Inbound: Being “Found” When Prospects are Looking

for a New Agency

Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency

That Was Then – Agency new business processes have largely been modeled on networking

with known prospects, pitching anything that came across the desk, and using the rolodex to

cold call any potential prospect that would listen. But substantial new business success rarely

comes with this non-strategic approach.

Phone

Email

Social

Digital

This Is Now – Just like you tell your clients, control has passed to the customer.

And for agencies that means the brand marketer decides IF and WHEN they will

consider your agency as a potential partner.

Brand marketers are bombarded by marketing and business solution vendors daily.

The competitive set of who is approaching the brand marketer continues to

expand - traditional agencies, digital agencies, specialty agencies, data analytics

providers, media & tech companies, and even business consultancies are treading

on your turf.

Meanwhile, most agencies still push content that talks about the agency, the

awards won, the clients roster, their unique approach to business. You need to

ask…

Why should the prospect engage when they don’t have a clear view of who your

agency is and what you stand for?

Why should they accept your call and participate in a dialog with you?

The model for new business has changed

Why is the Agency Prospect so hard to reach?

The typical brand marketer ‘customer journey ‘ shows that by the time a prospect is ready to “try” a new agency,

they are deep into their decision making process:

The key to success is to get into the consideration set early, when the prospect is seeking information and open to

hearing new things (which is far ahead of the RFP). Timing has always been the $64M question. The good news is

that there are many opportunities to help prospective clients understand:

• Who your agency is

• What your agency stands for

• How your unique agency POV positively impacts the prospect’s business

The key is to provide this information in content vehicles that allow the prospect

to engage on their timetable. Once they have engaged they are ready for “lead”

conversion. This is Inbound Marketing.

Awareness Education Evaluation Trial

75 - 90% of Customer Time 10% Time

Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agencycy

Just 15% of CEO’s will work w/ a

vendor they don’t know *

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing brings Content Marketing to life … by optimally leveraging a digital platform to create

and distribute content for new business prospects. You can gather rich visitor/profile data, content consumed,

keyword strength, social media activity, and prospect intelligence. software tools allow you to monitor the

prospect’s engagement with the content to determine how far they are along the sales cycle (Customer Journey)

to warrant personal, outbound contact moving them from interest to trial.

Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency

Growth Strategy

Sales

Content

SEO

Social Media

Lead Nurturing

Email

55% of CEO’s will work w/ a vendor they are

familiar with from online

content/events

The 6 Keys to Inbound Marketing

1. Growth Strategy – to focus the program on:

The highest value target verticals you need as clients

The business challenges they face

How your agency can help solve those challenges

The customer audiences your prospects care most about - Millennials? Tech Buyers?

2. Content Development:

Format your content in bite sized, multi-channel opportunities

Distribute via email, social media and on your web site

White Papers/eBook Newsletters Blog Webinars

3. SEO Optimization - audit your agency’s web site and social content to improve your agency’s rankings

on key search engines.

Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency

The 6 Keys to Inbound Marketing

4. Social Media – Make sure your agency appears where your prospect’s are looking for

information. Twitter, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn are business tools to monitor your prospect’s

interests and engage them about your POV on their challenges.

5. Lead Nurturing – Through Prospect Profiling identify when a prospect is “lead” ready for outbound sales

follow up. Only a small portion of your database will be “lead” ready via inbound alone. But once the right

engagement behaviors are identified these prospects become higher involvement opportunities.

6. ROI Reporting – To identify the value of your Inbound Marketing program, create reports that

outline which campaigns generated the most leads. The reports can also highlight the results of your

outbound programs (direct mail, PPC) and integrate w/ CRM systems to ensure all data is captured.

Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency

Leads from

Inbound have

an 8x

greater

chance of

conversion vs.

other leads

How Does Inbound Generate a Competitive Advantage?

The customer journey provides the blueprint for aligning the right tools to engage prospects at the right time.

Generating Awareness

The purpose of this stage is to engage as many potential high and medium value prospects as possible. Set them up

in your database and segment them based on criteria that you can address to move them through the sales cycle.

(Industry, role at company, pain-points). Provide content that demonstrates your agency’s knowledge about their

needs. Write blogs, send via email and social media.

Educating Prospects

Move the prospects further into the cycle by providing more knowledge about your agency with tighter content.

Create white papers, serve up case studies relevant to the industry, create landing pages with call to action forms.

Identify which prospects are opening and clicking on your content and/or visiting your web pages.

Awareness Education Evaluation Trial

Blog

Keywords

Social Media

Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency

Forms

Call To Action

Land Pages

How Does Inbound Generate a Competitive Advantage?

The customer journey provides the blueprint for aligning the right tools to engage prospects at the right time.

Encourage Evaluation

Set up prospect engagement scoring (Marketing Automation) so once prospects reach critical engagement points

(e.g. - 3 open emails, 1 click-through, 1 download), then put them into lead nurture. Follow them on social media as

an individual, send a custom email, make a series of custom phone calls, invite them to a webinar. If they are

showing the right behavior signals its time to get them into “trial” discussion.

Trial (RFP)

The purpose at this stage is to determine if there is a proposal opportunity in the short term (or long term). Set

up a qualifying lead phone call. Identify their business challenges and how your agency could address them.

Awareness Educate Evaluate Trial

Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency

Email

Behavior Signals

Webinar

Events

Phone call

Conclusion: How your agency benefits from an Inbound Marketing Program

It allows you to create a systematic approach to reach your prospects throughout their customer journey.

It helps you evaluate which content and distribution platforms are most efficient at generating response.

It provides your agency the ability to generate awareness economically with a deep list of potential prospects.

You can evaluate a prospect’s level of interest to determine when they are ready to dialog with you and

potentially be open to working with your agency.

Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency

Agency Growth Planning Series Overview

The Agency Growth Planning Series outlines the key stages an agency

needs to consider in order to optimize their brand and accelerate their

new business growth. Other whitepapers in the series include:

Part 1: Positioning to Attract the Agency Game Changer – The

first step in accelerating your agency growth, is to identify the ideal

growth target and how the agency needs to position itself to be credible

in the prospect’s eyes as a real alternative that understands their

business challenges.

Part 2: Content Marketing through Intellectual Capital - The

next step in building a successful Agency Growth Plan is to ensure that

you have the right Intellectual Capital and content for credibility, thought

leadership, and successful marketing campaigns.

Part 3: The Power of Inbound Marketing – Provides the strategy

and platform to create content, distribute it and monitor prospect

engagement for lead generation and sales conversion.

Part 4: Targeting & Stakeholder Mapping – How to identify the

RIGHT target brands and contacts to grow your agency. Including how

to segment content for key stakeholders unique needs and channels.

To learn more about how Linkergy can accelerate your agency’s growth

contact us at 312 422-0255 or email Janet Vinci at jvinci@linkergy.com.

Inbound: Being Found When Prospects are Looking for a New Agency

About Linkergy

Strategic new business is critical to

the long term success of every

marketing agency. Understanding

how to create a sales pipeline of

engaged, high-value prospects

enables your agency to focus on

growing with the right kinds of

clients. Linkergy’s mission is to

create customized new business

programs to accelerate your growth.

Linkergy outsource programs are

built to provide as much or as little

focused new business support as

your agency needs. Services include:

Growth & Engagement Strategy,

Content & Intellectual Capital

Development, Inbound Marketing,

Outbound Lead Generation and Sales

Consulting/Training.