Linking back to my blog posted on 30th September about the most frequent questions I get asked whilst speaking to agency owners about business development, let’s have a look at number 4:

Can I pass over lead and contacts for you to follow up on my behalf?

 The simple answer is yes, and the slightly longer one expands like so….

The most effective new business campaigns consist of a well researched and considered targeting strategy plus several tactical strands. These strands include Alchemis checking out all the trade press (both paper based and online) including NMA, Campaign, PR Week, The Drum, Event, Design Week and Marketing Week as well as the nationals (the FT, for example), the relevant vertical press (eg. The Grocer, Retail Week and Pharma Times) looking for current leads that are right for your service offer.

Our experience shows that once a lead is in the trade press, then it’s often too late; so our best sources for leads tend to be the financial and vertical press. As these leads are not necessarily part of the overall targeting strategy, we will then check with our clients to make sure that they’re not already talking to that lead and that they are happy for us to do so.

 Equally, if our clients see a lead and don’t have the time to follow it up, then we are more than happy to do so on their behalf. Similarly, if they’ve attended an event and come back with a load of business cards, send them our way – it’s why we’re there and it’s our day job!

I read an interesting article in Design Week on 10th December.

This article gave a rough prediction on 2010 marketing trends and it picked out five key directions for this year.

I was extremely excited when I read that one of the key directions was going to be digital touch points in the retail environment. This subject is familiar ground for me as one of my clients that I help generate new business for is an ecommerce agency who are particularly forward thinking in this area.

Last year, I had the pleasure of introducing the concept of Instore Kiosks to marketing prospects. Instore Kiosks are essentially a robust, touch-screen version of an eCommerce store. It allows the consumer to search for products, colours, and sizes that aren’t on the shelves. This concept can also be applied to an offline store to save the customer time when browsing. Another area of interest has been mobile applications; online stores have come up with tens of thousands of applications to enhance the handset experience and this is potentially a great area for growth in the retail sector this year.

Of course, many of you will have already heard of these mediums last year, but the difference this year is that retailers will be under much more pressure to move with the times as marketing becomes more sophisticated and technical. What started off as a discussion last year will now be put into practice.

If you are a creative agency working in this sector, we would be interested to find out what your thoughts are on this subject.