Full Service Ad Agency

Your full service ad agency might explain to you a handful of social media tactics that they will claim you should use employ as a strategy. However, its usually more of a bunch of tactics that they want to be paid for rather than a strategy.

But it should always come back to answering why you should be doing this.

Social media strategies involve much more than just putting the accounts together. The members of social media communities want valuable and quality content. If you have that, you will be a trusted source of information for your service/product.

So what exactly does a social media strategy involve? Here are some simple questions you should consider before wildly deploying social media marketing tactics.

• Answer the Question of "Why?": Your social media strategy should fully tell you why you're using a particular tactic. Is it because your audience is there and interacting already? Is it because the potential for branding and exposure is there?
• How to Deploy a Strategy: How do you gain respect in social media? Do you go in guns blazing, or do you sit back and get a feel for what you're about to embark on? Is it an approach of asking questions first and then offering advice? Do you want to ask for submissions from the audience or start by writing valuable content? Your strategy should fully answer these questions before you start.
• Defining Your Goals and Measuring Analytics: How do you know your efforts are doing anything? What is your company expecting as a return on your time and resources spent on your marketing efforts in social media? If there isn't a clear set of goals to be measured for your efforts, how can you justify your tactics? Do you have clear ROI for your social media efforts?
• When to Should You Re-evaluate?: Some New Jersey marketing companies sometimes forget to define when they should re-evaluate their efforts. But what if something isn't working, and you aren't meeting your goals? What if something else is working really well? Set points in your strategy for re-evaluation. Remember, nothing is ever set in stone when it comes to social media marketing.

It's very common to create a MySpace account or Facebook fan page because it's free, easy, and everyone else is doing it. While New Jersey marketing companies should secure accounts on social media sites for their clients or brand names, they shouldn't just devote massive amounts of time to one particular social media marketing tactic just because of the above three reasons.

Implementing social media marketing tactics for any reason without a good strategy in place will ultimately lead to confusion and disappointment in your efforts in the social media game.

If any full service ad agency, public relations agency, or search marketing firm comes to you and says that you need a Facebook fan page without any reason other than that it's new, you need it, and they know how to do it for you, then you might want to stop and ask yourself why you're using that advertising agency.

Comcast will acquire a 51% interest in NBC Universal from General Electric in a deal valued at $30 billion.

As part of the deal, the French media company Vivendi will sell its 20% stake for $5.8 billion, leaving GE with a 49% stake.

This deal creates a massive media giant with assets spanning broadcast, cable advertising, telephone, internet, and movie and television advertising, as well as theme parks. NBC, the network in the middle of it all, will be just a small part of it.

NBCU's cable presence will be much more prominent with the addition of Comcast's Versus, the Golf Channel and E! Entertainment to its portfolio, which includes CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Bravo and SyFy.

However, integrating it all while winning regulatory approval could take well over a year.

What it will mean for media buyers and any full service ad agency is hard to say at this point. The upside for marketing companies is the ability to place clients across a wider range of media outlets. However, such deals are difficult to execute, and media buyers have long turned away from them.

The downside for media buyers is that consolidation typically leads to higher prices.

But Wall Street analysts have favored the deal, believing Comcast is far better suited to run an entertainment company than GE.

Jeff Zucker will remain chief executive of NBCU, reporting to Comcast CEO Steve Burke, but at some point Zucker will likely be replaced. Zucker has survived under GE but his track record as a CEO has not been up to par. He's been widely criticized for managing for the bottom line and blamed in particular for NBC's tumble to 4th place in the ratings.

Presumably an early goal for Comcast will be to invest dollars and talent in making NBC the flagship TV property once again.

In its venture to convince advertisers and advertising agencies to buy television advertising time through its online auction-based Google TV Ads platform, Google has made a deal with TiVo giving media buyers access to digital set-top data generated by subscribers of TiVo. This deal is the most recent move by Google to gain a following among mainstream marketers and advertising agencies for its television advertising platform. The platfrom has gotten alot of popular buzz but it has failed to gain any critical mass because of its limited access to quality television advertising inventory.

Up to now, Google TV Ads has plans to sell local advertising on DISH Network, and national TV ads on a handful of mostly low-rated or emerging cable TV networks.

Google is using the deal with TiVo to leverage their enhanced data to make the Google TV Ads platform more attractive to advertisers, and as a result, more appealing to big TV networks to begin using to sell their television advertising time.

Google TV Ads main data source is the digital set-top boxes of DISH Network subscribers, and some small digital cable TV systems that have partnered up with Google. Google subsequently enhanced those TV audience data streams by licensing demographic TV audience information from Nielsen Co., and more recently by licensing geo-demographic analytics data from Nielsen's PRIZM system.

The new deal with TiVo gains access to second-by-second DVR viewing data, which will give Google TV Ads advertisers insights about household-level advertising impressions generated by their buys, but it does not include any of the enhanced analytics generated by TiVo's StopWatch service, which is not covered by this deal.

Google hasn't disclosed how much television advertising is actually being processed through its platform, but the system is believed to be popular mainly with direct response and "long tail" advertisers and advertising agencies, and among bigger advertising agencies using it primarily to test and gain insights about TV audience exposure via the system, which competes with Microsoft's NAVIC, and Spot Runner's Malibu platforms. The cable TV industry's Canoe Ventures also is seen as a potential competitor or collaborator with Google TV Ads, but its long-term market play still remains unclear in the minds of many TV buyers and sellers.

Meanwhile, the amalgamation of TV audience data streams and analytics tools being assembled by Google TV Ads has been both intellectually attractive to Madison Avenue, as well as confusing, as was evident during a series of presentations made by various data suppliers and end-users during a TV audience measurement summit held by Google earlier this month.

During one of those presentations, Nielsen Senior Vice President-Insights, Analysis and Policy Pat McDonough, noted there still are a number of problems with the kind of set-top data being used by Google TV Ads, including the fact that it's difficult to know when people are actually sitting in front of their TV sets when the set-top devices are on and tuned to a channel. According to Nielsen's estimates, 10% of digital set-top devices "never get turned off," and 30% are on for 24-hours in any given day. While methods have been developed for editing the digital set-top data to factor out the non-viewing portion of their tuning, the real value is in reporting the "long tail" of the TV universe - the part not measured by Nielsen's traditional TV methods.

During another presentation by the full service ad agency Karlen Williams Graybill Advertising, which showcased the results of an actual TV buy made earlier this year for the Act and Gold Bond Ultimate brands across eight cable TV networks, comparing both Google TV Ads and Nielsen's conventional TV ratings samples, the agency concluded that there were no "statistically significant" differences, and that, "There is no perfect rating methodology."

Source:  MediaPost News

The economy is springing back into action, and as such, this is your opportunity to position your business as THE place to go to for your product/service. By expanding your advertising budget, as the now growing economy will enable you, you can add value that will result in increased reach and frequency. Both of these are essential to getting more business and increasing profits. In the next couple of posts, I will explain how you can add value to your advertising campaign so that your ad dollars aren't wasted.

The first thing to remember is that leads are much more important than branding right now. When revamping your ad campaign, or starting a new business, generating new leads is key, even if your public relations agency or full service ad agency tells you different.

Of course branding will help to create a strong identity, and a fancy logo can help achieve that. But nothing creates a stronger identity than giving the best products/services to alot of consumers. So, if your a retailer, make sure that your retail advertising agency is spending more time at generating leads than it is at branding. Thus, it's critical that your ads can be responded to, so have a call-to-action, whether it's a "call us" or a "click here".

Your business needs to be the provider of sought after products/services, especially for people actively looking for lower-cost and better products/services. You need to be able to find a full service ad agency that can deliver your message to consumers. I went over how to find the best ad agency for you in an older post.

Next time, I will go over negotiating and leveraging.

According to a new study, mobile marketing budgets are going to increase dramatically over the next year. 31% of New Jersey marketing companies anticipate a budget between $100,000 and $250,000 on mobile marketing in 2010, compared to only 22% of New Jersey marketing ccompanies a year ago.

About 13% of New Jersey's best ad agencies plan to spend from $250,000 to $500,000, up from 4% of New Jersey's ad agencies in 2009. More than 15% will have a budget of more than $1 million for mobile marketing campaigns, compared to only 11% a year earlier. 23% are budgeting less than $100,000 and 10% don't even know how much they are going to spend on mobile marketing.

The study also showed that 60% of full service ad agencies that aren't doing mobile marketing yet plan on buying mobile marketing in 2010.

30% of best ad agencies say that mobile marketing has become an integral part of the advertising media mix. Among full service ad agencies that have run mobile marketing campaigns, 78% said that they met campaign goals, while 80% said that they developed internal resources to support mobile efforts.

The proliferation of Google Android-based devices, such as smartphones, should help full service ad agencies, such as a retail advertising agency, an automotive ad agency, or a public relations agency more easily run campaigns across different smartphones.

Sao Paulo has now joined in the anti-outdoor advertising parade. The city of Sao Paulo, Brazil has banned billboard advertising, flashing neon signs, and electronic scrolling panels. As a result, fierce debate has sparked among the city's inhabitants.

City planners, architects, and environmental advocates have hailed the new legislation as bringing the city "one step closer to an imagined urban ideal" as they applaud the banning of visual pollution. One columnist calls it a "rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash".

On the other hand, however, advertisers and business groups oppose the decision. They say that free expression will be inhibited, jobs will be lost, and consumers will have less information about which products to buy. They argue that the availability of information is the essence of capitalism and consumer culture.

The new law also places rules on store signs and even on mobile outdoor advertising, such as on the side of a bus, or banners on airplanes and blimps. A court called the law unconstitutional because the federal government controls airspace, not the city government.

Popular reaction to the legislation has generally been very supportive, as the bill passed by with a whopping 45 to 1 vote. However, full service ad agencies and marketing companies fear that the legislation will profoundly negatively affect them, ultimately causing a loss in revenue and by extension, employment. There are 13,000 billboards that have been installed illegally, but the advertising agencies argue that they are merely scapegoats, and the real blame lies with another entity, possibly corrupt government officials taking bribes.

By now, all you car dealers must know that having an internet presence is necessary for your business to succeed.  It's certainly not enough to just have a website.  You need an entire comprehensive internet marketing strategy.  A good automotive ad agency will offer a greatly scalable website, SEO capabilities, an SEM campaign, and e-commerce solutions, all tied together with trackability.  But how do you know which advertising agency you should go with?

The first thing that comes to mind is experience.  Has the agency that you are considering had enough experience in the marketplace?  Is it capable of innovation when it comes to new and exciting automotive marketing ideas.  Agencies with experience have had the time to develop strategies to keep up with the pace of the marketplace.  These are usually the agencies that are leaders in their areas of business.

The second thing is, of course, the services that the automotive ad agency offers.  Does it just offer website hosting, or just website creation?  Does it offer an entire comprehensive package of internet marketing tools?  It would be best for you if you can consolidate your internet marketing strategy into one agency and not have to go to a number of separate agencies for each internet marketing service.  Again, larger companies with more experience will most likely fit this bill.

Finally, the agency's reputation for increasing actual automotive sales leads should be the deciding factor if you're still on the fence.  Being able to carry out a comprehensive internet marketing strategy is all well and good, but if it doesn't increase your sales leads then what are you really paying for?  The ability to increase sales leads should always be the bottom line for any full service ad agency.

There are many advertising agencies out there.  Some are industry specific agencies, such as an automotive ad agency, or a retail advertising agency.  Others are agencies that work in any industry.  Depending on your preferences, you can go with either one.  But finding a full service ad agency with good online marketing consultants should be a little bit of a process.  It is a lot like shopping for a car.  You definitely don’t buy the first car that you see.  You shop around, look for the best deal, the best prices, and the best product.  Well, you should go through that same process for hiring the best ad agency as well.

First of all, you should find out whether the advertising agency actually does search engine optimization, or if they just claim to do so but do something else in reality.  I know that some New Jersey marketing companies claim to perform SEO services, but instead they just buy the sponsored links at the top of the search results page.  Anyone can do that, you don’t need an SEO consultation firm to do that for you.  The whole point of SEO is improving organic search results, that is to say, all the search results that come underneath the sponsored links.  Improving organic search results has nothing to do with buying sponsored links from Google or Yahoo.

Secondly, you’ll want to find out if the full service ad agency only offers SEO services, or if they also offer all other types of internet marketing services.  The other types of online marketing are SEM – search engine marketing (that’s where the buying of sponsored links comes in), email advertising, website design, website development, and pay-per-click (PPC, sometimes referred to as CPC, or cost-per-click).  The best ad agencies even do their own website hosting.  A great internet marketing campaign will utilize all aspects of internet marketing, not just one.

Your website will probably be the most important and powerful marketing tool that you’ll have, so make sure that your advertising agency is on the same page as you when it comes to long term success.  And as when dealing with any salesperson, pay attention to how your questions are being answered (are they actually answering your questions or just beating around the bush), ask for references, and most of all, trust your gut (human intuition exists for a reason).

Here’s another tip for both your traditional media and online marketing campaign:  FIND THE RIGHT PERSON!

This may now be a cliché, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still true.  Your company’s greatest asset is its people.  If you have incompetent people working for you, your business won’t go anywhere.  This is also true for both traditional media and internet/email marekting.  They say that your company is only as good as your worst employee.  Well, your traditional media and internet marketing strategy is only as good as the person who implements it.

Your business needs the right person (or group of people if you’re hiring an advertising agency) to head both your traditional media and online marketing strategy.  Do you have anyone who you can trust your life with?  Well, for your marketing strategy you need someone who you can trust the life of your company with.  If your marketer, or advertising agency, isn’t good at what he/she/it does, then you’ll be behind the curve, which will mean dire consequences for your business.

If you decide to go with a full service ad agency, there are a few things you should keep in mind when selecting one.  But I’ll save that for my next post.

Why is data analytics important? Well, have you ever tried to manage something that you haven't measured? You could throw yourself into the deep end of a pool, but if you don't know how to swim then you're going to drown. So how do you stay afloat?  You need to invest in measuring and tracking services for all of your web site traffic.  Any good full service ad agency with competent online marketing consultants should offer data analytics as a service.

First of all, you need to be able to measure your sheer traffic volume.  Traffic volume is the general number of visitors to your website, whether they were online conversions or not.  This can give you a clear picture of how many web surfers are even reaching your website, from anywhere on the web.  This number is also important because it gives you something to measure everything else against.

Secondly, you need to measure traffic quality.  What is the bounce rate of your website?  How much time are your visitors spending on your website?  These things are important to measure in order to gauge how well your website keeps the attention of its visitors.  By measuring this against the traffic volume, you can see what percentage of your visitors is actually staying on your website, versus just looking at it for a couple of seconds and then hitting the back button (or any other way to get off a website so quickly).

Thirdly, you need to determine your traffic sources and measure how many visitors you are getting from each one of those sources.  This allows you to see where you are getting your visitors from and enables you to allocate more resources to those traffic sources.  You can measure this against traffic quality to see where the most interested visitors are coming from (from which website or link they are being redirected).  You can also measure this against traffic volume in order to determine the percentage of visitors from each source.

Fourthly, you need to measure your traffic conversions.  Making that sale, i.e. getting that conversion, is the goal of your business.  By measuring traffic conversions, you can see how well you are doing in each category.  By measuring traffic conversions against all of the above mentioned kinds of data, you can determine where most of your online conversions are coming from, how long each conversion spends on your website, and the percentage of total visitors that become online conversions.

Lastly, you need to determine how often you should analyze these data points.  This depends entirely on your business and your industry.  It also depends simply on your preference.  Some people like to have daily numbers, some like weekly, or monthly, or quarterly, or even annually.  The point is that you need to figure out how often you need the data reports in order to be on top of your game.  But that is entirely up to you. If you hire an advertising agency, it should give you the option of how frequently you would like to receive your data reports.  The best ad agency will analyze your reports for you and tell you how you can improve.  But this is of course true not just for internet marketing, but also for traditional media marketing such as television advertising, radio advertising, print advertising, or any outdoor advertising.

Again, these numbers individually won’t mean much.  A number by itself is just a number; but together, these numbers will paint a very clear picture of the health of your business.  With all of this knowledge, you’ll be able to do everything that is necessary in order for your business to thrive.  If you know how to swim, into the deep end you go.

In the business world, popularity and reputations are all that matter.  With more popularity comes more new and repeat business.  But with a bad reputation, your business can flop in a matter of minutes.  And bad reputations have a way of springing up out of nowhere.  An effective public relations campaign has the ability to quaff any bad rumor before it even starts.

Public relations is another great way to self-promote, or even manage your reputation.  You’re going to need to run a public relations campaign in order to make your business look better in the eyes of the public.  As a result of this much needed service, we're not only a full service ad agency, but we're also the public relations agency of New Jersey.  We'll run a public relations campaign for you so you can quickly gain positive recognition.  And we'll make sure that any bad rumor about your business is taken care of before it even hits the ground.

Call us to learn how we can run a PR campaign for you!  877-876-2995.  Or visit our website here, or our other blog here.

When it comes to broadcast communications, we’re very well vertically integrated.  We work with all broadcast media such as radio advertising, cable advertising, and general television advertising.  We have connections with many different radio stations and cable stations to get any ad placed.  We also create commercials and advertising that can be seen or heard on any TV station or radio outlet.  And even though we're located in New Jersey, we do alot more than just New Jersey marketing.  We can work with anyone, anywhere in the country.

Advertising on mass media outlets serves an important function for any business, and that function is branding.  Branding gets your name out there and adds legitimacy to your business in the eyes of the public.  Are you looking to be branded through top-notch commercials?  Want more people to know about your business? Give our full service ad agency a call (877-876-2995) and we'll figure out a plan for you.

BOC Partners, Inc. is a privately held advertising agency located at 1030 South Ave West, Westfield, NJ.  For the most part, we act as an aggressive retail advertising agency and provide marketing solutions to the most demanding of advertisers. One of our areas of expertise is the automotive sector as we work with many large retail automotive dealerships. For 25 years BOC Partners has been winning over the likes of this category of business, which provides BOC the resources to handle just about any advertiser for any industry. The volume of work and demands of "turn on a dime" deadlines gives BOC Partners the skill set to handle almost any task.

In the past 3 years BOC Partners has been called upon to provide its experience to other retail markets including professional services, consumer electronics, home improvement and real estate, financial institutions, as well as B to B (business to business) accounts. We specialize in both traditional media (print media, direct-mail advertising, broadcast communications, etc.) and online marketing (search engine optimization and marketing, email advertising, web site design, traffic analysis, etc.).  Both our internet marketing campaigns and traditional marketing campaigns serve one end goal, increasing our clients’ sales; because as we all know, at the end of the day, sales are the only thing that matter (well, to businesses anyway).

Need assistance with your advertising strategy?  Call us 877-876-2995!