3 Tips for Promoting Your Creative Agency and Attracting New Business

Editor’s Notes: This post was originally published in July 2012 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Particularly when starting a new business, promoting your creative agency is necessary to attract clients and keep the things rolling.
Here are some of our best tips for being pro-active when generating new business at your ad agency:

Build Your Brand

Branding can guide a company into a stronger, more profitable future. The first step is to consider where you are, where you are going, and where you really want to go—these will be the principles that will guide your brand. Remember to be clear, concise and memorable and “live the brand” every day, in everything you do and say.

Build Relationships

Engaging people is a good way to get referrals and grow your portfolio of clients. Personal contact is the most effective means to do this, so go to conferences, business breakfasts, join associations, submit your work for industry awards and offer tours of your agency’s office. You also want to put a strong emphasis on engaging with your current clients, making sure you’re wow-ing them every step of the way. Use the client engagement worksheet to map out opportunities to wow your clients along the project pipeline; keeping them impressed from pitch to project completion.

Another way to get new accounts is offer some thinking/ideas on how your agency can help prospects to deal with specific problems. Call your prospects, have something interesting to say and show them why your agency is the “perfect fit”. A good CRM system, associated with a workflow management tool will help you with all this work— keeping all contacts organized in one place so you can better manage your network and provide the necessary attention to each opportunity.

Build a Great Website and Be Active on Social Media

The importance of an effective digital strategy cannot be overvalued. But what does this means for your creative agency? First of all, build a user-friendly website, where you can show your portfolio of programs, successful case studies, strategic testimonials, past ad campaigns, PR releases, etc. and provide easy to find contact information for visitors.

It is also interesting to offer a virtual agency tour: show your agency workflow to prospects (from the first meeting until the last review), your work space, the team, departments and roles in your organization, so your prospects will have a better idea what it will be like to work with your agency.

Keep SEO in mind. Do not forget to optimize your pages so they are easily found by the search engines by using keywords, images and titles. It is also very important to stay active in the world of social media—a good way to identify current market needs and trends, seek new opportunities and build brand awareness. Sharing new content regularly through social media and blogs will drive traffic to your website (inbound marketing). Check out Function Point’s Facebook to see how it’s done!

Following the tips above, you will be promoting yourself in a smooth way and become more credible.

Do you have ideas about how to further promote a creative agency? Please share with us!

Marissa Ho

Brand & Product Coordinator

Marissa was raised on a steady diet of mountain and ocean activities. She’s a product marketer by day, reader by night, and human being by day and night.