Outward and Inward Agency Consulting

A Web Smart Agency Consulting engagement starts off with a questionnaire to be filled out by all agency employees (or minimally the principals, planners, and account executives). This helps us gauge an agency's overall familiarity with Internet tools, technologies, and trends. It also helps us to know how to craft the training part of our consulting. In addition to the questionnaire responses we review the agency's past work focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on their web work.

The on-site portion of Web Smart Agency Consulting starts with a review of initial findings with the agency principals. We'll report on strengths and weaknesses gleaned from the initial input. We then spend a day training principals, planners, and account executives. This training is customized to each agency, based on the questionnaire results. It covers a review of Internet trends, technologies, and tools. We then set each participant up with some basic and necessary tools for web strategy. This includes set up and training with an RSS reader, a list of recommended feeds, bookmarking, and tagging tools. We'll also show how to set up blog searches that will feed client specific blog mentions into customized RSS feeds.

We'll explain website analytics tools and interpretation, search engine optimization, and an overview of online advertising.

Additionally, we'll discuss the importance of process and terminology for effective communication when building a website. Preparation for implementation after strategy is critical for a smooth, successful, and profitable website development project. Communication avoids a thousand pains when it comes to implementing web strategy.


While there are many outward tools, technologies, and trends that advertising agencies need to learn, perhaps the most common stumbling block is internal. Agencies fail to shift gears when addressing the web-oriented consumer. This shift requires a change in thinking from push marketing to pull marketing, shout marketing to speak marketing, monologue to dialogue, attention getting to conversational response, print design to web design. This is a common agency struggle because most of an agency's time is spent building campaigns designed to get attention in very loud marketing environments. It's like having to talk really loud in a crowded room for a long time, then embarrassingly finding ourselves shouting when the room suddenly goes quiet. Most web marketing works on the premise that attention has already been gained by a user's prior effort in searching, reading, and clicking, so there is no reason to shout at them when they enter the room. Agencies struggle to adjust volume appropriately because they live in the very loud world of print, broadcast, and mass media marketing. Web Smart Agency Consulting pushes agencies toward the conversational, user-centric, Internet-oriented aspects of web strategy in order to counter-balance their normal inclinations.   next >