Agency Life…And The Beat Goes On!
At times it’s like working in a washing machine, agency business can pull you ten different directions at once. We love the jumble, it’s what gets us up every day — no two days are the same. The combination of cold calling, networking, online advertising and answering help wanted ads is working. We’re getting a good push of opportunities headed our way and continue to land new projects. As deep as we are in this economic downturn some of our clients are seeing our efforts pay dividends…it’s been pretty gratifying. One company is seeing a strong upturn in activity as we’ve preached the benefits of customer retention programs and they’ve jumped aboard. Another company is seeing a substantial increase in leads from their website as a result of an adwords program we’ve put in place. Still, another one of our clients is outselling the competition “15 to 1” because of the long-term positioning we’ve developed that has made the difference between first and second in the category pretty vast. We learned this week that BDC Advertising had been selected as the “agency of record” for the Oregon City Main Street project. We’ll take that. We also enjoyed a meeting with a prospective client that was pretty exciting. Great dialogue, sharp client, dominate product…we’d spent several hours preparing for the meeting and we were glad we did. It made for a good discussion where we brought some new ideas to the table and learned volumes about their efforts. The discussion resulted in an opportunity — a very good opportunity that we’re excited to chase.
Snowballs In The Dead Of Summer
It’s starting to snowball…in one short (and frenetically fast) month we’ve lined up a litany of meetings, landed several nice opportunities and found business lurking in areas you only find by starting the journey we’ve been on. One networking friend figured it out in radio through “stimulus dollars” that local governments were landing. “They need to let people know what’s going on with the money they’re getting”, he started. “Radio’s the perfect tool in this area…everyone listens to it and our station is the one that’s listened to most — it’s the perfect medium to let people know how and where the money’s being spent.” This friend made his annual sales goal (their fiscal ends in July) by the end of February…he’s a hero in his company. One of the radio stations here in town talked about how a contractor was close to under and in the 9th inning with two outs and only a breath of business life left found some “stimulus” business through GoOregon, a government inspired effort that’s dispersing projects. That opportunity saved the business. That got us thinking as well as we began mining for suitable RFP’s. We found several, but the operative word here, “suitable”, stymied some of our efforts. Still, we’ve found a few that fit nicely and we’re chasing. So now, the marketing of our advertising business consists of an online advertising program, networking, social networking, cold-calling, responding to help wanted ads with our “the marketing director you’ve always wanted” approach and RFP’s. Business is as slow as you allow it to be. It’s there, you have to look for it, find it, chase it, get it in a headlock and don’t let it go. It’s a different world today than it was a year or two ago. It’s forced us to work harder, smarter, more efficiently and watch our bottom line and our client’s bottom line like a hawk. Conversely, other business owners and managers are so gut shot they’re just numb. Afraid to do anything they’re just waiting and hoping this is just a bad dream they’re going to wake up from soon. It’s not, it’s reality, pinch yourself…it hurts. Action creates action, doing nothing achieves nothing. As one business owner admitted, “I just don’t want to work that hard anymore.” Well?
