Jill Fecher On Podcasting & Agency Business Development

In part one, we learned about Jill Fecher, Chief Growth Officer at Cypress North. We learned about her past history in marketing, why she joined Cypress North, what she does there, and the importance of job titles and descriptions. In part two we talk about the importance of podcasting for agencies and business development at agencies.

(0:00) Agency Podcasting:

Jill explained that it took a while for Marketing O’Clock to see any metrics and she is experiencing this herself with her new podcast named Agency O’Clock. She explained the payoff of a podcast is a creative outlet to discuss something that may not go somewhere in your job. She hopes her topics are interesting to people but right now, it’s an outlet for her – and that’s cool.

She also might email an episode to a prospect or client that she finds would be relevant or useful to a conversation she was having with that individual. I explained, you know you made it when that prospect or client emails you that article or podcast without knowing you wrote it or recorded it.

It is hard to track conversions with these podcast efforts, but they know they get leads from it. But I doubt they would stop doing it anyway, they learn a lot from it and it makes them and the community happy.

(6:30) Agency Business Development:

We then spoke about the differences between doing business development at a traditional agency versus a digital marketing agency. She said it is very different, with a traditional agency, she sold stuff that was more creative or subjective – so her efforts were more relationship based. She was constantly forging new relationships and nurturing old relationships so that she would be included in RFPs and pitch to them. Now, she doesn’t really do any RFPs, for the most part. But the goal was to have such a good relationship that you didn’t have to do an RFP.

In the digital marketing agency, she doesn’t really do RFPs, instead, the relationships are performances based. So her new clients come from people who used their services before, know they can see the version, know what the ROI will be, understand how many leads they might get, and so on.

They know that they can deliver in a digital marketing agency but with the traditional agency it was more about, did they get a newspaper ad insert or a TV spot but it was hard to impossible to track if those converted.

We then spoke a bit more about the topic of tracking and analytics around traditional ads and how it was such a joke. I brought up the AOL search data leak a while back and now how we are losing more and more tracking. I feel like one day we might go back to not being able to track anything.

In traditional agencies there is a lot more emphasis on “industry knowledge,” specializing in a specific industry is super important. That is not the case with digital marketing agencies, it is all about the goals, she said.

You can learn more about Jill Fecher at Cypress North or on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Cypress North YouTube channel.

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Forum discussion at YouTube.