jfdi® believes that inbound marketing is the future of agency New Business lead generation. It is based on earning the attention of prospects by making your agency easy to get found online and then engaging prospects with high-value content. As traditional “push” forms of marketing, such as cold calling and email have become less effective, inbound marketing offers a better way for agencies to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise to prospective clients whilst measurably nurturing them through their buying decision process.
So where do you start? A good place to begin is your blog. You need relevant and interesting content that also has gravitas so that prospects are drawn to your agency and want to download your blog, link to it, have conversations about it and share the content with others via social media networks. This should be your “hub”. Therefore you need to think about your prospective audience and what they want to talk about and hear about. You also need to examine where they can be found online and how they interact with their networks.
In an ideal world, you should aim to write around 300-500 words and try to do this a minimum of twice a week. Think about what your keywords are and use them as this will help drive organic search engine optimisation. Also make the most of all the shortcuts you can to create content. With all the best will in the world, you will find it hard to maintain the momentum to write regular blogs. We recommend setting up an editorial calendar and involving others in your team – sharing the responsibility for writing and the time spent on it will take the load off you. Also, don’t forget that visual content (infographics, cartoons, slideshows and videos) is just as valuable.
You may need to work a little on selling-in the benefits of blogging as a New Business tool and to ensure that there no internal blockers. A few simple ideas such as the following can help make your life easier:
- having a content style guide in place
- drafting a list of potential topics to talk about
- setting up “rules” about what you aren’t going to talk about
- repackage existing content – something that was already written about internally
- brainstorm your ideas with others in the agency
Finally, while thinking about what you are going to write about, you should always keep the following in mind:
Who is your potential audience?
How are you going to promote your content to them?
What objectives are you hoping to achieve and do they fit with your overall New Business strategy?
A blog is a long-term marketing asset that will bring traffic and leads to your agency. It introduces you as a thought leader, allows you to earn potential clients’ trust and stay top of their minds as someone with the potential to help them solve that business problem that is keeping them up at night.