Successful Advertising Agency
Advertising agencies help clients market their goods and services to larger audiences. With the advent of the internet, the skills and strategies of advertising agencies have evolved. Successful advertising agencies need to follow the best strategies in order to survive in the hyper-competitive marketplace. If you are interested in starting your own agency, here are five tips you should follow to have a successful operation.
Emphasize Personal Relationships with Clients
Advertising agencies built trusts and partnerships with other businesses to create advertisements, marketing strategies, and how the public would see a product or service. Such brainstorming involved an immense amount of time and interaction between the creative professionals at the advertising agencies and the company-client they worked for. Today, even with new technology, such interpersonal relationships are still needed in the business relationship. Every client should have a go-to person at the advertising agency that they can talk to about the direction of a campaign. If you want new clients, make sure the agency is very easy to contact. Have emails, phone numbers, an accessible website, and a company address available for all clients to reach you.
Explain What You Do Easily
As a creative enterprise, advertising agencies fill a void that many businesses and clients have with their marketing. But, that does not mean that the advertising agency has to exist as an esoteric enterprise. Indeed, most of the art created by the advertising agency may be too obscure or not what the client wants. It is better to create very innovative and creative advertising art that speaks to people and explain that information clearly to clients. Clients should not be left out of the dark on what you mean or what you are doing or what the creative processes are. This is their product and service, and you are here to help them reach a higher audience. You need to be open, transparent, and update the client on how the campaign is doing and what the creative process is going through.
Have a Consistent Track Record of Matching Audiences
In this step, it is important to always present clients with your best work. But, how does one measure your best work? In this day and age, its not just the reach of the campaigns or how many people got to see the advertising campaign, but how consistently you matched the product to the right audience. The client and/or the agency may have an idea on what clientele makes the best sense to reach, for example a product or service might be best targeted for young people living in the city. Did the campaign successfully increase consumption in the age-bracket? If not, then this was not the best work by the agency. Highlighting successful campaigns helps attract, keep, and reassure clients.
Solve the Key Problem for the Client
Advertising is more than just ads. Advertising is how the client shows itself to the world. Advertising agencies need to help a client with how the client approaches technology, social media, and selling its product. The advertising agency needs to know how to innovate the client’s brand. This might be hard to accomplish, especially if the client thinks your agency is telling them how to do things too much. But, a successful agency will be able to solve the major problems facing a client and help them succeed.
Ask For Referrals
Once established and successful partnerships are made, you can always ask the businesses you interact with for referrals. These businesses most likely have good connections and associates they know – the more referrals, the better opportunities to start new business relationships.
Embrace Social Media
Most journalists use social media as a means of sharing their work and it seems businesses are all jumping on the bandwagon. Twitter and Facebook are great social media tools in communicating directly with customers, clients or companies. Blogging is also a key social media tool, a way of sharing information whilst gathering a following based upon what you are offering. Using social media helps to build awareness about yourself and your company, and although it’s relatively new, all businesses are striving to stay ahead of the game in technological and business advancements – every day that passes with you not benefitting from social media means a day of extra promotion to your competition who are using it. There’s no escaping it… social media is the future.
Attractive Website And Using SEO
One way to stick out from the crowd is to ensure you have a bold, simple and attractive website. You want the user to have a memorable experience, one in which they instantly recall. User-friendly and simplicity are the key words in designing a great website.
Once you have your site a vital aspect of getting yourself out there and known is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). SEO is the method of making modifications to parts of your website to boost its relevance within a search engine. When these changes are viewed individually, they may seem like small improvements, but when combined with other optimizations made, they have a significant impact on your site’s performance in search results. This can be done in various ways such as using accurate meta keywords and meta tags, linking sites to your own and ensuring the correct use of headings, sub-headings, bullets, lists etc..
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a SEO method used by search engine companies to drive traffic towards a website. PPC works by a company bidding on specific keywords that people are likely to type into a search engine in order to find information pertaining to their business.
In PPC you pay the search engine company an amount to have them list ads for your site at the top and right of the search listings. When a user clicks on your ad, you pay the current Cost Per Click (CPC) from your fund. Once your funds have been used up, the search engine stops running your ad until you top up your funds again.
Once used correctly, SEO can make your site stick out head and shoulders over your competition.
Even if you think you can only embrace a few of the ideas listed, it’s a start and can only lead to better things. Over time, practising different business methods will improve your skills, your business and will inspire you to try more in gaining success.
