The Marketing Agency Blueprint Part 10

Objectives: You must measure progress, and adapt based on performance and market changes.

Strategy: In football, you have offense, defense, and special teams. None of them on their own win the game. The same is true for inbound marketing: Brand, web, search, content, social media, and PR must work in sync to be successful.

The Foundation: Brand and Website

Every Inbound Marketing GamePlan begins with brand and website. These are the two critical building blocks for marketing agencies, and their clients.

Brand Marketing: Define and Differentiate Every agency must define and differentiate itself. Share your story through your website, content, social media activity, and PR, but remember that your brand is defined by experiences and perceptions. Start by answering these questions to define your brand: Who are we, in 160 characters or less, and without meaningless jargon?

What are the three greatest strengths/weaknesses of our brand?

What are our greatest opportunities for growth?

What keywords would people search to find our agency/services?

Who are our buyer personas?

What makes us different?

How do we express that differentiation in words, images, and actions?

What is our sustainable compet.i.tive advantage?

What value-expertise, resources, guidance, and tools-can we bring to our audiences?

What are we doing to innovate and move the industry forward?

What problems and pain points do we solve?

What makes clients buy from us the first time (acquisition)? What keeps them coming back (retention)?

When an agency begins, it inherently takes on the persona of its founder. However, as the agency grows, it becomes essential to take a more strategic approach to how you present your agency online and offline.

The key is to give your agency brand personality. You want clients, prospects, and other audiences to connect with your organization on a more meaningful level. You want to build trust and create positive perceptions about the agency and its people.

Here are some of the ways you can convey the unique attributes of your agency brand: Be consistent in how you define the agency across social networks, your website, internal doc.u.ments, and new business proposals. Also, consider how your employees define the agency on their social profiles and when asked in person.

Use your agency Facebook page to share photos and unique content. For example, PR 20/20 has a public quote board on the discussions tab of our page (www.Facebook.com/PR2020). This is where we post some of the quirky things our team says, giving us the chance to show a lighter side to which people can relate.

Integrate video of your team into your agency website. Consider whiteboard sessions, interviews, case studies, and weekly podcasts as ways to demonstrate your expertise. Feature your team's personalities and better engage audiences.

Hire professionals with shared values, and give them the freedom to build personal brands that complement and augment the agency brand.

The Power of Personal Brands As we have discussed, great agencies are built on the strength of great talent. Now, more than ever, the individuals within an agency have the opportunity to build powerful personas that drive agency growth.

Every agency professional has a story. We are all defined by our actions, beliefs, experiences, perceptions, and choices. We each maintain a unique personal brand that is defined by the sum of people's experiences with us and perceptions about us. However, we are our own gatekeepers. Thus, our brand varies from person-to-person based on how much of our story we choose to share.

We live in an online world dominated by content and community. And whether we like it or not, social media has made personal branding a 24/7 experience for many of us. The ma.s.s-market adoption of social networking has forever changed the way that our stories are told and shared. We publish pictures, articles, opinions, and updates that each tells a small piece of our story: What is important to us.

What we value.

Where we are going.

What we are doing.

Who we are with.

What we buy.

What we think.

What we are pa.s.sionate about.

Though many of us may not realize it, everything we do and say is crafting our personal brands, and either helping or hurting the agency brand. So, whereas taking the approach of not caring what other people think works for some personalities and career paths, most agency professionals will need to take a more thoughtful approach to their personal brand.

What is your story? What defines you? Would your definition of your personal brand closely match others? Here are 10 personal-branding questions to ask yourself and to consider when a.s.sessing and developing your personal brand and helping your employees to define theirs: 1. What three adjectives would people use to describe you?

2. What makes you unique?

3. What life experiences have altered your views and actions?

4. What motivates and inspires you?

5. What are you pa.s.sionate about?

6. How do you balance your personal and professional lives?

7. Do your friends and family have different perceptions about you than your professional peers?

8. Do you see challenges in life as obstacles or opportunities?

9. Are you stubborn and closed-minded? Or, do you view each experience as a chance to grow and expand your knowledge?

10. Do you take responsibility for your own success or failure?

Answers to these questions help to define who you are. How much of your story you choose to share and the manner in which you share it, play large roles in defining your personal brand.

Personal Branding Snapshot-The Case of Matt Cutts Google is valued at more than $150 billion dollars. It controls approximately 65 percent of the U.S. search market,1 and its tightly guarded algorithm determines the fate of millions of businesses online.

But Google has a complex and nagging problem-webspam-that challenges the integrity of its search results, and is creating reputation concerns for a brand that once could do no wrong.

In the middle of the battle for search supremacy is a man who strikes fear into the hearts of black-hat SEO pros, web spammers, and content farmers around the globe-Matt Cutts (@mattcutts).

He is leading the engineering charge to fix search-quality issues caused by webspam. However, equally important is his expanding role in elevating the public perception of Google and its search results through his personal brand.

By all accounts, Cutts is a brilliant engineer and one of the most respected minds in the search industry. However, his personal brand is becoming one of Google's most valued a.s.sets. Consider the following: Cutts has more than 131,000 Twitter followers, and is actively engaged with the community.

He regularly appears at industry events on behalf of Google.

His Gadgets, Google & s...o...b..og (www.MattCutts.com/blog) has an Alexa rank of approximately 4,100.

The Google Webmaster Help YouTube Channel, which features Cutts answering user questions, has 34,000-plus subscribers and more than 3.9 million channel views.

He is frequently featured in mainstream and online media channels. Run a Google News search for Matt Cutts and you will find hundreds of articles and blog posts quoting Cutts on the issues most important to Google, such as compet.i.tion, search quality, content farms, and link spamming.

Here is a snapshot of what marketing agency professionals can learn from how Cutts manages and builds his personal brand: Maintains a strong personal brand that aligns with the corporate brand and gives it an authentic human voice.

Creates tremendous value online through multimedia content, including blog posts and videos, and presents information with a high degree of transparency. This positions him as a thought leader and industry expert.

Uses social media to reach, influence, and engage with key audiences.

Serves as a trusted resource to journalists and bloggers, and builds relationships with influentials online and offline.

A hybrid agency is defined by the collective strength of its employees' personal brands. Your job as an agency leader is to clearly establish the agency brand, and then give your team the freedom and support to build and evolve theirs.

Website Development: Design, Connect, and Grow Your website is a lead-generation and multimedia content publishing tool. It gives your agency the ability to build a strong brand online, create value, connect with audiences, and generate leads.

When developing or re-designing your website, do not overlook the importance of strong website copywriting that is optimized for search engine rankings and visitors. Effective copywriting conveys key brand messages, stresses features and benefits, and drives visitors to a desired action, such as a call, contact form, or content download.

Once your website design and copywriting are complete, there are significant opportunities to build a more powerful site through SEO, blogging, social media partic.i.p.ation, content marketing, PR, calls to action, and landing pages.

Treat your agency website with the same care and attention that you do your clients' websites. Continually a.n.a.lyze, track, and monitor its success through inbound links, traffic, referrers, and website visits by keywords, among other metrics.

Audiences: Segment and Prioritize

Inbound marketing is primarily talked about for its lead-generating potential, but it can do so much more for your agency. For example, consider its brand loyalty and retention attributes with existing clients. Or, how about its ability to help recruit and retain employees, connect with mainstream and social media, influence compet.i.tors, and engage with peers?

When building your strategy, be sure to think beyond prospects, and design a GamePlan to reach and influence all audiences relevant to your business. Let's take a look at how inbound marketing can influence your agency's key audiences: Peers: The social web has made it common practice to connect and share with your professional peers like never before. In many cases, your peers, often from competing agencies, are the ones sharing and linking to the content you publish. Agencies and professionals that focus on collaboration over compet.i.tion will have greater opportunities to thrive in the emerging marketing agency ecosystem. Seek opportunities to engage with and support your industry peers through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.

Compet.i.tors: The race for search-engine rankings and influence has made professionals more open, and online tools have given marketers greater access to compet.i.tive intelligence. As a result, it is far easier for compet.i.tors to research and evaluate one another's strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. At the same time, savvy agencies can use inbound marketing tools-blogs, videos, social networks-to influence their compet.i.tion's thoughts and actions. Think of it in terms of marketing warfare. Although it is good to support your peers, remember that your compet.i.tion is reading and watching. Be strategic in your thoughts and actions.

Vendors: Your vendor network is essential to your organization's success. Build more valuable vendor relationships by engaging them in your inbound marketing campaign. Share guest blog posts, exchange links, and help to promote their capabilities and expertise.

Partners: Business partners share risk, and rely on one another to deliver results and achieve a common goal. Partners are essential to success in the more open and collaborative agency ecosystem. Inbound marketing has made identifying and evaluating potential partners more efficient. However, remember that the actions of your partners directly affect your brand, so have a system in place to continually evaluate the strength and profitability of each relationship. Be sure to subscribe to your partners' blogs and connect with their leaders in social networks. In addition, look for opportunities to create content that features your partners.

Job candidates: Use content publishing and involvement in online communities to tell your brand's story and attract social-media-savvy professionals. Understand how job candidates communicate online, where they congregate, and what keywords they search, and then use that information to adapt your recruiting strategy. Also, screen job candidates through their public profiles and online activities before you even grant an interview. Start with name searches on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Media: Use inbound marketing to connect with reporters online, learn their interests, understand their writing styles, and note their preferred means of communication. PR firms regularly do this to build more effective media relations programs, but every agency should consider ways to proactively build deeper connections with media contacts.

Employees: Every employee maintains a personal brand that can directly affect the strength of your organization's brand. Use inbound marketing to increase employee retention and loyalty by supporting your employees' social media activities, and encouraging them to contribute to the development and management of your agency's content and brand online. Employees, especially younger generations, are active in social media with or without your agency's support. View social media as an opportunity, not an obstacle. Establish social media policies, encourage professional behavior, and embrace their involvement.

Establishing Your Agency Social Media Policy When defining your agency's social media policy, start by stating the goal of the policy, and how it integrates with human-resources policies that already exist.

Then, lay out 10 to 15 guidelines for employees to follow in their online behavior. A best practice is to keep the tone positive by focusing on what is appropriate rather than what is not. Specific topics to cover may include: Authentic representation of brand and self: The importance of using real names and the lack of true anonymity on the web.

Disclosure, confidentiality, and privacy issues, such as guidelines for sharing company information with the public; who has the authority to comment on behalf of the company; and when it is necessary to disclose affiliations with the company and/or clients.

The purpose for online communications and how you will bring value to the community.

Usage and productivity during business hours.

Taking ownership of your words and actions, and respecting copyrights.

How to address potential challenges before they occur, such as friending colleagues, clients, superiors, and subordinates.

Also, address plans for monitoring and enforcement, such as who is responsible for monitoring employees' online behavior and what this entails. Clearly state the ramifications of misuse and how policies will be upheld.

Prospects: The most obvious and talked about inbound marketing audience, prospects, are actively seeking services and information online. Get found by prospects and keep your pipeline full by regularly publishing relevant content, and actively partic.i.p.ating in social media to extend your reach and influence.

Clients :Existing clients are your most profitable and important relationships. Building loyalty among this audience should be a primary goal of every inbound marketing campaign. Loyalty is driven by results, relationships, and communications. Inbound marketing gives you the power to dramatically increase the strength of all three. Connect with your clients in more personal and meaningful ways through social networks, and publish free content designed to expand their knowledge and strengthen your position as a thought leader and partner.

Objectives: Set Your Success Factors

Lead generation and loyalty building are the two primary goals of every marketing campaign, for both clients and agencies. We have consistently found that campaigns that focus inbound marketing strategies on achieving the GamePlan's four core objectives have the greatest potential to generate leads and build loyalty.

Let's take a look at each objective and introduce sample success factors that you may consider benchmarking and measuring to continually evaluate and evolve your campaign.

1. Boost Search Engine Rankings Search engine results are rapidly evolving to be more personalized based on factors such as geography, browsing history, and social graphs. Although top-10 rankings are still relevant, it is far more important to monitor actual organic (nonpaid) traffic. Focus on: Lead-producing keywords.

Sale-converting keywords.

Traffic-producing keywords.

SEO Tip Although your entire keyword universe may include thousands of phrases, most agencies should concentrate marketing efforts on the 30 to 50 most relevant keyword phrases.