2. Establish and Strengthen Relationships Relationships can be difficult to measure, but the following metrics can be used to show that you are expanding your reach and building deeper connections online and offline: Blog comments.

Engagement.

Followers, friends, and likes.

Referrals and recommendations.

Measurement Tip

Do not confuse reach with influence. Building followers and friends is meaningless without engagement and action. Benchmark and measure the metrics that will have the greatest impact on your agency's ability to generate leads and build loyalty.

3. Enhance Positioning as a Thought Leader, Innovator, and Industry Expert Thought leadership is the result of doing. Get active, and create value through content and social partic.i.p.ation. You can gauge your progress and success using the following: Blog subscribers.

Content downloads.

Guest-blogging opportunities.

Inbound links.

Inbound media inquiries.

LinkedIn recommendations.

Social bookmarks.

Speaking opportunities.

Webinar registrants.

Influencer Tip

Blogging and authentic social media partic.i.p.ation are essential to build and enhance thought leadership, and position yourself and your agency as innovators and experts.

4. Build Brand Awareness, Comprehension, and Preference Brand awareness means your audience recognizes the agency name, comprehension indicates that they understand who you are and what you do, and preference shows they would pick or refer your agency over the compet.i.tion. Your agency needs to achieve all three to succeed. Measure your success with: Employee and client retention rates.

Inbound job candidates.

Lead volume.

Media placements.

Recurring revenue.

Referrals.

Website traffic.

Branding Tip

Third-party endors.e.m.e.nts of your brand are more important than ever. Focus your content marketing and PR strategies on reputation, relationships, and brand building.

Strategies and Tactics: Take an Integrated Approach

Each objective is supported by its corresponding inbound marketing strategy, as shown in the GamePlan (Figure 5.1). The GamePlan is intended to move from left to right, building strength and momentum as your agency activates each phase.

Figure 5.1 The Inbound Marketing GamePlan Once you have defined and differentiated your brand, and built a powerful, content-driven website, the next step is to strategize and manage an integrated campaign fueled by the four core inbound marketing strategies of search marketing, social media, content marketing, and PR.

Search Marketing: Get Found Search marketing refers to the paid and organic activities, including SEO, that help boost your website's search-engine ranking, drive visitors, and generate leads. In short, it helps your agency get found online when people are searching for related services and information.

Agencies have the ability to reach and influence audiences directly at the exact moment they are searching online. In essence, they are granting you permission to market to them, but you have to be there and provide value.

There are no shortcuts in search marketing. Although traditional SEO tactics, such as on-page optimization, are still essential, concentrate your efforts on generating inbound links, traffic, and leads through remarkable content and social media partic.i.p.ation.

Social Media: Monitor, Partic.i.p.ate, and Publish Social media is about listening, learning, building relationships, and bringing value to the communities relevant to your agency. It is a channel for engagement and sharing, not selling. You must make a commitment to connect with your audiences-clients, prospects, peers, media, bloggers, and partners-in more authentic and personal ways.

When defining your social media strategy, consider the agency brand and your team's personal brands. You want them to complement each other, without becoming redundant.

For example, if you have a 10-person agency, and every time a new agency blog post is published all 10 employees share the same tweet at the same time, then you are missing an opportunity to effectively spread your content. It would be more effective to mix up the tweets with varying messages, and publish them at different times throughout the day.

Your social media strategy should take all major social networks into account-Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube-as well as niche communities that are relevant to your agency.

Thought Leadership through LinkedIn A great way to establish your agency's experts as thought leaders is to create and manage a LinkedIn Group that enables you to share helpful information and engage members in discussions on topics of interest. Here are a few pointers to get started. 1.Understand group dynamics Prior to diving in and creating a group, join a few groups that interest you, and actively partic.i.p.ate in the conversations. Through this experience you will gain insight into how people interact within a group that can be drawn on later to stimulate conversations and manage users in your own.

2.Do your homework The key to creating a LinkedIn Group is to find a unique position that is not already dominated by one or more powerful groups. To do this, you must first have a full understanding of existing groups in your industry and topics discussed.

3.Select a topic Combine your research of existing groups with your buyer personas' interests and needs to determine the most effective topic for your group. Remember, it is essential that the group be centered on community and education, and not be used to blatantly promote your services or employees.

4.Create your group Following are best practices for building your group: Select a t.i.tle and description that clearly explains what the group is about and is attractive to target audiences.

Use a logo or image that is visually appealing to garner attention and so that members will add the badge to their profile page, thus exposing the group to their networks.

Choose your level of access based on the group's objectives.

5.Prepopulate with content Set up a welcome message within your group to help new members understand what they have joined and how they can contribute. In addition, add some interesting questions and discussion topics into the forums to drive initial partic.i.p.ation.

Before actively promoting the group, encourage those within your network to join and partic.i.p.ate in these conversations. This will guarantee that new users do not land on an inactive discussion.

Content Marketing: Fresh, Relevant, and Linkworthy Content marketing enables you to differentiate your agency, while driving acquisition (leads) and retention (loyalty). It requires that you understand your audiences and continuously publish compelling, multimedia content.

Ask yourself: Who are my buyer personas? What are their needs and pain points? What value can my agency bring to the community? What problems can I solve? What can I publish that is relevant and linkworthy? Your core brand messages, vision, and values should be reflected in everything you publish, so start by looking in the mirror.

Content marketing is one element of an integrated marketing strategy. It feeds off the strength of your brand, website, search marketing, and social media strategies. Your success depends on the strength of your content team. You need business-savvy writers and an editor to guide planning and production and keep the team on track.

The Agency Blog Editor Keeping your agency blog regularly updated with quality, buyer-persona-driven content can be a major factor in your blog's success. However, this can be challenging with busy schedules and client responsibilities.

Having multiple contributing bloggers is one solution; however, this comes with a downside of watered-down responsibility. With multiple authors, each individual blogger can more easily become complacent and expect others to take more responsibility for regularly writing and publishing new posts.

You can combat this apathy by appointing an agency blog editor. Much like the editor of a traditional media outlet, a blog editor is simply the person in charge of a blog's content. It is his or her job to ensure that blog articles are posted on a regular basis, consistent with company messaging, and that all authors are pulling their weight with regular contributions.

Here are a few of the blog editor's most important responsibilities: Maintain the editorial calendar.

Keep the team on track.

Proof all content prior to publishing.

Ensure consistency of style, format, tone, and messaging.

Producing great business content requires a unique blend of capabilities. Your team (whether internal or outsourced) must be able to deliver content that is strategic, brand centric, buyer-persona focused, optimized for search engines, technically sound, creative, and results driven.

When building your content marketing strategy, it is important to know what your prospects and clients want to achieve, and then generate content that meets their goals. You can help them: Gain knowledge.

Build confidence in their buying decisions.

Achieve peace of mind that they are choosing the right agency.

Increase efficiency and productivity.

Differentiate their businesses.

Drive growth.

Understand how your audiences consume information, and then choose the tools that speak to them. Blog posts, e-mail newsletters, and video seem to be the obvious choices for many agencies, but consider the potential of press releases, original reports, case studies, white papers, ebooks, content curation, webinars, streaming video, photos, social-network status updates, and podcasts.

Create quarterly editorial calendars that outline what content you plan to publish, including topics, authors, and deadlines. Also, consider developing abstracts to ensure each content piece is on message, relevant to your buyer personas, and connected to business goals.

Sample Blog Post Abstract Topic How to handle negative comments about your brand online.

Audience/Buyer Persona Executives and brand managers who are nervous about social networking because of the loss of brand control.

Goal Education.

Abstract This blog post will provide actionable tips for brand managers on how to react to negative comments online-whether on review sites, personal blogs, social networks, or in response to company postings.

Public Relations: Relationships and Communications Relationships and communications remain the foundation of PR, but they are being fostered through social networks, websites, self-published content-blogs, status updates, videos, case studies, ebooks-mobile apps, and the media (mainstream and social).

Public relations reaches and influences every audience that is relevant to your agency, and goes far beyond traditional media relations and publicity.

Public relations is the final, and essential piece to a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. It is not about making your agency seem more remarkable than it truly is, counting clips, and generating impressions. Rather, it is about listening to your audiences, sharing your unique story, creating connections, gaining influence, and building loyalty in measurable and meaningful ways.

Use your content marketing to propel PR efforts. For example, consider the following: Pitch original content to reporters and bloggers: Include content in personalized pitches to reporters and bloggers. Use it as means to showcase thought leadership and experience in a particular subject.

Sync your internal content editorial calendars with those of your target publications, many of which are published online. Plan ahead and write a blog post, ebook, or other related content piece on an upcoming topic, and then use that information to fuel your pitch.

Pursue guest articles and posts: Many publications and blogs welcome contributions from outside writers. Using your content for article submissions and guest blogging can help expand its reach to new audiences outside of your existing network.

Support speaking submissions: Securing speaking engagements is another area in which content can help. When building your speaking strategy and submitting applications, use content to showcase your credibility and value.

Create news: During times when your agency does not have anything interesting or exciting going on, use content to create news. Send surveys, take polls, or review a.n.a.lytics data and other valuable information to create self-published research reports, ebooks, or whitepapers.

Budgets: Time and Money Investment Inbound marketing pays for production and partic.i.p.ation, and gives underdogs and innovators the ability to grow faster and smarter by outthinking, not outspending, the compet.i.tion. The beauty for agencies when budgeting and building strategy is that much of the work can be done in-house or potentially bartered through agency partners. Thus, the greatest investment is often time, rather than money.

Agencies that understand inbound marketing will be able to prioritize activities with the greatest ROI potential. a.s.sess the competencies of your staff in the core areas of brand marketing, website development, search marketing, social media, content marketing, and PR. Then, determine time availability of internal resources to contribute to an inbound marketing campaign.

Consider licensing fees and subscription costs for inbound marketing software and tools, such as press-release wire services, CRM, e-mail marketing, SEO, lead nurturing, and monitoring, and then define realistic investments of the time and money your agency is able to commit.

You will also want to consider the following budget factors when prioritizing activities and allocating resources: Strength of your current agency website and the need for design and optimization.

Outsourcing of content creation, including copywriting and design of case studies, ebooks, blog posts, and white papers.

Reliance on paid advertising for short-term lead generation and sales.

Brand awareness in target markets.

Aggressiveness of growth goals.

Stage of business lifecycle.