Social Media is now Pay to Play for Ad Agency New Business

social media is pay to play for ad agency new business

Paid social advertising can accelerate the process of attracting qualified traffic and leads.

Since 2007, I’ve preached that there was a new model for new business that made the existing model obsolete. Agencies needed a new approach to new business.

During the past decade, technology and the rise of social media changed how people communicated. This dramatically impacted business development. Prospects became self-sufficent. Any business information they wanted about a product or service became easily available online. Buyers were now in control. They became resistant to traditional marketing and advertising approaches.

This led to a paradigm shift in the way professional service firms, such as advertising, digital, media and PR agencies, sold their services. Instead of the interruptive type selling tactics of the past, prospects prefered marketing approaches that created value and were more relational.

“If you’re not developing content on the web you don’t exist.” Lee Odden, CEO @TopRank Marketing

Through an inbound marketing approach, agencies learned how to promote their business by creating helpful content through blog posts, eBooks, eNewsletters, podcasts, infographics, webinars, whitepapers, videos, etc. The content was shared to their social media community which also boosted their SEO rankings.

The new approach to new business:

  • The battle for new business moved online. Instead of chasing new business, agencies had to learn how to be found.
  • Community development became a prerequisite to business development.
  • Instead of services, prospects were searching for solutions.
  • Prospects were seeking expertise. The commonality of expertise … they write. This made inbound marketing fueled, by content, an important component to business development.
  • Through the rise of social media, agencies had the ability to publish and promote their content for free.
  • This organic reach allowed small to midsize to establish a positioning of expertise quickly to a very specific target audience and increase their online traffic for qualified leads.

I launched my blog in the early days of social media. I usually published at least 1 to 2 post per week of good, helpful content. At the same time, I grew my online community of prospects through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. My followers would see my content and share it. My blog grew and became rated among the top 100 marketing blogs in the world, according to Ad Age’s Power 150. It was simple way to fuel my new business and it was FREE.

But, the power of organic reach is dying. The boom years of the free promotion of content is evaporating quickly.

Organic reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post through unpaid distribution.

The same year that Facebook went public in 2016, it introduced paid advertising. Facebook has stated to their ad partners:

“We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”

Facebook is attributing this change to increased competition as more people and companies join its service.

The other social media platforms have followed Facebook’s lead in order to be profitable. With paid advertising and promoted posts as their the source of revenue, it isn’t a surprise that organic reach is becoming less effective.

More evidence of a shift to the ‘pay-to-play’ model:

  • As the average organic reach of business pages has decreased, Facebook’s stock price has increased.
  • Marketers are seeing their organic reach diminished. Posts from top brands on Twitter and Facebook reach just 2% to 6% of their followers without the use of paid advertising. (Forrester)
  • Facebook is in the process of slashing organic page reach down to 1 or 2 percent. (Tech Blog Valleywag)
  • On average, tweets only reach around 2% of followers. Take that into account when users will no longer see tweets in one continuous real-time feed, but will be shown the content that Twitter deems to be the most important. Organic reach is quickly being drowned out by the paid promotion of content.
  • LinkedIn has introduced some radical changes to its news feed algorithm. Most content creators noticed a significant drop in organic reach in all of their posts of 50% and more.
  • Scores of Instagram users and agencies recently took to the social network to voice concerns over a sudden dip in engagement on their posts.
  • The number of organic SEO results continues to pushed down by Google Ads – Searchmetrics

Just like every other business, your agency is being compelled to incorporate social advertising to help accelerate the process of building your online community of prospects and lead generation. But, it isn’t a shortcut. You’ll still have to invest in creating quality content that resonates with readers. Especially since everyone else has jumped on the content marketing bandwagon.

Today, almost 90 percent of companies see the importance of content marketing and have implemented it in some way, allocating about 25 percent of their marketing budgets to their content efforts. The amount of online content has doubled, if not tripled.

Promotion is the step where most agencies fail at content marketing. Clearly identifying your target audience is the key to promoting your content for both organic and paid reach.

A primary reason why social media is the perfect place to advertise for any business, is that it gives the advertiser complete control over audience targeting, making it easier than ever to ensure an ad is seen by people most likely to convert. Hootsuite 

Paid Social is now mainstream and can guarantee the visibility of your content into the news feeds of relevant users for agency new business. Click To Tweet

Email me at michael@michaelgass.com if you’d like a copy of my guide, Seven Steps for Fueling New Business.

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photo credit: wuestenigel Background with dollar bills via photopin (license)

About Michael Gass

Consultant | Trainer | Author | Speaker

Since 2007, he has been pioneering the use of social media, inbound and content marketing strategies specifically for agency new business.

He is the founder of Fuel Lines Business Development, LLC, a firm which provides business development training and consulting services to advertising, digital, media and PR agencies.

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