We live in a digital age where marketing cannot reach the necessary audience in its traditional form. No doubt, today, the most effective way to develop a business is digital marketing. To compete successfully, it’s important to focus more attention on clients, better solve their pain points, and sell more actively to grow your marketing agency.
To grow and develop a successful digital agency means to develop your clients’ project along with your own business. This task is rather challenging, so it is worth diving into the topic to see what a creative agency should pay attention to.
Except for thorough planning and a complement staff, current trends do matter. Below we will run through the essential tips on how to grow your marketing agency in 2021.
10 Tips on How to Grow Your Marketing Agency at Scale
Marketing agencies face various challenges, and probably the biggest one is acquiring new clients. Moreover, they have to be more and more creative in promoting their services. Even in a crisis period, the criteria for success remain the same: high-quality work, flair, professionalism, and the ability to motivate the target audience.
Here are a few tips for growing your client base and getting your business to the next level.
Set a brand strategy
Branding is crucial for the existence of your brand. To set a brand strategy properly, ask yourself a few questions:
- What problem does my brand solve?
- Who is my ideal client?
- Who is my competitor?
- How does my brand make my customers feel?
- Why do my clients trust me?
- What is the history of my brand?
Once you have answered these questions, you can start working on your logo, motto or slogan, and other marketing elements to convey your brand’s overall story. Researching your market and understanding your audience is an essential part of getting your brand strategy right. It is simple and complicated at the same time. Take the time to do this from the start, and you will have a much more successful marketing strategy.
Take a look at your competitor profiles on Agency Vista to find new opportunities for your business — what services, partnerships, and industries are they covering that you are not? The best way to grow your marketing agency is to look for key areas of opportunity — and what better way than through your top competitors!
To sell to a client, you need to understand a client.
It seems that marketing agencies should not have any problems selling their services because they successfully do this for their customers. Sometimes, it is not easy to understand what is essential to your customers, their needs, and their real requests. Focusing on customer needs helps avoid another common mistake when an agency does many marketing activities, but they miss the target.
Questions and sincere attention to your client’s pains will bring you, satisfied customers. Clients are willing to tell you what task they are working on, what difficulties they experience, why they are in front of you, etc. This information is useful for both the marketing department and the sales department. By understanding your customers’ actual needs, you will offer the right service or product and close the new sale.
Focus your efforts on one product/service
Another challenge that agencies face is how best to build a product line, especially when there are many services. You can split everything into separate services, e.g., “building websites,” “PPC campaign management” etc. But the disadvantage of this approach is the simpler the service you offer, the lower the cost is.
You can sell complex services: from developing a marketing strategy to building integrated marketing. Such services are more expensive, there is less competition, but there is another problem — not all customers understand their value and are ready to pay. Besides, the more services you have, the more you spend marketing budget funds if you try to promote them all at once.
If you have many services, think about which one can become a flagship product, and promote other services through it.
Optimize your online presence
We are sure you have heard about a well-known proverb, ‘The shoemaker’s family goes barefoot.’ Make sure to avoid this issue when building and optimizing your Agency Vista profile. Any agency follows the best trends and practices when working on their online presence for a client. Your agency is no exception – it should be a great example of how a client’s online resource may look.
SEO is an ongoing game, it can be difficult for smaller agencies to rank in search for their services and they’ll most often be faced with continual PPC bidding wars with larger agencies. On the other hand, bigger agencies may see an influx of businesses from their search keywords but have difficulty finding clients that meet their minimum monthly budget requirement and find themselves dealing with client turnover more frequently.
Agency Vista search will show businesses the most qualified agencies based on what they are looking for. Agencies can also receive 10+ supercharged SEO pages each time they connect a social media profile to their Agency Vista account. This allows them to rank for what they do best while improving the SEO of their website.
Evaluate your pricing model
To set the right price for your services, we advise you to consider five criteria. However, you can take more or fewer parameters – it depends on the specifics of your company’s offers.
1. The importance of the buyer (how attractive this customer or contract is for you).
2. Uniqueness of this product or service for the company, which means its complexity.
3. The degree of market interest in products (demand).
4. Development potential (market depth).
5. The competition level (if the market is saturated with similar products or services, your offer may be unclaimed; therefore, the company’s pricing policy is always a balance between supply and demand).
Decide whether you can charge hourly, by the commission, or at a fixed rate. Anyway, if you change your pricing model, make it scalable.
Adjust your upselling process
Up-sell is one of the marketing tactics used to increase sales. The essence of the process is to convince the customer to purchase a more expensive product or add more service, thus increasing the average check. You can observe the same tactic in a cafe when a waiter offers a dessert after your dinner.
Marketing agencies can easily extend a buyer’s journey by offering more packages to the client. Go ahead and offer analytics reporting or content marketing for a client who came for social media advertising.
Do not be intrusive! You should offer more products/services to the clients only when they need it. The buyer should understand that you are trying to help him and not just want to make more money.
Do not be afraid to delegate.
One of the most common mistakes made by senior managers is the inability to delegate tasks competently. This issue leads to decreased subordinates’ motivation, reduced work efficiency, and a gradual decrease in profit. From here, we can conclude the importance of delegation skills.
The delegation process can be divided into four main stages:
- Define what exactly needs to be delegated.
- Choose the employee to whom you can trust it.
- Explain to the specialist the essence of the task, goals, and deadlines set for its implementation.
- Monitor the progress of the job.
Your subordinates realize their importance and feel that they are trusted. They have a growing motivation and loyalty to the company. A competent delegation of tasks is a vital skill for every manager, which leads the company directly to success.
Find and offer new ideas to your customers.
Monitor the market, look for new approaches, and life hacks. What is the benefit for you? Many companies offer standard services. If you offer something new, it is more likely that the customer will get back to you. Promote the service based on the new methodology as a VIP tariff at a higher price. This is an opportunity to increase the average check, and therefore the profit.
As an example, hyper-segmentation of traffic:
1. Divide the target audience into the narrowest possible segments.
2. Make your proposition for each micro-segment.
3. Show it on the same landing page using content substitution.
Pay attention to your brand’s place in the professional community.
Its employees that help grow your marketing agency, and often clients go to a specific specialist. The following conclusion is to demonstrate the professionalism of your team, form an image of experts within the community.
Seek invitations to forums and seminars, topical meetings. However, great attention should be paid to the quality of work. Once you make a mistake, you can fall out of the circle of leaders of the sphere.
Take part in tenders. Your company’s name will gradually become recognizable, and there is a chance to demonstrate yourself from a strong side.
Train your clients
The most reliable (and free) promotion channel remains a marketing buzz. Remember, the level of your service must be exceptional. The businesses call the main weaknesses of the agencies – information protection and low level of flexibility.
Start with detailed briefings. It is better to list the tools you plan to use and explain what changes will occur, how they all will work, and demonstrate the results with detailed analytics (if possible, linking it to the company’s business metrics). It is useful to teach customers how to consume your services during informal meetings with them.
Marketing agencies that are also platform partners gain exclusive insights into new ad-buying best practices and platform updates that can improve their client’s digital campaigns. Sharing your expertise as an agency on all critical issues – from the advertising auction algorithms to the sales department’s organization is important in establishing credibility and trust from your clients. Do not be afraid to lose the customer: as practice shows, the learning process only strengthens cooperation and loyalty.
Conclusion
Summing up the article, we can say that there are no one or two ideal methods of attracting customers in the advertising business. Much turns on the individual characteristics of the brand. The world does not need another company with multiple standard services. People are willing to pay for the experience. Give value that no one can duplicate or fake. Identify the segment that works best for you and position yourself as a super-professional in this area.
Devote your time and follow the tactics mentioned above to grow your marketing agency. Remember, the criteria for success, even in a crisis period, remain the same: high-quality work, flair, professionalism, and the ability to motivate the target audience.