A Smart(er) Approach to Lead Generation

This Unignorable Marketing Program Delivers A Smart Advertising Agency (or any company for that matter) Lead Generation System

This is a thought starter for how to deliver on and support the promise that your advertising agency can make a client, its services, or its products unignorable. Deliver an unignorable message to develop a smart advertising agency lead generation system.

To prove your point and demonstrate your unignorable belief system your advertising agency will need to think about how to express its own marketing messaging in an unignorable way. Your advertising agency will need to tailor its promise based on its own skills and history.

You have to walk the talk.

Now, consider this…

“My brain is full.”

It is common knowledge that we are bombarded by 24/7 news, social media content, incoming alerts, messaging and emails, digital notifications, and multiple forms of advertising every day. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people and brands and sales messages want our attention.

“My brain forgets”

Even worse than message bombardment is the fact that we can hardly even remember the messages that we want to remember. Neuroscientists tell us that, at best, 90% of what we hear and see will be forgotten. These scientists have even invented the Forgetting Curve chart to help us visualize how much does not sink in.

Marketing clients understand the high cost of this cognitive problem and are looking for marketing techniques, systems, platforms, and efficient solutions that help deliver sales messages that get noticed and are memorable. These clients are looking for marketing communications agencies that can offer marketing that cannot be ignored.

I call it getting to being Unignorable.

Unignorable delivers smart advertising agency lead generation.

What is the definition of Unignorable? The online dictionary Merriam–Webster defines “Unignorable” as being – unable to be ignored: not ignorable.

?According to me, the opposite of being Unignorable is to be ignored. Being ignored is a marketing disaster. A waste of everyone’s time and money.

Your Advertising Agency’s Must-Do Approach to Delivering Unignorable Marketing.

OK. How to express your advertising agency’s solution to current and future clients?

#1 – Find the Bold Client:

First, there is no way that a brand or service-marketing message can become unignorable if the client does not make being unignorable a key objective.

Being unignorable requires a wholehearted dedication to the goal. Being half unignorable does not work.

This need for a bold client means that your agency will need a client prospect selection criteria plan that defines the type of client it wants. Do you have a clear idea of what clients you want?

In my own agency’s case, we wanted clients that had BHAGS. Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Passive clients generally deserve and get passive marketing. Even a bit worse passive clients do not make agencies look good.

Consider making a future client pass your “BHAG test.” An example… Challenger brand agencies like eatbigfish are fortunate to have clients that want to break through.

The good news here is that nine out of ten brands are by nature challengers and what savvy brand would actually say: “no, I do not want to challenge the leader?”

#2. The Right Positioning Is Unignorable:

Building a powerful and competitive brand positioning is critical to being seen and understood. The positioning must be rooted in the essence of the brand, be well-targeted to the brand’s target consumer and the positioning must stake out a compelling sales proposition that recognizes a market gap. Build a positioning that is competitive. Me-too marketing does not work in the land of ignorable.

#3. Insight-Driven Messaging:

Having a strong and compelling positioning is important. But the positioning must be supported by attention-arresting sales messaging, i.e., marketing that grabs attention.

The path to building out powerful messaging requires the following:

Marketing communications must be rooted in deep consumer insights and analysis. Data is good. But, how to use it to get to serious brand-building insights is the key.

I stole this definition of insights from Google:

“Simply put, a market insight is the discovery of a relevant, actionable, and previously unrealized reality about a target market as the result of deep,? subjective data analysis. … In other words, the best market insights offer value for both the seller and the companies in need of the innovation.”

Your advertising agency must go beyond just locating the insights to creating ‘compelling’ brand stories around the insights.

#4. “Power Messaging”:

Messaging and advertising need to be simple and very clear. Let’s call it Power Messaging.

Messaging should aim for an action – an action that can be tracked. An example of a failure = many expensive Super Bowl commercials seek brand attention but not consumer action. How many Super Bowl commercials do you remember? How many pushed you to action?

#5. Can’t Miss Creative:

Delivering an attention-grabbing creative approach is a must. Unignorable brands use consumer research and insights to build out ‘advertising’ and content that is, yes, unignorable. However, even insightful insights can be ignored if presented in a boring manner.

From the Harvard Business Review article, “Creativity in Advertising: When It Works and When It Doesn’t”:

“Ask a professional in the business what the key to success is in advertising, and you’ll most likely get an answer that echoes the mantra of Stephan Vogel, Ogilvy & Mather Germany’s chief creative officer:

“Nothing is more efficient than creative advertising. Creative advertising is more ? memorable, longer lasting, works with less media spending, and builds a fan community…faster.”

There is a lot of supporting research in the article. For example, a fact that could be discussed with a client:

“A euro invested in a highly creative ad campaign had, on average, nearly double the sales impact of a euro spent on a noncreative campaign.”?

Can’t miss advertising hot buttons:

• It is visually compelling.
• it delivers a solution.
• It often clearly and quickly shows consumer love of the product.
• It has a bit of drama.
• It is fun.
• It has a promotional element at the end that drives viewer action. It gets past just being “creative”.

#6. Message Delivery – Art & Science or Science & Art:

Your advertising agency uses science.

As mentioned earlier, neuroscientists tell us that people forget over 90% of what they see and hear. It is illustrated in the Forgetting Curve, which hypothesizes the decline of memory retention over time. Being obvious…. One will ignore what they cannot remember. Your advertising agency must create memorable marketing.

We also know that people pay more attention at the start and end of brand communications (it’s called primacy and recency). This reality can be used to promote the need to think through how to be unignorable.

What else? Here is some art.

Humor works – laughs work. We can be too serious. An example of the power of humor is the insurance industry’s recent move from scaring us to humoring us. The humor of GEICO and Allstate TV grabs our attention. I think that GEICO does a better job – how can you ignore a gecko?

Repetition works – Think Aristotle said: “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.”

Martin Luther King Got It:

King uses a technique known as "anaphora”, the repetition of a phrase at the beginning of sentences, as a rhetorical tool throughout the speech. An example of anaphora is when King urges his audience to seize the moment: “Now is the time…” is repeated four times in the sixth paragraph of the I Have a Dream speech. The most widely cited example of anaphora is the “I have a dream…” phrase, which is repeated nine times as King verbally paints a picture of an integrated and unified America for his audience.? King cleverly uses the phrase at the beginning and at the end (epiphora) of sentences.” Source: Michel Angelo Caruso

Repetition plus ubiquity can build “unignorable”

Brands should think about building out a 360 degree / surround / amplification system. For example, amplify a brand message across a group of communications platforms including video (on the brand’s website and other platforms); audio (as in podcasting); selected social media (from Instagram to LinkedIn and Facebook) thought leadership (research and papers, etc.)

Can your advertising agency brand the idea of repetition via repurposing its messaging across multiple platforms? Hmmm. Maybe call it… ?Surround Marketing?

#7. Be Authentic:

Consumers are looking for authenticity. Yes, a possibly overused idea but many consumers want to know what a brand stands for and that this is based on brand culture, purpose, and history.

This gets to the brand’s Mission Statement. REI, Patagonia, and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream own their authenticity.

Can your advertising agency have a research system that gets to and tracks a brand’s authenticity index? I am not super sure how to do this, but it could be cool.

#8. Think Unignorable Media:

Think through the unignorable and possibly surprising use of new media platforms. Surprise the client with thinking beyond Instagram. TikTok can be used as a micro-video delivery vehicle. Note that TikTok is growing as a search engine

Part of the deal here is that you may not need the client to want to use TikTok. You might just need the client to recognize that you are bringing new ideas. New ideas in the land of “Unignorablelandia.”

The Bottom Line.?

People see between 4,000 and 10,000 marketing messages every single day. That’s crazy, right? But here’s the thing: we’re tuning most of them out. If you want to break through the noise and get attention, your content must be on point.

It’s gotta matter to them.

By the way, smart advertising agency lead generation is smart.

Want more ideas? Go here now.

Oh…

Do not forget to buy my wonderful book: How To Build A Kick-Ass Advertising Agency.

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