Blogging For Agency New Business-Why You Shouldn’t Question It
I’ve had prospects and clients alike question the efficacy of blogging for agency new business. Or just blogging, period.
You should be doing it, and here’s why.
I spoke with an agency prospect this week who told me about a client he lost the previous year who represented 45% of the agency’s business.
You know the story, and unfortunately, many of you reading have been there.
The happy ending is the agency was able to survive and put themselves back on a path towards profitability.
A big part of building back their client base?
Creating content around their specialization.
Two things we know from the agency/marketer survey reports we create:
1) 57% of marketers read agency newsletters and 43% read agency blogs.
That’s a fairly compelling reason on its own, but the key here is: your prospects have to know your content exists.
This is, understandably, where agencies fall down, because like many new business efforts, content creation tends to fall by the wayside when client workloads pile up.
2) In 2013, only 47% of marketers stated they were looking for “specialty agencies”. At the end of 2017, 71% of marketers in our survey said they needed help from specialty firms.
Marketers are looking for it and that means you have to focus on it when creating content.
No time for blogging for agency new business
That’s the ongoing agency mantra. Well, the hard truth is, you need to make time.
Because at least one of your competitors is doing it, and chances are they’re benefitting from it.
Here’s the thing-content creation doesn’t have to be an impossible task.
A few ways to make content creation easier:
–You don’t literally have to have a blog on your site. As you know, there are many outlets to post content. Unless you can truly sustain an active blog, I actually think it’s better to post on LinkedIn, for example, where you can post not only your own content, but third party content easily and it’s not as easy to tell if you haven’t written a post lately.
–You don’t have to post multiple times a week. You don’t even need to post every week. That would be ideal, but you want to maintain this content consistently. Start with one post a month. And then use that in multiple forms of outreach: your blog, LinkedIn, Twitter and especially in the email reach-out you’re sending to clients.
–Write what you know. Agencies always agonize over what to write and whether a prospect will even care.
They will care, and they will read-if you speak to their challenges.
And if you’re consistently writing on your specialization, whatever that might be (vertical or service offering), the writing will come much more easily.
Write on the challenges you help your clients solve. You’re living it every day, so write about it.
Not in an overly salesy way, but in a way that shows your prospects you understand their world and you solve problems within it.
And finally, it doesn’t have to be blog, it can be various types of content, most important is that you actually do it.