Have Agencies Given Up On Their Sites?

We recently sent out a tweet from our post Is Your Ad Agency Web Site Working For Or Against You-5 Key Guidelines :

 

After the tweet, Derek Walker, owner of the agency brown and browner, and I had a conversation via Twitter on agency sites and I wanted to share a few of those tweets.

 

 

My initial response to Derek on the destination vs. digital brochure question is “a little of both.”

He asks if people should visit an agency site more than once, and then asks, if so-why?

That’s the million dollar question-why indeed?

For a good majority of agency sites, the real answer is, most prospects wouldn’t visit an agency site more than once because there’s not a whole lot there.

For a small to mid-size agency, the reality is, prospects aren’t treating your site as a destination.

Why?

Because they’re incredibly busy, you have nothing there to show them and/or you’re not driving them there.

You can create all the great content in the world, or build your site so it’s essentially a digital brochure, either way-there are way too many agencies out there for your site to stand out without help. (Good SEO is certainly one of those helpful tools.)

With any new agency site, or redesign, these are the most important questions to ask yourself:

1)      Can a prospect easily tell what type of agency we are?

2)      Can a prospect easily understand the niche or niches we focus on?

3)      If we’re creating content-is it easily accessible and is it focused on your prospects?

Along with these questions should be an SEO strategy consideration and what channels you’ll use to drive prospects to your site.

A creative site that shows the agency culture is also important, to be sure, but many agencies consider that to be the main goal, and it shouldn’t be.

Derek and I then traded a few more tweets:

 

Derek has a point with that last tweet and I think social plays a big part in that.

I agree that agencies have abandoned (given up?) site evolution to a great degree in favor of social channels.

It used to be your site was the only place on the net for prospects to find you, but Twitter, Facebook and the numerous other social channels have replaced opportunities for interaction, take blog comments for example.

There are still vibrant agency blogs out there with strong comment activity, but few agency sites, even larger agencies, would be considered a “destination.”

This post just scratches the surface and I thank Derek for starting the conversation.

The good news: marketers are reading agency content.

In our 2014 New Year Outlook survey, 49% of Marketers said they read Agency blogs at least 1x per month or more often.

So while agency sites as a destination may have passed us by, getting your agency, content and thought leadership in front of prospects has never been more important.