You Can’t Get New Business if Prospective Clients Can’t Find You

That was the headline at an AdAge Small Agency Diary article. Tom Martin, founder of Converse Digital wrote to encourage agencies to recognize that clients are resorting to search strategies of their own to find new marketing partners. I found this paragraph particularly telling – “This is the point at which many agencies now find themselves — though often they seem to be in denial. They moan and groan about the cost of participating in RFP-based new-business pitches, but aren’t positioning themselves to adapt to clients’ changing expectations, so they can compete for the new business.”

Tom continues to point out clients are searching for answers to their marketing problems; sounds so simple and straightforward, yet so many struggle to make “new business” complicated. He concludes by suggesting – “So if you’re truly tired of the RFP rat race, do something about it. Go find out what you spent last year on pitches and dedicate 25% of that to taking the steps above. Dedicate yourself to giving the system a year to generate results. I promise you, you won’t regret it.”

I couldn’t resist, I had to contribute. I posted:  Tom makes great suggestions for agencies seeking new business opportunities. For those who follow his advice, simultaneously drop the “iron curtain” screen on incoming e-mails from those not yet on your white list. Many legitimate client inquiries and even invitations get blocked and bounced by your filters. Instead, designate a specific e-mail for inquiries (not ), make that easy to find on your website, and only give one or two trusted, virus-aware individuals access to open those.

Next suggestion … with all the competition for SEO awareness, an individual agency will be hard-pressed to successfully compete for visibility in the sea of relevant search terms.  How many agencies in North America? Try 30,000. One benchmark for years has been the 15,000 count at www.Redbooks.com Regardless, there are too many fish in that pond to hope to be found all alone.

But don’t abandon your plan to optimize – register with some of the successful client/agency match-makers who make being found their stock-in-trade. They compete for relevant keywords and tend to be found before an individual agency. Those with time-tested search algorithms and deep agency databases can and do deliver the precision Tom describes. That’s what we’ve been doing at www.agencyfinder.com for 17 years.

Tracking software analytical tools are great, but they often provide more information than you can effectively absorb, and short of conducting “auto-responder marketing” to every likely individual at companies that visit, they all lack the ability to provide the visitor’s e-mail and/or name. But I’ll be first in line when that happens and is legal.

Chuck Meyst
Chairman & CEO
AgencyFinder.com