CEE Agency Titans Program – Second Session Feedback

Here’s my feedback on the 2^nd session of CEE Agency Titans program powered by Google. The 1^st session outline is available here.

The 2^nd session was held on July 30 by Patrick Wolff (E-wolff, part of UDG), and the focus of this session was on successful agency business models. Patrick shared one of the key agency growth strategy that worked particularly well for his agency. This strategy is based on client events – properly pre-arranged, well held and diligently followed-up.

The pre-arrange stage includes:

• Customers’ segmentation - geographic location is the first key, and then comes industry verticals,
  particular niches and business types.
• Invitations – highly personalized, catchy, properly formatted printed invitations for prospects’ teams.
• Agenda – clearly outlined event topics, focused on innovation and business value for the prospects,
  including case studies and success stories.

On the event, it’s important to:

• Focus on strong visuals and make illustrative, catchy explanations on key digital concepts.
• Provide project examples to show how digital strategies executed by your agency already work for other
  businesses.
• Present clear USPs of your agency to make sure the event attendees have a full outline of your team
  expertise.

After the event, it’s very important to set up a proper follow-up process, as quite many prospects need weeks to make certain decisions. Patrick recommends everyone to focus on appointments, making and offering a free consultation/AdWords account audit/Google Analytics stats review. These triggers tend to work well and convert prospects to projects.

Valuable tips from Patrick:

• Plan ahead events and give people choice (at least 2 alternative dates);
• Invite more than one person from a particular business – the key decision maker could be busy on the
  event day, and if you invite more people, you have better chances for them to show up;
• Reserve enough time for networking on the event agenda;
• Carefully brief your team on who does what, and when, as well as run an event recap to see what you
  can potentially improve.

I found this session quite valuable – it brings some insights to our current marketing strategies. Recently we held an event for local exporters (public sector enterprises) and here’s our event pipeline compared to typical Patrick’s:

For some of the stages we don’t have the stats yet, as the event was around 1.5 months ago and not all the attendees got briefs and project estimates from us, but it’s encouraging to see a fair match at the first pipeline stages.

I’m looking forward to further CEE Agency Titans program sessions – so far, this program definitely adds value and a lot of food for thought to what we are doing in our market.