Ad Agencies must be prepared to implement creative new approaches to reach and communicate with clients and consumers.
A few creative ideas for your agency.
This may take a new approach to develop best practices, new ideas, and growth. As many of you know our firm has specialized in teaching agencies how to grow and improve operations in the advertising industry for the past 30 years. We’ve worked with agencies of varying sizes on projects ranging from pitching a global brand to setting up a new business program to the redesign of a single agency process.
Avoid A Catastrophic Failure
Recently we were published in Digiday commenting on the failed Publicis-Omnicom merger and offered some recommendations on how marketing firms should prepare for the future.
Tips on how to prepare for the future:
- Reduce costs. Cutting costs is an essential step to free up resources and invest in the future. Reduce or eliminate the lingering overhead from days long gone. If your agency isn’t generating close to 20 percent profit, look closely and start making some difficult decisions.
- Increase existing client revenue. Adapt a client solutions market strategy versus an advertising or marketing strategy. Focus on selling strategic thinking, methodology and value-based ideas. Work hard to provide a more holistic solution to clients instead of piecemeal services.
- Increase new client revenue. Understand that a new breed of client demands a new approach to agency growth. Clients today have come to believe that all agencies are equal. Check your brand, develop an effective outreach program, and change how you close with a focus on speed.
- Restructure the agency. Restructuring goes far beyond the normal tactics of reducing payrolls, slashing overtime or stopping the drain on cash flow. Restructuring involves repositioning your agency to take the best advantage of the new market realities. Organize your agency with an eye on capturing the projected future market. The agency brand, culture, structure, processes and technology should all be revisited.
- Improve efficiency. Get better at service and production. In today’s environment, efficiency climbs to new heights of importance because the cost of errors cannot and will not be passed on to clients. Errors, waste and spoilage all come out of the bottom line and must be reduced significantly or eliminated entirely. At the same time, the delivery of services has to speed up. No longer will clients be willing to wait weeks for a response.
- Expand services. Meeting the more broad-based business needs of individual clients not only creates a strong bond with the client, but it also stimulates ideas for adoption across other clients. Develop a broad-based service offering based on a keen understanding of clients’ business and needs. This understanding can provide the basis for a total client-solutions market strategy. This is much more of a consultative model and is not in the traditional agency’s wheelhouse.
As they say, read the whole thing.
Read more at http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/36508.asp?imcid=rc_articleMention#oXdWueQAFj5jbfP4.99
iMedia Connection published 8 ways agencies can garner new business. It’s a detailed outline of how successful agencies really generate growth. The last thing you should worry about is working on new business. So follow these steps and get your program up and running, once and for all. There are eight steps to setting up an effective new business development program.
The top line points:
- Build brand congruence
- Identify your prospects
- Build an outreach system
- Track progress
- Handle leads the right way
- Do a chemistry litmus test
- Widen your circle
- Always be refining the process
Again, read the whole thing at iMedia
And there is this little article on how do you know if your marketing firm needs a new vision at LinkedIn:
Some managers may believe they have a sense of direction already. The feeling is sometimes we’ve gotten along fine up to this point, why do we need a new vision? Here are some warning signs we often see within agencies that indicate the need for leadership to get involved. Often these only show up when there is a lack of direction or uncertainty about the agency’s vision.
Read “Is Your Firm On The Wrong Path?” at LinkedIn
Final Thought:
Proactive agencies are aggressively attacking the need for best thinking, new information and growth ideas with the goal of positioning them for the future. Ad agency creative should be more than your product. As always, we’re standing by to help. Why not give us a call at 412.897.9329?
Photo by RawPoetry
