“4 out of 5 Americans read blogs”
Your agency blog is one of the most important new business tools in your arsenal. It can quickly become the “front door” to your agency and even your agency website. A trend is developing where the ad agency website looks more like the agency brochure or portfolio. This is not a bad thing.
Below I have listed my top 5 benefits of having an ad agency blog:
Benefit 1: new content
Advertising agencies usually require a great deal of time and effort to update their website and even more so if they have to redesign their websites. From my experience working with agencies, this is a very SLOW process. Usually, many people are involved and turf battles are fought. Most agency website designs do not make content management easy and are difficult to update. Agencies also tend to be overly self-critical of their own work. It is always more difficult for them to do the work for themselves than for their clients.
Blogs, on the other hand, are much easier to keep up to date with new content, highlighting work, and are designed for repeat traffic.
Benefit 2: Generate more traffic
That your blog has the potential to create more traffic than your agency website is a good thing. Your blog has the potential to attract a large volume of quality traffic from the pool of potential customers you are trying to reach.
Blogs develop more visitors through:
*Search Visibility: Blogs are organized to accommodate search engines. The more content you have (well linked) the more chances there are to attract search traffic.
*Click Traffic: By posting interesting articles, a blog gives a reason for other people to link to it.
*Repeat Traffic: Regularly updated content and comments keep visitors coming back…and coming back…and coming back. Most agency websites are not conducive to repeat traffic, especially if your website hasn’t been updated and it’s been 5 years.
*Personality – Create a blog around your agency’s image and culture and let your personality shine through and people will be drawn to you. People like to associate with the people they like. It’s hard to befriend a company, but it’s easy to like a person with a welcoming personality.
*Viral Effects: You create something great and visitors tell their friends, who tell their friends… and so on.
*Authority/Credibility: Blogging allows you to become an expert in the minds of your prospects.
Benefit 3: Easy to use
Setting up a blog is not like setting up a website. A blog is easy to set up, even for the tech-challenged. No HTML coding experience is necessary.
If you’re new to blogging, you’ll find that there are a number of free blogging services that can help you get started easily. You can literally be up and running in minutes. Blogging is a great place to start. It is very easy to use. However, you will probably want to transition to WordPress eventually. Be sure to secure your own domain for your blog so switching services won’t be a problem for you in the future.
Benefit 4: Cheap
The single word more popular than user-friendly ad agency CEOs is cheap. There is virtually no hard cost involved. Just your time. It will greatly return the cost of your time investment by repurposing your blog content in EzineArticles, emails, ezines, white papers, and in traditional publications.
Benefit 5: a great new business tool
In a recent survey of enterprise technology marketers conducted by research firm MarketingSherpa, blogging was voted the fourth leading lead generation tool. Ultimately, a blog can be very effective, the most powerful and low-cost new business marketing tool your agency will ever use. As long as you know your target audience, have the right positioning, messaging, and rich content that benefits those you’re trying to reach.
Blogging will take time and effort, but the rewards will be great. Just remember, be consistent. Provide a blog post at least several times a week and don’t sell. Instead, use your blog to establish and build relationships. This new business tool is superior to any other tool you have used to build relationships for new business. People enjoy working with those they know, trust, and like.
Agencies have a hard time articulating who they are, why they are different, what they offer, and how they do what they do. As you research and write your blog posts, an added benefit will be clarity. The old adage is true, “you don’t know what you know, until you write it down.”
“Your agency is your most important client”