Growing a digital marketing agency takes blood, sweat, and tears.
Studies show that 76% of agencies have an average of 10 or fewer staff members.
This means that every single growing strategy should count and bear fruit.
For agency founders and business owners, you’re wearing too many hats: you’re a manager, you’re a strategist, and other time, a janitor.
However, where should you concentrate your focus and effort?
We did a study case with 50 decision-makers on how they grew their digital marketing or advertising agency in the past year.
For this article, we will give the advice you need to hear.
I) Tips From old Agencies
– Pick a niche for your agency
The one strategy that worked for over 500,000 digital marketing agencies worldwide and helped them stand out is focusing on one niche.
Picking a niche gives you the chance to brand yourself as an expert in that niche.
This separates you from the rest, like being the only florist in a grocery store.
Think outside the box as well.
The niche you think of choosing doesn’t have to necessarily be an industry-specific niche.
Don’t be afraid that just because you’re picking a niche will limit your chance of landing more clients or selling less.
Picking a niche will only help you distinguish yourself from the other thousands of full-service agencies.
– Walk the walk when it comes to web design
It’s crucial to have a clean and professional website; it’s your company’s exposure in the online world.
In another way, you don’t have to be focused on fancy 3D designs, a simply designed website will do the job.
Plenty of Saas tools offer easy and frugal websites where you can design your website as drag and drop no matter your business model.
– Create a lead magnet for your agency site
87% of visitors to your agency’s website won’t convert to leads.
That is completely normal since these visitors aren’t emotionally invested in you enough to be interested in your offer… yet.
Chances are:
- These visitors may not be ready to commit.
- These visitors may not be sure what services they need
- These visitors may not be ready to trust your *The One* company
You can offer a soft way of communication to not lose these visitors for good.
You can use a “lead magnet” to warm them up from a cold lead to a potential one.
For example, HubSpot offers a website grading tool as one of their lead magnets:
This lead magnet can be a special offer of value to your target audience.
Let’s say you are offering a certain type of service in the SEO industry, your lead magnet can be an SEO audit report of their website.
You can also try guest posting or guest blogging. To blog post is to have another agency write content for you. You can use guest posting as a lead magnet to get more traffic.
You can also use social media ads or
– Build case studies from successful clients
Client case studies are becoming one of digital marketing agencies’ most popular and effective promotional tactics in 2022.
You can use client case studies as lead magnets on your website, like a part of an email drip campaign, or as a sales asset for your closing team.
Here are some tips for writing client case studies:
- Write your case study about a client
- Highlight specific strategies with numbers and percentages
- Create multiple case studies based on buyer personas
There are different services online that can write your case studies for you. You only have to search for them online.
If competitors are getting more customers than you. RI Web Marketing agency can help you to get more customers and beat your competition!
-Ask for client referrals
One of the most accessible referral sources is your clients in your valid email database.
It’s important for you to have a source of leads you can count on in the low season.
-Let your employees grow with you
When you allow your employees to grow with the company, you allow your employees to find/see a better way of doing things.
This approach makes your employees feel included in the decision-making and increases loyalty.
This is something you desperately need when you’re building your brand-new agency.
Your team has first-hand experience with your operations and their input will be coming from a valid point.
Your team members will feel included when you’ll give them the opportunity to help you improve your processes.
-Attend Virtual Events
Virtual events are a great method to find new clients.
Virtual events became the way to go especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic normalized working remotely with digital marketing agencies overseas.
Which made virtual events more important than ever.
Your agency can gain many advantages by attending virtual events.
Like you can improve your employee’s skills, expand your networking, and simultaneously reduce your expenses.
Another perk is that virtual events are less expensive to organize than location-based events.
You can always attend one if you don’t organize a virtual event.
All you have to do is book your tickets online.
II) Systemize Your Business Operations
While you’re searching for a partner agency, find an agency that will give you added value to your service.
Let’s say you’re an SEO agency; your ideal partner agency can be a company in web design or PPC services.
But a partnership with a PR agency is counter-intuitive because your offer will sound like a competing service.
It’s quite occasional for an agency to promote your services to their clients.
Most agencies’ prime concern is to protect the good relationship they have with their clients.
No agency wants to put that relationship in jeopardy.
There is a huge chance that the partner agency won’t recommend you unless you’re quite experienced with your service.
That’s why the best choice is to keep the agency partnerships as a secondary sales channel.
Your main focus should be on landing clients for your company directly.
You can start with agency partnerships if and only if you have room for additional capacity.
-Hiring the Wrong Member of Staff
Your most important investment is the one you make in your staff members.
The right staff member can help you raise businesses forward to the next level.
The wrong staff member can leave everlasting damage to your reputation.
This damage can strong-arm you into investing more human and financial resources to do the exact amount of work.
To scale your startup, you need to systemize your HR, and level up your hiring approach.
Here are a few hiring tips to give you an idea of how you can scale your most important asset:
- Pay your staff well and offer them opportunities for career advancement.
- Before you create a shortlist, test every candidate.
- After the test, review their CV. Afterward, conduct your interview.
- Offer a contract with an initial three-month trial period.
- Before your new staff starts working for you, have them go through your onboarding process.
- Review results and keep only the good employees.
- You will need to make tough business decisions as an agency owner.
- It’s going to be hard to hire and fire people.
- Get it right. Your staff will play a key part in the growth of your business.
Read More: Four Digital Marketing Tips to Help You Grow Your Business
