’ve selected will help you achieve your objectives. Will these folks truly benefit from what your agency has to offer? Can they afford your offerings? Are they easily accessible? If so, which media or channels do they typically prefer? Do you understand the motivations behind the decisions that they make?
Finding the right vertical for your agency to primarily serve is a small but crucial part of achieving long-term new business growth. With a specifically defined audience, your sales and marketing efforts will go a lot farther.
You’ve written a great introduction email and have prepared an inspiring cold-call pitch, but how do you actually get in touch with and make contact with the prospect? Calling the company’s switchboard or filling out their website “contact us” form are not efficient or effective ways to connect with senior marketing decision-makers for new business for your agency.
All too often, companies require sales reps to try to track down their prospect’s contact information on their own. If the contact data is ever even found, it is often inaccurate and incomplete. This process eats up the seller’s time and limits their sales potential. But there’s a better way.
Top agencies subscribe to database services that provide accurate, direct contact information on prospects. They build targeted lists and supplement this data with their own due diligence. This process results in richer information that is relevant, current and provides insights that can be used in prospecting email and call messaging.
Below are five important steps to build a scalable, repeatable and efficient prospecting process. Following each step of these steps on a consistent basis will result in thorough and targeted prospect lists:
1. Get A Good Database Provider
There are number of database providers available online, such as Winmo, that offer vetted and current prospect contact information for ad agencies, marketing firms and creative agencies. These sophisticated database and intelligence services often provide much more than contact information. They also can offer company financial data, agency relationships and recent news articles to help you better identify your best prospects.
When selecting a database provider, it is important to find one that employs teams of researchers to validate and refresh the data on a regular basis, at least every 3-6 months. It’s also important that the company specializes in advertising and marketing agencies so the prospects align with your target audience.
2. Focus On A Vertical
As a consultant and sales director at Catapult New Business, I pull prospect data lists on behalf of agencies multiple times each week. I typically begin by selecting a target business vertical, such as insurance companies. By being narrowly focused, the outbound messaging can be similar across all companies within the vertical, leading to more efficiency in your outreach program. Top sellers will focus on 1-3 verticals per quarter, depending on the final size of the prospect lists.
3. Identify the Best-Fit Companies
Once the vertical is selected, the company list can be narrowed by such criteria as revenue, media spend and location. By targeting only the companies that fit your buyer persona, you’re able to laser-focus sales efforts to the best-suited companies. Although the database provider I use has extensive lists of companies, I also review top business rankings lists within that vertical to ensure that I have all relevant companies included on my list.
When researching each company to determine if it fits our buyer persona, I take notes on the challenges the company is facing. These insights are later converted into talking points for email and phone outreach. If I am unable to identify challenges that we can realistically solve, I believe I have no valid reason to reach out to the prospect and remove them from the company list.
4. Identify the Best-Fit Contacts
Once I have narrowed the list down to the top 10-20 companies, I use the database to find the most relevant contacts within the companies, based on job function and rank.
Who the right contacts are will vary depending on your agency’s services. For example, a social media agency surely will want to connect with a social media director. However a branding agency likely would not.
I like to focus on C-suite, VP and director-level marketing professionals, but depending on your agency, you may also target manager-level contacts. What’s important is that you’re only targeting decision-makers or influencers. I focus on finding about 10 contacts per company, depending on the size of the prospect company and your agency’s specialty.
At this point, I download the information from the database provider into an Excel or CSV file to upload to a CRM program such as Salesforce.
But the work is not over.
5. Uncover Even More Best-Fit Contacts
Unearthing information on LinkedIn is a powerful way to gain even more contacts. By reviewing the LinkedIn profile of each contact, you can confirm that the employee is still with the company and remains in the appropriate role.
LinkedIn is also useful for mining additional contacts in the company. By reviewing the “People Also Viewed” box on a contact’s LinkedIn profile, you may find additional relevant prospects you have not found previously.
During this process I also make notes of mutual contacts, past employers, links to presentations, schools attended or other points of connection that I will use in my outreach to that contact.
You will need the email address information for these contacts found outside of the database. You can solve this by looking at the email naming conventions of the other contacts in the company; 90 percent of the time the naming convention will hold for the missing prospects. If all else fails, there are a number of online tools available to help find alternative email suggestions.
Lastly I will scour Google reading financial statements, press releases and trade articles for mentions of other relevant contacts at the companies.
Key Takeaways
Your prospect data list is the most important part in agency new business outreach. If you do not have a relevant and accurate list of prospects and an efficient way to get this data, even the best messaging will fail. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it really fall? Using a database platform makes this scalable so business development reps can spend more time on outreach and less time trying to track down contact information. Following each step on a consistent basis will lay the critical foundation for an effective outreach program.
Author Bio
Christian Banach is an advertising agency new business consultant and sales director at Catapult New Business. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Prospecting is time-consuming and often messy – but also vital for young companies ready to develop strong customer bases. If you aren’t finding enough leads, it’s time to invest more heavily in high-quality prospecting. Here’s what you need to know.
1. Be Organic, But Also Focus on Data
Let’s unpack this tip a bit: Prospecting is about acquiring contact information and profile data for potential leads. Because it can be time-consuming and doesn’t actually lead to revenue until leads have been turned into customers, many new companies are tempted to cheat – to buy lists of customer contact information or use contact lists from other portions of the business. Avoid this temptation – prospect data needs to be organic, gathered in the wild from real sources. This is the only way to guarantee high-quality leads with the right contact information. At the same time, these organic prospects need to be as data rich as possible so that you can start forming accurate customer personas, predict the needs of your leads, and start putting together powerful sales strategies.
2. Establish Useful Conversions
Prospecting is not too early for conversion efforts: We’re talking about basic, early conversions designed to test the efficacy of your process and gather important data. Conversions like responses to emails, fill-out forms on your website, successful referrals, and similar actions should all be fueling your prospect list. Ideally, they should also give you enough information so that you can rank your prospects based on their profitability and chances of success. Conversions this early in the process also allow you to note which channels are the most effective in picking up prospects.
3. Use All Available Channels
Speaking of channels, how many are you using? You should tap into all channels possible for your industry and target audience: Social media, blogs, forums, email, trade shows, calls to past clients, buddies at the local pub, old friends now working for another business…cast a wide net when first building your customer base. Not only will this help you find more prospects, but it will also help you sharpen up your sales pitches and marketing content before you start dealing more directly with your leads.
4. Specialize in the Right People and Tools
When we say “specialize” we are talking about two important steps in the prospecting process. First, specialize in demographics that are indeed interested in what you are selling. Don’t waste your energy gathering prospect information for people that have no interest in your products (people who live in apartments don’t buy lawnmowers, etc.). Second, specialize on prospecting within your company. There are several reasons to avoid having your salespeople find prospects. A better solution is to assign someone temporarily or permanently to dig up prospects and do nothing else: Follow up by giving these people the right sales tools to maximize productivity and narrow down/rank prospects efficiently.
5. Stay in Communication and Predict Needs
If you have followed our other tips and have a roster of high-quality leads to pursue, don’t give up on them. Keep trying different approaches, offer different solutions, seek out new decision-makers, try for different meeting times, send more emails, and so on. Prospects that may seem dead on arrival today could be a new client tomorrow. One of the most important steps in turning prospects into successful leads is to correctly forecast their needs before anyone else (including the prospects themselves). Keep a finger on the pulse of your industry, watch trends, and start making predictions about what your target audience is going to need before anyone else is thinking about it.
Email marketing certainly still has a place in the world, especially for growing agencies looking to acquire new clients and increase client retention. Take a look at several ways email should be used in any marketing strategy.
Creating Customer Databases that Work
One of the most important steps for driving new business is to create and maintain a healthy database of prospects. Yes, there are quick and dirty ways to create prospect databases using lead lists and other things of that nature, but the reality is that those tactics don’t work. However, what does work is building your database off of real email addresses that real prospects provide.
It’s very cost-effective, easy to utilize, and provides some welcome hard data for businesses that may not know much about their customers yet.
Platform for Campaigns and Brand-Building
When it comes to campaigns and brand awareness, many businesses immediately start thinking about social media and blogging. But email is a speedy way to help increase customer participation and purchases in both areas. Always include email notifications or newsletters when launching a new campaign or announcing a new deal – many customers won’t notice otherwise, but a bold email subject line announcing the deal will draw attention. Likewise, more complex email content can also be used increase awareness and brand loyalty (try using or summarizing your more popular blog posts for this).
Building Buyer Personas
To take audience targeting to the next level, you need to know who needs your product or service and the best ways to reach those people. Using emails as login information is a great way to track potential clients, as well as consistently generate valuable data for marketing initiatives. Specifically, use customer habits gleaned from your email databases to create buyer personas, based on the ideal client you want to attract. Of course, this also requires that you tie email addresses to a CRM and marketing automation system.
Rewarding Loyalty
You can absolutely email coupons and discount codes to your customers to increase business and responses…but this should be done carefully. Email can be a useful platform for customer loyalty rewards, where such coupons and other benefits are sent to long-term or high-purchase customers as a thank you for their business…and an incentive to return.
Future Target Marketing
Finally, your agency should begin customized, personal email marketing as soon as possible. This is a great way to retain customers and use email in a way that few other channels can be used – to craft in-depth and personalized responses. After creating customer databases and building personas, this is absolutely the direction that companies should move to utilize email and win more conversions.
You’ve targeted your ideal prospect and written a personalized and compelling email – but to win new business from senior marketing decision makers you need the prospect to open and reply to your message.
The day and time your email is sent has a major impact on your success. Several studies confirm the best days and times to send emails, but these have primarily focused on B2C emails and have used only open rates to make their recommendations.
This 2014 Yesware study of 500,000 emails, on the other hand, explicitly measures B2B sales emails and bases day and time recommendations on response rates.
Best Day to Send a Cold Email
Many people believe that Mondays are better days to send sales emails since prospects are back in the office. Fridays are believed to be poor, since many decision makers are thought to be on the golf course or at their beach house.
Yesware’s research says otherwise and found replies to be equal across each weekday. This is great news for sales reps that have been cramming their outreach into four weekdays.
As a consultant and sales director at Catapult New Business, I set up sales cadences with six email touch points. The first four messages and the sixth (and final message) are sent on weekdays.
But, I experiment with the fifth message and send it on a weekend. Absurd? This same Yesware study found that weekend emails are 10% more likely to be opened over weekday emails, likely because 80% fewer marketing emails are sent on weekends.
Best Time of Day to Send a Cold Email
Does time of day matter when sending out cold sales emails? Absolutely. The aforementioned Yesware study found that the best times to send cold emails were:
• early mornings (between 6 and 7 a.m.)
• evenings (around 8 p.m.)
Reply rates during these times were around 45%.
I have a two-pronged outreach approach that includes both emails and phone calls. Many people wait to check their voicemails until right before heading home from the office. So I send the voicemail follow up email around 8 p.m., giving the prospect more time to check and hear the voice message I left. When it comes to introduction emails, (ones not following up a voicemail) I send in the early morning.
Keep in mind that each situation is different; if you’re not receiving responses from morning and evening emails, try after-lunch and even later evening emails. Because many senior decision makers tend to work very early or very late, it’s not uncommon for them to respond outside of “regular” hours.
Useful Tools for Scheduling Emails
Good news: Sending emails at specific times does not mean getting up super early or staying up late. Today’s sales development platforms and tools allow you to schedule your emails in advance.
SalesLoft is an excellent example of a program that gives you the ability to set up a multi-touch sales cadence and schedule your emails to go out at specifically designated times.
The added benefit of using such a platform is that you can send your emails at optimal times based on your prospect’s time zone.
Measuring Your Success
An email campaign, like any other campaign, demands careful measurement of results to determine what’s working and what’s not. When looking at results, however, do so in terms of your reply rate—not the number of people whom simply open your emails.
Unfortunately, open rates can be quite misleading. Your tracking tool might record an open when your prospect hasn’t actually opened the message and vice versa.
A better way to measure your outreach success is to use your replies as the metric. To calculate, take the total number of positive replies and divide by the total number of messages sent. Keep in mind; a 50% open rate with a 1% reply rate will lead to fewer opportunities than a 5% open rate with a 10% reply rate.
Key Takeaways
As you can see, there’s a lot to keep in mind when it comes to writing a sales email and deciding when to send it for the best chances of receiving a response. But you can increase your chances for success by:
• Experimenting with “off hour” weekday and weekend emails
• Using tools like SalesLoft to set up a sales cadence and schedule your emails; and
• Measuring success by tracking replies – not opens
These three tactics will help determine areas for improvement and change your sales email strategy as needed. After all, no two prospects are going to be exactly the same.
Author Bio
Christian Banach is an advertising agency new business consultant and sales director at Catapult New Business. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Hunting for scalable email marketing solutions for your agency can be a daunting task, especially when you have limited time and resources to work with. Fortunately, there are a number of budget-friendly and free tools that can effectively solve your agency’s business development problems right now.
If you have been struggling to find the right tool for your team, here are our recommendations on the best free and low cost email marketing tools for growing agencies.
Cyfe
In the interest of efficiency, check out Cyfe to track data and analytics from various sources. The Forever Free Plan can solve many of your issues.
Cyte is a convenient all-in-one business dashboard solution that gives you the ability to bring your website and/or blog analytics, SEO metrics, and social media analytics, into one shared and easy-to-read dashboard. It can help you analyze data covering year-to-date revenue from Salesforce, Google Analytics website visitor locations, keyword rankings and funnel paths, Twitter tweets, and email marketing analytics from MailChimp. We know you are interested in email marketing, but you get all the other information as well. Pretty cool!
MailChimp
If you have less than 2,000 email contacts, you should explore MailChimp’s Forever Free Plan. The plan doesn’t expire, and you can send up to 12,000 emails a month using the majority of their tools.
VerticalResponse
VerticalResponse is a great tool because it enables you to send up to 4,000 emails a month, create unlimited sign up forms, a connection to one Facebook and one Twitter account, and test out their auto-responder tool for free.
Thunderbird From Mozilla
Thunderbird is a dynamic free application developed by Mozilla, and it may be just what you need. This email application is easy to set up, easy to customize, and it’s loaded with fantastic features.
It combines privacy, speed, and the very latest technology. Thunderbird also includes many innovative extra features including mail redirect.
99design
There is a new email design category from 99design. It’s a perfect source whether you’re running a SMB or a larger firm. Remember several years ago when the buzz was that email was going to disappear? Well, not happening.
With 99design, the demand for services and free templates is growing. They also offer free design consultation.
When you hear “automation,” chances are you’re thinking fast, robotic, and assembly line. While there is truth to these perceptions, email marketing automation requires a knowledgeable marketer to create a strategy, manage the process, and then analyze the results to inform on next steps.
If you’re unsure about using email marketing for your agency, let’s put to rest some common misconceptions.
1. Email Marketing is a Passing Fad
Talk about a huge misconception. According to a 2015 Salesforce analytics study reported on Forbes, email marketing is the top source for data used by high performance enterprises. Then consider the number of active email accounts is growing: there are over 4.35 billion in use now, which is predicted to reach 5.59 billion active accounts by 2019.
2. Automation Means Set It and Forget It
Without human intelligence, all of that data your email automation software collected is as useful as 10,000 lbs. of cotton puffs at a building construction site. Software cannot create marketing plans or content. It compiles lists of your leads, tracks email delivery and engagement rates, and collects email performance data. You need to put in the intellectual and creative work; interpret the data to find insights that inform future campaigns and other marketing tactics.
3. Automation Ensures Email Deliverability
Between sophisticated spam filters and prioritized inbox features, it’s easy for your marketing email to go unread, possibly undelivered. Best practices play a role here in determining which segment of your audience will receive an email and the clarity of the message to inspire action.
4. Email Marketing Automation Is Effortless
Content is significant in email marketing, and you need to create a lot of it following a strategy and established goals. Each email campaign must be unique and should be personalized. Target your buyer personas using list segmentation, and speak their languages while addressing their needs. Then there is the follow through when you ask the recipient to click on the CTA (call to action). The work extends far beyond the email to fulfill the offer.
5. Automated Emails Are Cold and Impersonal
Email automation software is designed to integrate with your CRM enabling you to categorize your audience or leads based on interest levels and other segments. From there, the message and CTA are geared toward the targeted audience with personalized touches, including addressing the recipient by first name.
Now that these common misconceptions have been cleared, it’s time for you to put email marketing automation to work and win more business for your agency.
It goes without saying, but conferences and tradeshows are a big deal in the marketing and advertising world. These events present a unique opportunity for senior-level marketers to learn from industry leaders, and at the same time, network with a large pool of top prospects to generate new business leads.
However, every year there are more and more conferences to choose from and it can be a daunting task to try and figure out which ones present the best opportunity for business growth and leadership training.
To save you some time and help you win more new business in 2016, here is our list of the 11 best marketing and advertising conferences to attend this year.
A more intimate companion to the Masters of Marketing, ANA Brand Masters is an event that brings together CMOs and marketing thought leaders. These top marketers come together and share actionable tips on how to navigate customer insights, data analytics and technology to engage clients and prospects, and grow their businesses.
3. Intelligent Content Conference
When: March 7-9
Where: Las Vegas, NV
If your agency specializes in content marketing then this is a must attend conference in 2016. Speakers include Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute, as well as Jeffrey Tambor, Scott Brinker, Robert Rose and more!
4. Social Media Marketing World
When: April 17-19
Where: San Diego, CA
With an estimated 3,000 marketers attending yearly, Social Media Marketing World is the world’s largest social media marketing conference. By attending you get the chance to network with industry leaders and top prospects on the brand and agency side. Definitely one you don’t want to miss!
5. Mirren Live New York
When: May 2016
Where: New York City
Every year, top agency marketers and CEOs from 400 different agencies gather in New York City to discuss innovative new business strategies and techniques. This conferences showcases over 50 speakers and includes more than 35 sessions.
Held at the luxurious Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, DIGIMARCON WEST is known for showcasing the most thought-provoking and innovative digital marketers in the industry. The speakers provide attendees with insight on cutting-edge strategies, the latest technology and best practices for content, UX, mobile marketing, social media, search marketing, marketing automation, analytics and more.
7. Content Marketing World
When: Sept. 6-9
Where: Cleveland, Ohio
Every year the best and brightest flock to Cleveland to attend the now infamous Content Marketing World conference. The event showcases more than 80 sessions with top content marketers. In 2015, the line up of speakers included big names like Nick Offerman, Jay Baer and David Beebe, the VP of Global Creative & Content Marketing for Marriott International. This is an unbeatable networking opportunity and a rare chance to get actionable tips from the very best on how to maximize results for clients’ content marketing strategies.
8. Digital Strategy Innovation Summit
When: Sept. 14-15
Where: Sydney, Australia
If you have the budget and are looking for a conference with a little adventure, the Digital Strategy Innovation Summit in Sydney is a fantastic choice. This internationally renowned conference brings together the most innovative thought leaders in the industry for two days of inspirational discussions. This summit also presents a rare opportunity to network with top prospects from around the world for agencies targeting international audiences.
No surprise here, but HubSpot’s INBOUND conference has quickly become the number one event of the year for most senior-level marketers. And with a line up of speakers that includes the likes of Seth Godin, Aziz Ansari, Chelsea Clinton, Marc Maron and Jonah Peretti, how could it not? Every year, thousands of top advertisers and marketers come together and have a great time. If you only attend one event next year, this is the best choice you could make.
10. Internet Summit
When: Nov. 16-17
Where: Raleigh, NC
The Internet Summit presents a rare opportunity to rub shoulders with industry leaders from every area of digital advertising and marketing. For 2015, the star-studded line up of speakers included Russell Simmons, Rand Fishkin, Chris Brogan, Melanie Deziel and Tina Moffett — and that’s just a few of the unbelievable sessions attendees can look forward to. As one of the few conferences priced below $500 right now, this is one of the top three events to mark on your calendar next year.
11. Digital Summit
When: Varies by City
Where: Phoenix, AZ | Charlotte, NC | Atlanta, GA | Denver, CO
Digital Summit is a two-day conference held throughout the year in different cities. Thousands of top digital marketers come together and present innovative strategies, new technology and discuss trends emerging in the marketplace. According to Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, “this is where people get inspiration. Everything going on here is so important.”
