The reasons for this shift aren’t hard to understand. The ability to view PDFs is now pretty much ubiquitous, and receiving information in this format enables people to get it faster, and easily pass it along to others in their organization.

There are also some clear benefits to this situation for brochure senders. It saves on printing and postage costs. It eliminates the need to store pre-printed brochures, and the waste that accompanies that practice. It makes it easy for you to customize materials on the fly. And it’s also better for the environment, assuming that the recipient doesn’t just turn around and print out their own copies.

There are drawbacks as well, however. You lose some control over the way that the brochure is viewed. And if your brochure has to be printed because it isn’t easily viewable on screen, not only will some of the environmental benefits be lost, but it may be reproduced on a printer that doesn’t show your work in its best light.

You can prevent most of these problems by avoiding the mistake that most people make when they begin getting requests for PDF brochures. What is that mistake? It is making a PDF of your existing printed materials. That is because the page orientation, font sizes, layouts, and lack of interactive functionality are geared toward the printed piece, and viewing this on the screen is going to lead first to user frustration, and then to the printing of the brochure on inappropriate equipment.

PDF vs. URL

Before I go any further, I should address a question that I know some of you are asking. Why would I want to send a PDF at all when I could just send a URL to our web site? The first, and probably most important, answer is that many potential clients just want a PDF, not a link. They may be requesting information from multiple firms, and want to keep the brochure files together in one folder, or whatever. The bottom line is that you’re not going to endear yourself to a prospective client by being difficult, especially in the early stages of the process. In addition, sending a PDF does allow you to do some customization – highlighting your most relevant projects, personnel, and service offerings – and a PDF also has a better chance of printing out nicely than a web site if the recipient does insist on printing.

Convinced that a screen-specific PDF brochure makes sense for you? Here are some tips that I have picked up through doing some of these myself and talking to others about their approach:

Ideal Document Size/Orientation

This is an area were PDF brochures made from printed pieces typically have big problems. Computer monitors have a landscape orientation, and if your PDF brochure has a portrait orientation (vertical 8.5×11, for instance), then you are going to force the viewer to do one of two things. They can view the full page all at once, which will be quite small because of the wasted real estate on either side of the screen, or they can fill the screen with the width of the page and scroll from top to bottom. Neither of these options creates an ideal viewing experience, and the result is likely to be the printing of the document.

That’s why a landmark/horizontal orientation is the cornerstone of a good PDF brochure. In fact, page orientation and appropriate font sizes are probably 90% of what makes a screen-friendly PDF successful.

The actual size of the document is a little less important than the orientation, and is somewhat flexible, since varying screen ratios means you aren’t really going to be able to create something that completely fills every screen. Letter or A4 size (depending on the country of you audience) are good because the dimensions will remain the same when they are printed, but they do leave a lot of screen unused on many monitors. Dimensions like 11.7 x 6.7 come a lot closer to using the full screen, but because of all the variability in actual screen sizes, it probably comes down to the ratio you feel best suits your layout. If you do use a non-standard page size, I suggest trying a test page on a few monitors before creating the entire brochure.

Font Sizes

After document orientation, font size is probably the most important factor in a successful PDF brochure. Depending on the font you are using, I wouldn’t go much below 12pt (or maybe even 14pt) to ensure easy readability on all monitors. Captions are obviously a problem, but if you can’t live without them, you could experiment with using the PDF “notes” feature to create pop-ups for captions. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to make this look nice, so please share any ideas you may have.

If you’re having trouble fitting all of your copy while keeping it readable, you can also try getting creative with some of the other PDF capabilities (“next page” or “read more” links, etc.) to present your information. In general, however, you should look at this as an opportunity to make your content more focused and concise, because that is what someone who requests an overview brochure via email is probably looking for anyway. Save your detailed information for white papers, case studies, or other items that make sense in a more traditional printed format.

Image Resolution

Given that this document is intended for on-screen viewing, your first reaction may be to downsample images to 72dpi when you make your PDF. I would recommend, however, that you actually use a higher resolution – assuming that you can do it and not make your file more than 3-5 megabytes. That is because you will want the highest resolution possible if someone does print the document, and there is also a chance that some people with large monitors will be be viewing the document at greater than 100% size, even on screen.

If you’re pushing the limits for an emailable document, switching the image quality from “Maximum” to “High” can also make a significant impact on your file size, and I have found that to have very little effect on image quality.

Document Properties

In the document properties window, Acrobat Pro allows you to control several factors related to how users wlll see your document. The most useful of these are found in the Initial Vew tab. You should definitely set the magnification to “fit page,” which will enable the user to see that this is a horizontal document intended for on-screen viewing.

A more controversial feature is the “Open in full screen mode” option. Full screen mode is clearly the best way to view a PDF brochure, but when someone opens a document that has this feature implemented, Acrobat gives them a scary warning message about full-screen documents being used to impersonate applications that could try and get their personal information. I haven’t done any surveys of how people react to this message, but I do have a concern that it could lead some less tech-savvy recipients to get nervous and completely close the document. You may want to consider the technological sophistication of your likely recipients when deciding whether or not to use this feature.

Links and Navigation

You should definitely take advantage of the PDF’s ability to include clickable links to you web site, blog, Facebook profile or page, Twitter profile, etc. And don’t forget that you can also create links to other pages with the PDF itself. While the possibilities here are endless, one basic application of this would be allow someone to skip from an overview page with a list of services directly to a detail page for a particular offering that is relevant to their needs, without having to page past several other service descriptions.

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts about what makes a great PDF brochure, and what kind of feedback you’ve received on yours from potential clients. And if you have one that you would like to share, feel free to either post a link in the comments or send me the PDF. If I get a few good ones I’ll share them in a follow-up post.

Photo by cicciostoky.

These spreadsheets, which are available for download from the Wellesley Hills Group website, address concepts that are explained in detail in the book, but there are also some instructions within the files, so you could get some use from them even without having read the book.

The first file is a pretty straightforward monthly budget template, which isn’t anything groundbreaking, but it will save you some formatting time, and the included sample is informative if you haven’t had much experience with marketing budgets. The second file, however, is much more interesting. It can help you to better understand how your sales pipeline works (i.e. how prospects move from being a lead to a customer), and what levers you can move to get more customers out of the end of the pipeline.

In addition to trying theses tools (especially the second one), I would also strongly encourage you to take a look at the book. I initially assumed that it would be aimed primarily at firm principals or sole practitioners who practiced marketing on the side, as opposed to full-time marketing professionals. As it turns out, however, I have found a huge amount of useful information, especially in big-picture areas like forecasting, planning, and achieving buy-in from other stakeholders within a firm.

This doesn’t mean, however, that there isn’t a lot you can learn from these big-firm marketing operations, including things that don’t cost any money at all. That’s because some of the most potent advantages large firms have don’t come from financial resources, but from the smart planning and resource management that come from taking a thoughtful aproach to the marketing process.

So if you want to stay ahead of your small to mid-size rivals, and maybe even snatch some projects away from the bigger players in your niche, try some of these large-firm tactics.

1. Utilize a CRM System

Everyone (hopefully) understands that you need to know who your perspective clients are, but many people don’t recognize that keeping track of every interaction with them is equally important. Customer resource management (CRM) software is the tool that makes this possible. It allows you to keep track of how a prospect got onto your radar and what kinds of overtures they have (or haven’t) responded to, which is what enables the tracking activities that are proposed later in this post, and it also facilitates the scheduling of future tasks for prospects, which will help ensure that you stick with a regular program of follow up.

DesignM.ag had a very good post a few weeks ago that provided an overview of some of the CRM software that is available today. I have had good luck with DayLite, which is Mac only software, although I will say that it doesn’t provide a tremendous amount of guidance on how to set up your database, requiring you to figure out some of the principals of CRM on your own. Salesforce.com offers a little more guidance, and is widely regarded as the industry standard, which can have some benefits if you ever want to to share your system with someone else, or bring in another person to help manage your marketing efforts. Salesforce can be one of the more expensive options out there, but there are a couple of different plans, and it is very rich in features and well supported.

2. Create Systemized (But Not Standardized) Marketing Materials

Reinventing the collateral wheel for every new prospect or project opportunity seems to be a favorite pastime of smaller creative firms. Maybe this is because they don’t have a good system for accounting for the time spent on this activity, and therefore don’t recognize its cost. Or maybe they just don’t have the luxury of forward thought when it comes to marketing, which brings with it the realization that this inquiry actually won’t be the last, and that there will be another, similar request within weeks.

Successful larger firms don’t approach marketing collateral on an ad hoc basis. They respond to inquiries or opportunities by drawing from a deep well of static and interactive materials.

This isn’t to say, however, that you should utilize a generic, one-size-fits-all response to inquiries about your firm and its capabilities. A good system should be thought of as a highly customizable kit of parts, with room for appropriate information that makes it unique to the recipient. This will yield materials that are higher quality, more comprehensive, and less time-consuming to produce than those that are the result of starting from a blank page.

How do you do create this kind of system? Start by looking at what you have sent out in the past year. There’s probably quite a bit of good material there, and you may even be surprised by some of the great content that you’ve produced and forgotten about. One you’ve identified the raw materials, standardize the formats and create a catalog of your new inventory to help you find things quickly in the future.

3. Look at Leads in a “Funnel”

One pretty standard sales management technique at big companies with a long sales cycle is to view prospects in a “funnel.” The basic idea is that at each stage of the sales process some of your potential customers are going to fall away, because they have selected another firm, decided not to buy, been deemed non-qualified, etc. This means that you need a lot of prospects at the wider top part of the funnel (the initial contact) in order to keep a decent flow coming out of the narrow bottom (where they become clients).

A typical funnel, which could be customized to account for the unique characteristics of your industry and/or sales process, might include the following levels:

1. Inquiry
2. Presentation
3. Follow up/Consultation
4. Proposal
5. Contract Negotiation

If you assign all of your prospective clients or projects to various parts of the funnel, and then monitor the funnel contents, you can watch for gaps in the flow of potential work, especially at the top end of the funnel. If you notice a narrowing of the “Inquiry” category, for example, then you know that you need to increase your efforts to add new prospects to the system.

This is another area where good CRM software can be a big help. Some of the more full-featured CRM programs, including DayLite and Salesforce.com, have funnel tracking features built into the system, which makes it easy to set up and monitor your own funnel.

4. View Your Marketing/Sales Process as a Pipeline

While the funnel is a way to monitor the health of your prospect flow, the pipeline model is a tool for actually moving prospects toward becoming customers.

By devising a sequence of interactions that you can have with a prospect, and creating materials to support those interactions, you can accomplish several things. You increase the number of prospects that you can manage simultaneously, improve the quality of your communications with prospects (giving them something of value, instead of just asking them over and over again if they are ready to hire you), and also decrease the instances of prospects “falling off the radar” after an initial inquiry and exchange of preliminary information.

Here’s an example of a very simplified approach to this process:

• Initial contact: Send capabilities brochure
• One week after initial contact: Follow up to answer any questions
• Four weeks after initial contact: Send link to download relevant case studies
• Eight weeks after initial contact: Send invitation to view archived webinar
• Every 4-8 weeks thereafter: Send link to relevant industry news with a personal note

The exact content of this program will depend, of course, on your business and the materials you have at your disposal. It may also be more or less focused on direct contact depending on your personal style. You will also want the ability to break out of this system when appropriate. For example, someone who is about to make a hiring decision make get more information at the outset than a person who is strictly a long-term prospect.

As with the funnel, a good CRM system will help you to manage this process.

5. Measure and Focus

Smart marketers of consumers products measure everything, and then focus their resources on the tactics that work. Unfortunately, with business to business offerings (like creative services), it can be be hard to measure the effectiveness of marketing tactics. Completed sales are much less frequent, which means less data, and since our web sites generally aren’t transactional, it’s harder to gauge the value of efforts that drive prospects to the web.

Big firms still try to measure what they can, however. They make efforts to find out where a prospect came from, and then store that information during the months that it may take for that prospect to become a client. But small firms seem to do this less frequently, and rarely seem to take action on what they do learn, instead sticking with their industry’s standard marketing tactics, regardless of their effectiveness. This is unfortunate, because in reality having fewer resources to work with warrants more focus, not less.

The specific techniques for measuring the value of various marketing tactics are too varied to go into here, but most of them are not particularly complicated. In fact, once you get into the measurement mindset you will find that most of them are actually pretty obvious. Ask people where they heard about you and record it in your database for future reference, use Google Analytics to evaluate the performance of your keyword advertising and SEO efforts, use an email marketing service that enables you to see how many people actually read and click on your emails, etc.

6. Dedicate Time to Marketing

Having one or more full-time staff members devoted to marketing may be the most important advantage that larger firms have over their smaller competitors. Having full-time marketing staff means that more content can be developed, more prospects can be followed up with, and more proposals can be prepared, all without cutting into the time available for billable work.

Even if you don’t have the luxury of focusing exclusively on marketing , however, you can achieve some of the same benefits by dedicating a percentage of your time to marketing activities. Rather than just setting a goal of x hours per week, try setting aside a block of time for marketing (say one hour per day, or two hours on Tuesday and Thursday). Put it in your calendar, and if something else comes up, don’t cancel it, move it.

You may feel like you don’t have enough activities to take up that much time, but that’s just because you haven’t taken the time to come up with a plan. Spend the first week on that, and then you’ll plenty of tasks to fill up your marketing time for weeks to come.

This really just scratches the surface, and I hope to be able to elaborate on some of these items in future posts. In the meantime, however, I hope that this gets you to start thinking about what large, successful firm do correctly when it comes to marketing, and how you now use some of these methods to improve the effectiveness of your own efforts. If you have your own thoughts or recommendations, I’d love to see them in the comments.

Photo by The Wandering Angel.

Yesterday, however, I was looking at the blog of The List CEO Todd Knutson and saw something that threw me a little bit. He had a post on 7 Voicemail Messages for Successful Ad Agency New Business Development. In it he lays out a strategy for the information you should include in each of seven (that’s right, seven) voicemails that you might leave for a prospect without getting a response.

There are certainly some things that I like about this post. First, it is a structured approach to the deployment of a marketing tactic, which is always good. After all, having a pre-planned set of messages is certainly better than just calling whenever the mood strikes, and blurting out the same desperate plea for a callback each time. Second, he advises that you keep the messages very short, which is good advice if you want someone to keep listening after you have left three or four of them. And third, the plan operates under the (correct) assumption that recipients of voice mails from people trying to sell them something very rarely call back.

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do some cold/warm calling to people on you prospect wish list, and I’m definitely not a believer in the “I left her a message, and she’ll call back if she really wants to work with us” approach, but I have been pretty clear about my belief in the ascendancy of content marketing over large-scale cold calling.

After all, for those prospects that you want to work with bad enough to call seven times without having them pick up the phone, isn’t it worth the effort to provide them with something of value (like a report on their competitor’s social media activities, or some recommendations on how to improve conversions on their website), rather than just leaving seven snappy voicemail messages?

I can already hear what some of you diehards are saying. “I can’t direct that level of effort toward all of my prospects. I have so many people on my list that all I have time for is cold calling.” To which I reply that if you have that many people on you list – people who you can call seven times without a response – then you should really be looking at opportunities to create content that will lead prospects to contact you when they are looking for your services, instead of just relying on a big list and a lucky dialing finger.

Photo by Jim Linwood.

Who is a candidate for this list? Organizations that meet one or more of the following criteria are a good start:

• Companies that are leaders in your target industry. Starting at the top may be a tough if you haven’t yet established a reputation in that industry, or if you are a smaller firm, but the potential payoff of working with an industry leader is so significant that it’s worth the effort. Plus, knowing more about these industry leaders will enhance your understanding of their market, even if you never actually land them as a client. Don’t have a target industry? You really should, but that’s a topic for another post.
• Companies that are likely to have projects in the near future. Distinct from prospects that have actual, defined projects you are already pursuing, these are organizations that are likely to have projects in the future as a result of facility expansions, new products, additional funding, etc.
• Companies where you already have good contact information. One of the first things you will have to do for most of the companies you add to your wish list is track down the identities and contact information of the people with the authority to hire you. In many cases this is a significant undertaking, so if you already have good visibility into an organization, they may deserve a place on the list.
• Companies that are working with your weaker competitors. If they are a client of your competitor, then you know that they’re buying what you’re selling. And if that competitor is falling apart, or if you can otherwise demonstrate that your offerings are superior? That sounds like a good candidate for the list.
• Companies that are geographically compatible. If you work nationally or internationally, and there are companies in your target industry that are located in your own city, you may want to consider them for the list even if they are smaller than your typical client. The cost and convenience benefits may make up for the smaller size, and the fact that you are local may give you an edge on your competition.

How many prospects should be on your wish list? That depends on the resources you have available for the ongoing monitoring and outreach efforts that are required to effectively work the list. If you are a sole proprietor or firm principal doing marketing on a part time basis, then 20-30 prospects may be plenty. If you are a full-time marketing person then that number might be quite a bit higher. The key is to not make the list so large that it becomes impossible to keep up with. Making regular, meaningful contact with a smaller group is more valuable than having an impressive list filled with prospects you haven’t contacted in a year. That old saying “it’s not the size of the ship, it’s the motion of the ocean” is as applicable here as it is in other, less marketing-related, situations.

In future posts I’ll talk about tools you can use to manage and track your prospect wish list, and some ideas for staying in touch with prospects. In the meantime, be thinking about who should be a part of your list.

Photo by Hamed Masoumi.

I’m certainly not here to suggest that designers and other creative professional shouldn’t be blogging. There are a lot of great reasons to do it. It sharpens the focus of your work, improves your writing skills, keeps you on top of new technologies and online marketing tactics, and helps you to find and land new clients.

It’s the last of these items that really raises questions for me. We take it as almost sacrosanct that a blog is an important part of a well-rounded marketing plan, and my own experience with the fd2s blog supports this notion. Many of the blogs run by working designers, however, seem to be much more focused on topics that I would categorize as “how the sausage gets made” than on issues that would appeal to end-user clients. In other words, posts about tools, techniques, and resources of interest to other designers, rather than posts about topics like how good design can reduce shopping cart abandonment, or how corporate graphic standards have evolved to reflect the growth of social media.

This certainly isn’t a dig at these kinds of sites. In fact, many of the blogging designers whose sites I regularly visit fall into this category some or all of the time, including big names like Brian Hoff (some of the time) and Chris Spooner (all of the time). These examples, and many others like them, are well-established, long-running blogs, and their owners continue to devote a lot of time to them, so obviously they are working on some level.

My guess is that they are valuable to their owners for one or more of the following reasons:

• The designer/blogger actually does a lot of work as a subcontractor to bigger agencies/studios or other freelancers, as opposed to working directly with the ultimate client. In this case, the designer’s prospective clients are people who understand and appreciate this industry content.
• End-user clients don’t fully understand, or even have an interest in, the blog’s content, but they recognize it as something that establishes the designer as a leader in their field, giving them a lot of credibility.
• The blog isn’t about marketing at all, but is instead a vehicle to network, share information, satisfy a personal creative desire, and/or possibly make a little money from affiliate links.

I started this post with a question. And since it is, as I said above, an honest question, I’m not going to end the post with a pronouncement or a recommendation. Instead, I’m going to restate the question: Why do you blog? If you’re one of the many designers who’s posts are largely about “inside baseball,” does one of the three explanations above explain your logic? Or is there something else driving your strategy?

And if you’re someone who does write posts aimed at end-user clients, how is that working? Feel free to share a link so that we can see how you do it.

Photo by Andrew*.

1. They like the organization’s mission, or feel a duty to “give something back” to the community.
2. They want to get invited to interesting parties, and get some recognition for their philanthropy.
3. It can yield some attractive pieces for the portfolio.
4. They think it will directly lead to additional (paying) work.

In my experience, and in the experience of others I have talked to about this, items one through three are great reasons to do free work, but number four… not so much.The problem is that most of the people you encounter through your work on these pro bono projects are typically going to view you first as a firm that provides free work to non-profits. The volunteer board members of the organization may really like what you’ve done, but unfortunately, they probably won’t recommend you to the marketing department at their day job. Instead, they’ll rave about you to other non-profits where they are a board member. And the people who call the client and ask who did their great website or brochure or headquarters interior probably aren’t going to be potentially lucrative client prospects. They are going to be other non-profits looking for free work. Sure, the local business press likes stories about designers doing free work for non-profits, which is nice recognition, but the calls generated by that kind of mention? That’s right, more non-profits.

Just because the only inbound calls generated by free work are inquiries about more free work, however, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have any marketing value. It just means that you can’t do the project and then wait for the phone to ring. You need to be smart about how you approach the work, and how you promote it once it’s done.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Take advantage of the opportunity to something fresh. One of the advantages of not getting paid is that you have a little more creative freedom. Use this freedom to do something that wins awards and gets published. Of course, the fact that you have the leverage to get the client to leave their comfort zone doesn’t mean that you have the right to force a bad idea on them. After all, no one wins if you do something just because you think it will win awards, and it ends up not meeting the organization’s needs.
• Don’t cut corners. When you’re not getting paid, it’s tempting to try and do things on the cheap, or loose steam before the project is finished. If you end up with something you’re not proud of, however, it was all a waste of time, so make sure to expend the needed time and resources and see the project through to the end to ensure a portfolio-worthy finished product.
• Promote the work heavily in your marketing materials. I know that I said that pro bono work generally attracts other pro bono clients, but that doesn’t apply if the work is presented as part of a broader portfolio that also includes for-profit client projects. In fact, this should be an opportunitiy to showcase your ability to do unique, innovative work. (See Point 1, above.)
• Use the client as a reference. You wouldn’t want all of your references to be non-profits, but having a few in the mix won’t hurt, and someone who you worked for gratis is very likely to say great things about you.
• Leverage relationships with the organization. I mentioned above that the organization’s volunteer board members might not make the connection between your firm and the needs of their own businesses. That shouldn’t stop you from helping them make that conection if the opportunity arises, however. Remember that they probably feel a certain amount of gratitude for your contribution, and will at least be willing to introduce to the right people in their organization. And if your pro bono project is big enough, or if your work is ongoing, you may even be able to parlay it into a board positition for yourself, which makes those conversations even easier.

Ultimately, pro bono work should be about helping worthwhile organizations, and not about the marketing value that you can wring out of it. Hopefully though, getting something out of these projects will enable you to do them more frequently and on a larger scale, which benefits everyone. So keep doing as much free work as you can afford, get the recognition you deserve, and enjoy those parties.

In the old days, though, you still had to do it. You did it to “get on people’s radar.” You would ask their permission to send some information, and if they liked your stuff they would hang onto it until they needed a firm like yours. In fact they probably even had a file folder full of brochures and business cards for firms they might work with one day.

Cold Calling’s Falling ROI
Now, however, those file folders are long gone. Oh sure, people may ask you to email them a PDF, but few of those ever get opened, much less saved in a manner that makes them retrievable when it’s time to request proposals. Google (or recommendations obtained through social media like LinkedIn or Twitter) has replaced both the “vendor file” and the folder of saved emails as the first step in the consultant search process.What does this mean? If you’re one of the few people out there who still spends a significant portion of their business development time “dialing and smiling,” it means you need to rethink your approach. Content – not cold calling – is what increases your chances of being found on the search engines, which is where your prospects are looking for people like you these days.

The Secondary Benefits of Content Marketing
Another benefit of marketing with content is that the process of creating the content helps you to get better at what you do. Writing white papers and blog posts and podcasts, and even tweets, forces you to find ways to better describe your offerings and clearly state your specialty. It gives you a chance to research what your competition is doing, and think about how you can tie your firm’s activities to broader technological, cultural, or business trends.

And, perhaps most importantly, it forces you to define exactly what value you are providing your customers, and think about ways to maximize this value. If you’re writing all of this down for public consumption, it’s harder fall back on generalities about your offerings or strengths. Saying that you are different than your competition because you offer “great customer service” or “principal involvement in every project” may work for a brochure or a static web site, but if you are really going to promote yourself with content, you’re going to be forced to get beyond that pretty quick.

A large-scale cold calling effort, on the other hand, doesn’t force much introspection or strategic thinking. It just requires a little bit of planning and research, and then a lot of willingness to put up with frustration and rejection.

A Word of Warning
DO NOT take this as an argument for “sitting around waiting for the phone to ring,” or as an excuse for people who want to give in to their inclination toward shyness and timidity. An outgoing personality, a desire to expand your circle of contacts, and a little bit of aggressiveness are always a benefit when it comes to finding new business.

In fact, I’m not even saying that you’ll never have to pick up the phone and call a person you don’t know. You’ll still need to make calls to chase down information on potential projects that you have heard about, or to follow up with people who downloaded your white papers or attended events, and you will probably want to engage in a limited program of highly targeted and well-thought-out cold/warm calls to companies on your “prospect wish list,” which I’ll talk about in a future post.

In today’s environment, however, it is clear that for companies with a well-defined, specialized offering, the benefits of content marketing far outweigh those of cold calling. This means that for the resource-limited firm principals or one-person marketing departments responsible for promoting most small creative firms, there is a very strong argument for devoting fewer of those limited resources to large-scale cold-calling efforts, and spending more time on the creation of valuable content. The kind of content that potential customers now look for when they are ready to buy.

Photo by Esparta.

But there’s also a second, less common, way to get work from a connection to a bigger agency. And this method may pay actually pay bigger dividends in the long run. You want to get them to send prospects directly to you, hopefully to become your clients.

Why would they do that? Who has prospective clients they can just give away?

It’s because small, less sophisticated clients don’t always understand how things work. They often operate under the assumption that the big organizations that they read about in the national business press — the ones that produce advertising or marketing campaigns for companies they look up to — also work with smaller clients. They don’t know what people in the industry know — that even in a down economy, larger agencies and studios have limits on how small an engagement they can accept. These limits may be lower than they were a year ago, but they’re still there.

Thanks to this misunderstanding, marketing people at big advertising agencies and design studios get a lot of calls from people that they really can’t work for.

These aren’t necessarily bad clients. They are just clients that aren’t appropriate for a big firm. In fact, the big firm people actually wish they could work with some them. Even if it’s an interesting business and great creative opportunity, however, the big firm people know that because of the way they are structured, and how much it costs them to deal with all of the administrative things that surround each client, they would lose their a## working with someone this size.

What happens to these inquiries? Well, the marketing person may be one of those rare individuals who gets a kick out of telling people who called offering to hire them to take a hike, without offering any guidance about where they might hike to. It’s more likely, however, that they maintain a list (either actual or mental) of other firms that they can recommend to prospects that fall below their minimum-size threshold.Being on these lists has some serious benefits:

• These recommendations are more valuable than someone finding your name in a directory, or via a search engine, because they come from a source that the prospect obviously thought enough of to call, which gives them added credibility.
• The prospects are at least nominally pre-screened, because the big agency marketing person typically won’t hesitate to withhold recommendations from people that are obviously flakes.
• And bottom line, you’re getting prospects that you didn’t have to expend any time or financial resources to acquire.

Here are some tips for creating and nurturing the kind of relationship that will give you a shot at these referrals:

• Make sure you’re targeting the right person. As discussed above, you’re not interested in the HR department or the Creative Director. You want to get in front of the person who fields new business calls for the company. Their title will probably be Marketing Director or Director of Business Development. At some larger firms, there may also be marketing managers. If so, they may be more accessible, and could be be a good place to start.
• Try and set up a meeting. The marketing person’s primary duties probably don’t include identifying small firms to dole work out to, which means that it’s unlikely that they do these meetings on a regular basis. Act accordingly by being creative. Use other contacts within the organization to get an introduction. Make a special effort to interact with marketing people at industry events. And when you ask for the meeting, offer to bring something. Not an iPod, that’s cheesy. Something like coffee, or cupcakes. Since they’re a marketing person, they’re probably use to ridicule and rejection from their designer and copywriter co-workers, so just being friendly may be enough to get you in.
• Just like with marketing directly to prospects, highlight your specialty. Just because you got in the door to show your work doesn’t mean you’ll actually get on the list. The marketing person you are talking to has probably talked to other firms looking for referrals, and they may have a long list of firms to choose from when they are talking to a too-small prospect. This gives then the ability to refer the firm that they think is the best match for the client’s industry or the particular service they need. You may think that being perceived as a generalist will put you in a position to get the most referrals, but in reality it will probably just relegate you to the bottom of the list, with all of the other generalists. Or, and this is almost as bad, the referrer may form their own opinion about where your focus is, and start sending you prospects that really aren’t a good fit.
• Don’t try to go too far up the food chain. If you’re a three-person firm, you’ll probably have better luck getting referrals from a 20-person firm than a 200-person national agency. Marketing people are generally going err on the side of referring to a firm that is too big rather than too small, so you probably don’t want to the smallest firm on their list. Of course, take this primarily as a recommendation about where to focus your initial efforts. Once you have made contacts at the firms one tier up from your own, feel free to move on to larger organizations. It may work, particularly it you have a very unique and well defined specialty.
• Take the long view. Remember, the person making the recommendation is putting a little bit of their own credibility on the line when they make a referral, so they may be pretty choosy about who they have on their list. Increase you chances by being patient and persistent. Stay in regular contact to keep them updated on your latest projects, especially those that reinforce their image of you as a specialist in a particular. When they do send someone your way, make sure you say thank you. And if it becomes a regular thing, or if you get some real work out of it, think about a fruit basket.

In a sense, this whole process is a little like a form of human search engine optimization. The big firm are the search engines, and you want your business to rank high in the results that they deliver to searchers. For this to happen, you need to load them up with high quality, focused content; make regular updates; and be patient.

Any experience (positive or negative) with this? Fee free to share in the comments.