Ad Agency New Business: Your Agency’s New Business Strategy Depends on a Good Content Strategy: Five Steps Towards Making It Happen
Creating a strong content culture is key to achieving long-term new business success. It strengthens your position, supports prospecting activity and often helps close business. Understanding that time is often the issue, below are five steps to help get you going in the right direction:
1. Appoint A Leader The most successful content cultures are born at the agency principal level. As in business development, gaining the support of your firm’s visionaries is vital to your success. The individuals who provide thought leadership and drive agency direction are your best resources for guiding content that will resonate with your target audience.
2. Staff the Effort Assign a team as you would to any important client. Define your strategy, create a tactical plan and hold your staff accountable, regardless of competing workloads. New business should always be your first business and on-target; regular content creation is central to supporting that effort.
3. Define and Research Your Prospect Audience Research your target audience(s). If you use HubSpot, you are already familiar with Buyer Personas – prospect representations that include demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, pain points and goals. It is critical to construct comprehensive personas for each audience segment, as it will steer the development of stronger content and other important elements of your inbound program.
4. Pick One Audience, One Problem, and Provide One Solution As Derek Halpern from Social Triggers explains in his Blog That Converts, don’t try to reach all of your prospects at once. Instead, use the “Divide and Conquer Technique.” Pick one prospect segment, select one problem they have and develop one actionable solution to that problem. Offering “finely focused” versus “broad topic” content separates expert firms from the generalists.
5. Write Base Content Establish an expertise, one topic at a time. Pick a subject, divide it into 3-5 sub-topic blog posts and explore it in depth. Once you have established and exhausted your expertise on this subject, move on to the next bite-size portion.
Good content creation is a never-ending story, designed to methodically bring prospects through the sales channel. Take the time to do it right. Gain the support of your principals, develop a strong point of view and assign the appropriate resources to ensure success. Most importantly, do it right or don’t do it at all.