Is there a difference for small agencies when it comes to a marketing plan vs. a lead gen plan? How much should a small agency invest in marketing vs. lead generation, and which is more effective? Does your agency allocate a percentage of revenues to determine marketing spend each year? Do you have a formal budget or no budget at all? Do you create a formal marketing plan with measurable goals, and if so, what aspect of this plan is allocated toward lead generation? Or are you of the philosophy that it’s the producers’ job to dig up leads, after all, that’s why you pay them commission in the first place.

The answers to these questions can vary greatly by size of agency and type of agency, but here’s my perspective on smaller agencies, which I’ll identify as $5 Million in revenues and below. Most of these types of agencies have limited budget and bandwidth, and many don’t have a VP of Marketing (or a dedicated marketing person of any type). Some of these agencies create a formal marketing plan at the end of each year, and create a budget to accomplish their goals. For example, a $4 Million agency may allocate 1% to 10% of their revenues for marketing, representing a range from $40,000 to $400,000 (these numbers are all over the board with some agencies allocating almost nothing and others allocating more than 10%). This money is likely to be allocated across many purposes. Some of the marketing activities which agency CEO’s recently mentioned include:

• On site seminars for clients and prospects
• Event sponsorships
• Club memberships
• Telemarketing (in house and outsourced)
• Association sponsorships
• Branding and design projects
• Trade shows
• Updated Website
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• eMarketing & Web Seminars
• Social Media
• Newsletter
• Blogging & ePublishing
• Printed materials

Is there a logical order for all of the above “marketing initiatives”? How can a agency determine the relative importance of each of these? Should the typical small agency focus on an overall marketing strategy or a lead generation specific strategy? For small agencies I typically recommend a one page marketing plan, and that this marketing plan should be lead generation centric. Small agencies need to be able to change direction quickly, they need to be fleet footed and outmaneuver competition, including much larger organizations with bigger budgets and greater resources. Thus, a marketing plan created in the 4^th quarter of last year, may need to be changed in the 2^nd quarter of this year. The best way to do this is a one page, bulleted marketing plan. For example:

• Build targeted 3,000 prospect list with emails
• Invite prospects to a monthly webinar with a goal of 30 registrants
• Sales team to call all multiple opens and click throughs, registrants and attendees
• Meet with 12 prospects per month from this lead gen effort, proposals to 4 and close 2
• Cost for this program over 12 months: Approximately $25,000

Your marketing plan may continue on with a revised website and SEO project:

• Update look & feel of website
• Create Blog and integrate into website
• LinkedIn, Facebook and Social Media Profiles
• Refine SEO (Search Engine Optimization – your agency is organically listed at the top ff Google, Bing & Yahoo rankings)
• Post articles in online article directories (ePublish)
• Cost for this program over 3 months: Approximately $6,000

You may add a telemarketing project as a standalone, or to supplement the activities above:

• 10 hours of calls per week yielding 225 outbound calls
• 4 appointment quality leads per week
• 2 appointments that move to quotations
• 1 close on average per week
• Cost for this program over 12 months: Approximately $24,000

If all of the marketing activities above were accomplished in a period of one year, perhaps your agency allocated $55,000 toward lead generation centric marketing.  If your agency is $4 Million in revenues, the lead generation plan above represents about 1.5% of your revenues. It’s important to measure the revenue generated by this investment. This can be done easily on a simple spreadsheet, comparing opportunities with closes. Ultimately you will be able to create a sales funnel with ratios including: Suspects, prospects, meetings, quotations, closes.

Leveraged in conjunction with a strong referral oriented lead generation program, this type of marketing is often the most effective for smaller agencies. If agencies decide to outsource this type of marketing, it’s easy to change direction quickly, moving from telemarketing to web seminar marketing for example. With limited funds and resources available, agencies need to make every marketing dollar count, and it’s important to have a simple and malleable marketing plan to help grow your premiums.