The Marketing Agency Blueprint Part 17

I hope that the laws, which are featured in the following list, provide some sort of motivation or guidance to agency professionals who are looking to differentiate themselves, become leaders, and build loyal clients.

Deliver results: Tasks, milestones, and activity reports are a means to an end. Our job is to deliver results. Chapter 8 is dedicated to this Marketing Consultant Law.

Pay attention to details: Maintain a vigilant focus on details in all communications and projects. Never make mistakes that are due to lack of focus or effort. Always ask yourself, "Is this the best I can do?"

Be a proactive communicator: Do not ever leave your clients or peers wondering. Antic.i.p.ate their information needs and maintain a high level of communication at all times.

Challenge yourself to be great: Always challenge yourself and those around you to improve. There is no limit to what you can achieve in business and in life.

Bring solutions: "I don't know" is not an acceptable answer. Your clients and your peers rely on you for solutions. Use your experience and the endless resources available to you to find answers.

Maintain a career/life balance: Your career affords you the opportunity to live a full and rewarding life, but do not let it consume you. Maintain balance among work, wellness, relations.h.i.+ps, community involvement, professional a.s.sociations, friends.h.i.+ps, hobbies, and interests.

Grow your accounts: The life-blood of every consultant is the client base. It is your job to retain and grow your accounts by maintaining an in-depth knowledge of your clients and their industries, building relations.h.i.+ps, delivering results, and keeping a pulse on opportunities.

Be creative: Show imagination in your strategic thinking, and bring creativity to every project.

Be an independent thinker and risk taker: Do not get stuck in the rut of conformity. Look beyond traditional wisdom and conventional solutions. Be willing to take calculated risks and make mistakes.

Strive for excellence: Set high performance standards, and always strive toward personal and professional goals.

Think strategically: Challenge yourself to see the big picture. Always be a.n.a.lyzing-perceptions, audiences, objectives, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Find connections in seemingly unrelated news and trends.

Hunger for knowledge: Do not ever stop learning. Consume the wealth of information that is all around you, and share your knowledge for the betterment of your clients and peers.

Stay in the moment: You will see and do things in your career others can only dream of. There will be highs and lows, victories and defeats. Cherish those moments, but do not dwell on them. Your job is to stay in the moment, and appreciate it for what it is.

Have fun: Positive energy is contagious. Bring enthusiasm and pa.s.sion to your work every day.

Chapter Highlights.

Loyal clients lead to higher retention rates, greater profit margins, more predictable cash flow, and stronger referrals.

From day one of their training, agency professionals must understand the importance of each client and the financial impact retention has on sustainability.

The greatest value you can bring to clients is staffing their account teams with A players.

Be proactive in creating and nurturing connections now for you and your clients. Do not go looking for new contacts when you have something to pitch or sell.

Agency systems are designed to increase efficiency and productivity, encourage creativity, accelerate innovation, and push professionals to realize and embrace their potential-all of which produce higher performance levels and more satisfied and loyal clients.

Time-tracking, project-management, and CRM solutions play major roles in building effective systems that continually improve client services and increase loyalty.

Agency management, as it relates to client loyalty, comes down two things: intelligence and action.

Although agencies need to make every client feel valued, the reality is that some accounts are far more important to the stability and success of your agency, and they need to be treated differently.

Agencies should be willing to invest nonbillable account-development time in the core clients. Although this can lead to below-average revenue-efficiency ratings in the short term, the lifetime-value potential dictates that you take a long-term approach to their development.

Build your agency around clients with strong financial health and a history of on-time payments.

The most effective and rewarding partners.h.i.+ps have shared values and complementary cultures.

The highest potential accounts have growth opportunities beyond the standard engagement.

Case studies are rarely made of conservative companies. Clients have to be willing to take risks, try new strategies, and give your agency some creative freedom.

Chapter 8.

Deliver Results An agency's value is measured in outcomes, not outputs.

Become Measurement Geeks

Marketing executives-your clients-are drowning in data. They have access to powerful tools that produce endless streams of information about prospects and customers. However, data without a.n.a.lysis is simply noise.

Marketing agencies from every discipline-advertising, PR, social, SEO, content, and web-have the opportunity to evolve, and play an integral role in bringing structure and meaning to the numbers. Your professionals can and should be extracting insight from the wealth of information available to businesses.

Leading marketing agencies turn information into intelligence, and intelligence into action. They build campaigns that consistently produce measurable outcomes, including inbound links, website traffic, leads, and sales. Hybrid agencies must s.h.i.+ft away from arbitrary metrics, such as media impressions, reach, advertising equivalency, and PR value, and become measurement geeks who are obsessed with data-driven services.

Learn to Love Data Elite agency professionals, the A players, have an insatiable desire for data. They are constantly seeking bits of information-click rates, downloads, referring traffic, leads, conversions, search rankings, sales-from which they can derive knowledge. They take a scientific approach to marketing, and develop processes to a.n.a.lyze data for insight that can increase efficiency and maximize ROI for clients.

Integrate Measurement Tools You have to be a tech geek before you can become a measurement geek. Hybrid agencies are immersed in technology and continually testing and integrating the latest advances in monitoring and measurement. Use change velocity a.s.sessments, as discussed in Chapter 7, to keep your firm at the forefront of innovation.

From a measurement perspective, look for solutions that help you discover and interpret the metrics that matter most to your clients. For example, if your agency is evolving to meet the demand for digital services, you need platforms that can deliver online data, such as search rankings, blog a.n.a.lytics, website traffic sources, inbound links, shares, clicks, social reach, leads, and conversion rates.

Train a.n.a.lysts Turn your hybrid professionals into a.n.a.lysts. Teach them to make decisions based on logic and reason. Show them how to gain insight from information and how to use that insight to educate clients, build consensus, and drive action.

One of my favorite marketing-book lines of all time comes from Sergio Zyman in The End of Marketing as We Know It: "You've got to look everywhere and learn everywhere, because everything is connected."1 Develop professionals who see the big picture and have the ability to make connections that result in actionable intelligence.

Practice on Your Agency Learn on your time, not your clients'. If measurement and data a.n.a.lysis are new to your agency, experiment on yourself first. Like we talked about in the Inbound Marketing GamePlan, start with the basics: Install website a.n.a.lytics to enable real-time tracking of traffic, referrers, page views, and keywords.

Build unique landing pages that enable you to track views and conversion rates for content downloads, event registrations, contact requests, and other calls to action.

Track marketing events and milestones, and monitor how they correlate to spikes in website traffic, inbound links, leads, and sales.

a.s.sign a team member to monitor website a.n.a.lytics and social-media activity daily.

Once you have proven that you understand measurement and a.n.a.lysis, then look for opportunities to build it into your services.

Tie to Services Every campaign should start with performance benchmarks-current lead volume, inbound links, website traffic, content downloads, blog subscribers, social media reach-and clearly defined success factors for how the client will measure your value and their ROI.

Challenge your agency to move beyond the arbitrary measurements of success used by traditional marketing firms, and push the conversation toward more meaningful outcomes that can be tracked in real time and directly connected to sales.

Dig into the Data Anyone can pull charts and numbers and present the client observations and a.s.sumptions. Your agency has to go further. You have to find cause-and-effect relations.h.i.+ps, not just correlations. You have to turn noise into insights, and find the answers to difficult questions.

Why are e-mail click-through rates so low?

Why has website traffic reached a plateau?

Why are compet.i.tors outperforming your client on search engines for priority keywords?

Why are pages per visit dropping on the website?

Why does landing page A have a 20 percent higher conversion rate than landing page B?

What is the best day and time to send an e-mail newsletter?

What impact is blogging having on your client's business?

The answers are in the data. You just have to know where to look and how to make the connections that will produce results for your clients.

Every Agency Pro Should Take Google AdWords Training Professionals do not become a.n.a.lysts overnight. Agencies have to provide the knowledge and training to develop and hone these skills. A great starting point is the Google AdWords Certification Program.

According to Google, "Professionals looking to update and demonstrate search skills to employers can study and certify to become individually qualified in Google AdWords. To gain qualification, exam takers must pa.s.s both the Advertising Fundamentals exam and one advanced-level exam."2 I feel so strongly in its value that we require all PR 20/20 consultants to take and pa.s.s the Fundamentals exam, despite the heavy time commitment involved. The AdWords Learning Center contains 21 lessons for the Advertising Fundamentals exam alone, totaling more than 400 pages of reading.

The exam tests your knowledge of Google AdWords tools, account management, a.n.a.lytics, and ad-optimization techniques. Although it focuses particularly on online advertising, it is an invaluable exercise for all marketing agency professionals. The exam fosters a.n.a.lytical thinking, refines budgeting skills, and expands knowledge of how search engines work.

Encourages a.n.a.lytical Thinking Being able to demonstrate your success through tangible factors, such as search engine rankings, website traffic, inbound links, leads, and sales, is essential in today's business environment. The Google AdWords exam forces you to think a.n.a.lytically, translate data into meaningful measurements, and adjust strategies based on results. All these skills are vital for marketing-agency professionals looking to demonstrate their value to clients and to manage successful campaigns.

Refines Budgeting Skills An organization's ROI using Google AdWords does not necessarily relate to how much the organization spends; it is determined by how well their budget is used through keyword and bid selections, targeting, and optimization. These factors usually need to be tweaked, often based on past performance, in order to get the most benefit for your money.

This same logic can be applied to the financial aspects of managing any type of campaign. Hybrid professionals need to be able to work within a client's budget-choosing those activities that will have the strongest ROI-while simultaneously being able to determine when a larger budget is needed to achieve desired objectives. They also need to continuously review their current campaigns and budget allocations to determine if their existing financial distribution is optimal or if funds should be reallocated to better-performing activities.

Provides a General Understanding of Search Engines In Chapter 2, we focused on content marketing as the greatest opportunity for agency growth. However, to optimize content for online audiences, professionals need a sound understanding of search engines and how they function.

The AdWords training program offers a general overview of Google paid and organic search. It also provides an in-depth lesson on keyword selection. Although most information has a paid-search focus, the knowledge derived can be applied to organic search as well. Having basic knowledge of how the search engines work can significantly impact the success of your client's online content.

Google a.n.a.lytics Training Google also offers a free online course that provides comprehensive training in Google a.n.a.lytics implementation and data a.n.a.lysis, and is a great way to train your team. Completing the course prepares professionals to take the Google a.n.a.lytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test. The fee for taking the Google a.n.a.lytics IQ test is $50. Like the AdWords training, this is required learning for PR 20/20 professionals.3

Use a.n.a.lytics to Adapt

The most advanced hybrid agencies win with speed and agility. They draw on their experience to develop theories and strategies, and then use the science of a.n.a.lysis to adapt to changing business environments and evolve client campaigns in real time. They continually experiment, measure, a.n.a.lyze, and adjust.

Once your agency has the right tools and talent in place, concentrate on making a.n.a.lytics a part of your professionals' daily routines. In order to foster deeper thinking among your team, a.n.a.lytics needs to become second nature, rather than an afterthought. Following are some tips to get started: Review Google a.n.a.lytics reports as part of your account teams' daily campaign management duties.

Communicate insights to clients in real time.

Build data a.n.a.lysis into daily, weekly, and monthly client reports.

Talk about client a.n.a.lytics as part of your agency's daily meetings.

Conduct internal a.n.a.lytics training sessions with senior consultants during which they demonstrate to a.s.sociates how they process and interpret data.

a.s.sign exercises to challenge and develop a.s.sociates' a.n.a.lytical skills.

Share insights throughout the day on Yammer or through whatever internal social network your agency uses.

Services, Measurement, and Selective Consumption As consumers tune out traditional, interruption-based marketing methods and choose when and where to interact with brands, agencies gain the ability to connect actions to outcomes. Let's look at selective consumption at work to better understand its power and the role of real-time a.n.a.lytics.

a.s.sume the client, a B2B software company, wants to generate 100 leads next month. The company has solid brand awareness, but struggles to gain market share from the larger, more established compet.i.tors. Historically, it has invested heavily in industry publications, spending north of $10,000 per month on advertis.e.m.e.nts. Although the ads are creatively strong and are believed to have been influential in building brand awareness, there is no direct way to measure their impact on the client's success. This is what I would call the publish-and-pray approach, also known as outbound or interruption-based marketing. We will consider this option A.

Now your agency comes along with a few new ideas. You recognize that your client's leaders are some of the brightest minds in the industry, but they have been hidden away behind the bland corporate messaging that permeates their website and marketing campaigns. You see an opportunity to differentiate the client by creating value, and parlaying its personal brands into thought-leaders.h.i.+p initiatives.

For the same $10,000 per month, you propose option B, which we will call the inbound-marketing approach: Publish a 3,000-word ebook on a custom-built landing page. Announce the ebook on the company blog, and consider doing a few guest blog posts on partner sites to promote it as well. Although there is no registration (lead form) required, there is a call to action to sign up for a webinar, featuring the client's affable lead engineer. The ebook and webinar are promoted through the client's database of 10,000 contacts, and they are also distributed through a media partner's database of 25,000 subscribers.

As a marketer, as much as I like to see nice full-page, full-color print ads, I am going to put my money on option B. Why? Because my experience tells me it has a far better chance of producing 100 leads. More important, even if it does not, I can measure every single element of the program-downloads, webinar registrations, landing page conversions, e-mail click-through rates, referring sources, blog-page views, new blog subscribers, social sharing, and inbound links. I will be able to monitor the campaign's performance in real time, and have actionable data to better spend my $10,000 next month.

The takeaway: In order to use a.n.a.lytics and constantly adapt to bring greater value to clients, your services must be measurable.

Real-Time Marketing and Monthly Scorecards Change velocity and the availability of real-time data have created new demands and opportunities for agencies. Tech-savvy firms with fully integrated digital services and top-grade talent are more nimble in the planning and execution of client campaigns. They are capable of quickly adapting strategies and tactics based on insights into consumer behavior, and they are obsessed with improving performance and ROI. a.n.a.lytics is the key to success with this agile approach to marketing.

At PR 20/20, we start all long-term client engagements with a customized Inbound Marketing GamePlan, as detailed in Chapter 5. Knowing how quickly things change, our general philosophy is, "less time planning, more time doing." The goal of the GamePlan is to set clear benchmarks and objectives, arrive at a consensus for a 12-month approach, and approve services for first-quarter activities. We plan tactically in quarters, and adapt daily based on campaign performance, changing market factors, and the client's business goals and priorities.

During the initial GamePlan development process, which usually lasts 30 days, we go through a relatively traditional discovery period. The discovery phase uses internal information and secondary online research to a.s.sess the following: organizational goals, buyer personas, market segments, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) a.n.a.lysis, compet.i.tors, brand positioning, website performance, products/services, pricing, historical marketing strategies, sales systems, marketing software, budgets, and timelines. This is also the time in which we evaluate existing a.n.a.lytics tools and determine the need for any additional monitoring and measurement support.

Our focus is on having the right solutions in place to gather and interpret data. We build monitoring and reporting into every client's daily campaign management, and then we rely on monthly scorecards for a full a.n.a.lysis and action plan. Here is a look at the monthly scorecard structure: Section 1-Snapshot: The snapshot provides a dashboard overview of campaign performance, including results from all major activities completed during the previous month. The snapshot functions as an executive summary with key findings in the areas of website, social media, search marketing, content marketing, and PR.

Section 2-a.n.a.lysis: This is where we dig into the data to look for actionable intelligence. We a.n.a.lyze website grade, site traffic, traffic sources, keyword performance, referring sites, inbound links, lead sources and quality, blog statistics, social-media reach and engagement, and customer conversions. This area is often customized based on client preferences. For example, marketing directors may use scorecard charts and key findings as part of their monthly executive meetings. In this case, we will tailor the design and content so it can be easily extracted and dropped into their presentations.

Section 3-GamePlan: Using the findings from section 2, we construct an updated GamePlan for the next month. Time and budgets are reallocated based on priority opportunities and evolving business goals.