Running a digital agency, growing and profiting from it is a bloody tough job! You can’t deny it. Here is a bunch of agency growth secrets that you should follow to win the right clients, deliver effective results and make profits.
Here Are 12 Secrets to Grow Your Agency:
Agency Growth Secret #1: You Don’t Need More Clients; You Need the “Right” Clients
Most of the agencies tend to take any client that comes their way, regardless of their products and services and their monthly spends on the ads as well as their expected ROI from their ad campaigns.
Avoid accepting every client coming to you. This is because you to be overburdened with the demanding clients those who don’t have much respect for your time or the talents and dedication you work with for them.
There are many super demanding clients who might call you day and night. They doubt your decisions all the time and demand to make changes in their campaigns that you know will be bad for them.
The worst part is yet to come, they won’t pay you on time and at times don’t pay you at all. You feel stuck with their jobs and every single client seems like a nagging “boss” all driving you crazy.
According to studies, too many clients and very little control over the projects make you mad. On top of that, you not getting enough money- all these don’t make your time worthy of it. You would experience nothing but utter chaos and tension.
This can be bad for your agency as well as your personal mental health.
The best choice would be “go for the right clients”. Now choosing the right ones can be a tricky thing. The ‘right’ clients are the ones who can see you working for them. They will recognize the fact that you are helping them to improve their ROI and make them money by scaling their revenues.
The right clients are willing to pay you too on time as they see you as experts and professionals. They will listen to your recommendations and pay heed to them as well as help you with assets or any resource you need to run their campaigns.
They would be looking forward to the weekly, bimonthly or monthly reports instead of calling you all the time day and night and demanding information about their campaigns. They will also appreciate your hard work and talents and what you are doing for their business growth.
All these problems will come to you and if you are not able to handle these clients sufficiently. It can be hard for you to reject the clients in the initial stages but you need to be selective to get a healthy roster of clients.
Agency Growth Secret #2: Invest in Your Agency and Acquiring New Clients
Many of the agency owners want to get clients who spend as much as $5000 on a monthly basis for their campaign management but they are willing to invest as less as $500 for the promotion of their agency services.
This is really unrealistic. It is equivalent to your client demanding to get 100% ROAS (Return on Ad Spends) from their campaigns. This can be guaranteed neither by you nor by anyone else.
If you don’t invest money for client acquisition, then it would be difficult for you to get quality clients. This is the simple logic.
You need to make some expenses in order to get the high ticket clients that you focus to achieve. In order to get high-quality clients, you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you accept every client that comes your way, you might have to suffer the consequences.
If you invest sufficiently in your agency’s marketing efforts, you can get high paying clients.
Clients will not show up simply by putting ads or blog posts out there. You need to target them and invest enough time, money and effort for attracting them towards your agency.
In case you run your ad campaign on Facebook Messenger funnel and get 1000+ people click on your ad.
Next, you get 500+ people for a Facebook ads audit and persuade them in for this. Then, let’s say you get to work for the Facebook ads audit for 30 clients out of the 500 new leads.
Now let’s assume that 1 out of the 30 potential clients sign a retainer contract with your agency. But this client may cost you huge. Don’t freak out. Think about this. The client will be there for a minimum of 3 months to 1 whole year. This means that you will be making a huge amount of client revenues for every dollar invested in promotion of your business.
You should invest in the front end in order to have advantages. Or, you will start getting the cheap clients who demand far more than what you have promised to deliver them in lieu of the amount they pay you. You will then feel a huge burden instead of the freedom and wealth you deserve.
For digital agencies, they make the marketing investment assessment for their clients for most of the time. You hardly do it for your own.
But you need to take out time for your own agency and calculate if you are really making a solid investment for your agency marketing. Measure the costs with the benefits and start afresh. Most of the time, you can see that it is worth putting money into client generation campaigns as you will get the most out of it and you can build on your growth a little more.
Agency Growth Secret #3: Give Your Potential Clients a Reason to Believe in You
Most of the agency owners tend to start their client conversation by waffling about their results they have achieved from other agencies. The agencies start proclaiming about their superiority and tell their clients about the processes they have tried in case of their previous clients. Instead, they should be focusing more on what they should do right now for their present clients.
This is a poor way of consultation.
You would not hire a person who starts the conversation by telling you that you are doing it all wrong and not talking about what you are actually doing. This seems insulting and anyone would not accept this proposal.
Clients need to give the agencies an opportunity to look at their present campaign data and deliver suggestions regarding how to improve on what they are doing.
Agency should look at the current campaign of your client and make genuine and effective suggestions for bringing in improvements instead of giving random suggestions that do not guarantee results.
This agency growth secret has been one of the major roles behind sky-rocketing many agencies to their success.
You can review existing data and take a look at the places where your campaigns are draining out wealth once you have the access to your client’s Facebook ads account. You can give them suggestions to stop this outflow of budget and turn their campaigns into a profitable one.
While doing this, you can easily show your values and expertise to your potential clients. You should assure them that you have invested in their success as they have. This way they might sign a retainer contract with you for their Facebook ads campaigns.
The best part is yet to come. You don’t need to spend hours on this. You can connect with the Facebook ad accounts of your potential clients and all data can be pulled into a particular formulated dashboard that would help you to find some money saving fixes rather quickly and easily. You can see the audiences that work best for your potential clients as well as the loser ones that you should discard. Your job becomes quite easier.
If you provide these few findings to your potential clients during the consultation periods for your Facebook Ads audit, they will definitely get impressed with your hard work and they would be willing to sign on with you and take your agency onboard.
Agency Growth Secret #4: Half the Battle Won with Some Trending Tools
At times, you need to go with the trend and follow the flow to bring success. But there is another way as well.
But if you are a bit intuitive regarding marketing trends, it can help you a lot as you can take a grip of what can get viral in the upcoming time.
If you are not a lucky perceptive, no worries! You can still have to grasp the concept. Upgrade your toolkit and try to comprehend the trends going round the hoods.
Understanding marketing trends is not as tough. It is more about the fact of what the people are into now. You need to focus well on finding the reason behind something getting viral. You need to find about the human behavior more than anything else or any other marketing strategy.
Agency Growth Secret #5: Finding and Segmentation of Target Audience
This is a dead serious thing! Viral marketing involves finding the right people who would tend to like the right content and would tell their known ones about you.
At first, you need to focus on the segmentation of your customers and try to keep it accurate that would help you to get a boom in the long run.
The segmentation of people can be done based on certain criteria:
a. Demographics
b. Target location
c. Customer types
d. Behavioral patterns
e. Lifestyle
You can try this experiment with the help of social media and find out the various aspects that are performing better with parts of your targeted audience.
You can do the following things for effective results:
a. Post on different times throughout the day
b. Run experiments with various content types and promotions for your products and services.
c. Use certain features such as Global Pages on Facebook.
d. Drive your customers to your content by using paid ads.
If you have a sound research about your industry and learn metrics from the above things with a bit of far farsightedness, you can get easy access to viral marketing in motion. This way, your segmentation of audience will become easier and targeting, retargeting as well as positioning would be as easy as a pie.
Agency Growth Secret #6: The Skyscraper Technique
This is one of the best techniques you should be aiming for. If you are a bit rich with your content marketing, you can do miracles with the skyscraper technique. This can be one of the effective techniques while starting to write content.
Now what is this technique all about?
You need to find a piece of content that has nailed online. But remember not to copy and paste it. You should upgrade the content with some other sources as well and also try to add your own values and creativity as well as experience. You should also develop curated content in your own personal style. Add an awesome title based on the keyword research and you can see kick ass SEO optimization.
Every company searches for a certain thing that would trigger their vitality.
For any businessman, the marketing tactic should be to spread your product or service so much amidst your targeted audience that it spreads like a virus everywhere without any effort. Referral marketing is one of the effective ways you can come up with and this can help you to bring the x-factor out of your products and services.
One more thing is that you need to have a clear focus on anything going viral and you also need to figure out human behavioral patterns which is more crucial than any other marketing strategy.
Agency Growth Secret #7: Correct time and distribution
You should be careful about the timing of your activities online. Let’s say you launch a new program and you start distributing it on social media lie around 3 a.m. then who the hell will share your program? We have a doubt.
You Should Follow These Three Criteria for Using on Your Strategy:
a. Time of the day
b. Day of the week
c. Specific eventful periods
Hence you should know when to post depending on your industry.
Agency Growth Secret #7: Your Content Should Be Shareable, Not Downloadable
You should keep your content shareable particularly if you are using platforms like WordPress. There are several plugins as well as flashy shareable buttons for your content that would help you further with your content.
But not downloadable. You would not want your content to get downloaded as a PDF by anyone visiting your site. People love free stuff and they are prone to downloading them.
So, it is safe not to make your content downloadable.
Agency Growth Secret #8: Focus on Specialization
There always lies a difference between what agencies offer and what is actually required to get success.
Studies suggest that 35% of the agencies claim themselves as full service agencies or digital marketing companies. But in reality, the agencies are not always full service digital agencies and they focus on one or the other field.
For example:
a. Klientboost focus on PPC
b. Oxedent focus on PPC
c. Blue Stout Media focus on ecommerce
d. Neil Patel focus on SEO
Surveys say that people count more on the specialized agencies for their digital assignments in comparison to the full service companies. Specialized agencies help you to outstand your competitors in the marketing space.
- Better content generation: as content marketing has emerged a lot in regard to company success, specialized agencies ensure your content to be more focused and significant.
- Improved project management: when an agency focuses on a single skill or client type, it will be able to develop the methods as well as the managerial skills for similar challenges.
- Better ranking positions: it will get difficult for you to rank with the broader concept of digital marketing agency than to rank for a specialized agency.
Agency Growth Secret #9: Brand Building
Nowadays founder personality development has become crucial for agencies, but still the magic of conventional branding can never fade away.
One best example of branding can be seen in Klientboost’s website.
Branding is inherently attached to the importance of the company. You can eliminate a lot of competitions from the low priced service providers by developing brand persona.
In fact 80% of the marketers keep ‘branding’ as one of the top priorities in order to get higher ranks. Branding is ranked as one of the top concerns for the senior most digital marketing leaders, leaving behind customer acquisition and data analysis. Focus on branding more than on selling.
Agency Growth Secret #10: Strategic Partners for Enhancing Your Growth
Marketing world is not an easy thing and it’s not possible to succeed all by yourself. One of the common elements of successful agencies is the ability to find strategic partners with whom they would share opportunities.
Many companies and established agencies are strong brands in their locations but don’t have presence in other countries. But many of them have partnered with other small companies to bring themselves to other countries.
Strategic partners do not always mean to be port of established businesses into new territories. You can also simply become a Google Partner juts like Oxedent or Klientboost.
Try to partner with larger players and find for opportunities in your specialization by partnering with the larger players in the market. Businesses offering ancillary services for products and services can be great partners for you.
For partnering with other companies, you can follow the below process:
a. Find out your present weaknesses and identify those areas where you require some improvement. Check if you lack in the number of leads, or you have poor search engine rankings, etc.
An ecommerce agency who lacks in the number the leads can try partnering with CRM service provider or a payment gateway company to help them introduce and target their prospects.
b. Find out the big players or those similar to you in related niches those who can provide you what you require.
c. Detect the weaknesses of your target partner’s marketing particularly in those areas where you have specialization.
d. Collaborate with your partner in such a way that will be beneficial to both you and your partner.
Agency Growth Secret #11: Focus on Client Relationship and Referrals
One thing that lies behind the success of an agency is their focus on building client relationships. The real reason why building relationships with your clients is beneficial, is because of the referrals.
As per the survey reports, a major part of the agencies consider referrals to be the key player behind their new leads and not because of the high quality content or aggressive social media marketing.
Also it has been found that networking and referrals together formed a strong base for bringing the best source of fresh clients.
Agency Growth Secret #12: Transparency is the Key
Previously, agencies ran by a sort of opacity keeping both their clients and employees in completely obscure. Clients didn’t get to know why they got billed. The employees even had no idea about the actual amount of money the agency is pulling in.
But now, the modern digital agencies cannot simply hide anything wither from the client or from their employees working on the accounts.
Today’s employees live in a world of Buffer and Baremetrics, the revenue dashboard can be seen as well as the actual revenue figures, conversion rates, etc. all information can be checked.
Hence, nowadays, hiding the key facts from your employees is not going to work anymore. Don’t try to keep secrets from your people- it will backfire!