Do NOT panic!
I spend the majority of my working time thinking about how to bring new business into the agency. Since the economy tanked, the challenges have increased, but in our experience at least, there is plenty of work out there and clients for the most part aren’t radically slashing their marketing budgets. We’ve actually surpassed our new business goals for the first quarter and landed some major new clients with healthy PR, advertising and new media budgets.
We certainly don’t have all the answers, nor can I speak to what other agencies are or aren’t doing, but I can share a couple of key strategies and philosophies that are working for us.
- We saw opportunity in the crisis: In the innocent days of 3Q 2008, a financial expert gave us a critical piece of advice: This will be bad. But it’s also an opportunity for strong businesses to rise out of the flames above their competitors like the proverbial phoenix. We decided to BE THAT BIRD and began to prepare for the coming storm by doing what we do best: delivering Brand. New. IdeasTM to our clients on a daily basis. The first thing we did was to call every client and talk to them about their businesses. What were their concerns? How did they think their marketing needs would change? This gave us key intelligence about who was at risk, but primarily it showed our clients that we cared about THEIR bottom line as much as our own.
- We stayed positive: Sticking with the avian analogy for the moment, we eliminated Chicken Little-thinking. When clients called about cutting their ad buys, we were ready to talk them off the ledge with well-researched arguments about why going dark to save dollars was wrong and oh-by-the-way here is a cost-effective digital media strategy custom tailored to your business. Internally, we told our staff that we wouldn’t keep anything from them…we would continue to share financials on a quarterly basis and there would be no surprises. Because of good solid leadership from our fearless CEO, we were in a strong position financially and we let everyone know that for now at least, their jobs were safe and we needed their A games…no doom and no gloom allowed.
- We got smarter: We committed to walk the new media walk. From CEO to account coordinator we Tweeted, Facebooked and blogged ourselves silly. We dove in the deep end with Web analytics and pay-per-click programs and we drug our clients along with us, educating them along the way about highly targeted, cost effective communication strategies like online advertising and social media initiatives. In the first quarter of 2009, we landed budget increases from six long-time clients for specific social media and digital marketing programs.
These strategies are working for us, but they’re not revolutionary. We simply took our natural strengths as an agency – flexible, entrepreneurial thinking, subject matter mastery and can-do optimism – and cranked them up a notch or two. We know things aren’t going to get better overnight and that this recession may last many more months, but we’re thinking every day about how we can ensure that our agency and our clients come shining through on the other side.
