1 Fantastic Validation For Social Media as a Part of Your Ad Agency New Business Strategy

In the Ad Contrarian post, The True Cost Of Social Media, the ultimate takeaway in looking at the 28 most popular brands on Facebook: in the overwhelming majority of cases, they are brands with enormous traditional marketing budgets. The post goes on to say:

One of the dangerous things about social media is that it gives a certain type of incompetent marketing person unprecedented opportunities to pretend they’re doing marketing when they’re actually doing little of value. Here at Ad Contrarian World Headquarters, we call this “alibi advertising.”

Ouch.  There’s some truth there though and perhaps deserves a completely separate post on its own, but in relation to the question of value I mentioned earlier, a commenter (Patrick) added some worthwhile insight (bold is mine):

Being at a top of a list or the most watched video this week on YouTube is not an indication of having a successful marketing program.  For me, and my clients, success is measured by increased leads, revenue or sometimes just increased awareness – but within our identified and qualified customer base.

Interestingly a similar point came up in Mack Collier’s post, Something interesting is happening in Atlanta. A bit of background, for perspective, but also because the business model is quite interesting:

I was in Atlanta training with. . . NCI, the largest national publisher of local printed and online magazines for the real estate market, and my guess is they probably provide social media services for more clients than anyone else in the country, if not the world.  They offer social media services to property managers, realtors, architects, interior designers, and contractors, just to name a few of their client areas.

And they’ve gone from 0 to 1,200 social media clients in just a year’s time.  All while providing an extremely affordable social media solution for clients.  Those clients get a blog (with 2 new posts every week), a Twitter presence, and a Facebook page, for usually $350-395 a month.

Outsourced social media content isn’t brand new, but this was the first I’d heard on this scale. What came next though was the point I thought served as an inspiration/reminder to agencies maintaining a social media presence in order to gain more new business (again, bold is mine):

What struck me in the weeks leading up to the training sessions, and during my time with the team in Atlanta, was that the engagement level on the blogs was often non-existent.  Few, if any comments, no retweets, no ‘signs of life’.  In fact, I was thinking to myself that many ‘social media people’ would look at these blogs, see little to no engagement, and view them as failures.

But obviously they aren’t failing their clients, who keep jumping on board.  So how does NCI create value for its clients via blogging? “Our goal is to drive leads for clients on the web.” explains Adam Japko, the Senior VP and President of the Home & Design Area for NCI. Customer leads for clients.  This is one of the points I keep stressing to those of you that are trying to get buy-in from your boss for your social media ideas.  You have to make the business case for social media.

The takeaway for your agency social media effort as it relates to new business: you’re not in this to have the most-commented-on blog, most-watched YouTube agency channel or to have the most Twitter followers; you’re in this to get more new business. Social media will help you do that by generating the leads that result from a targeted effort to your identified and qualified prospect base.