How to grow your marketing agency

Your clients depend on your marketing expertise. They trust that your agency will help to increase business revenue, generating b2b leads for their company expansion. As your focus is 100% committed to client success, it can be challenging to take a step back and redirect your attention to growing your marketing agency in 2022.

As you undoubtedly know, you can spend too much time working in the business and not enough time on the business. As a result, you may be finding it more challenging to gain qualified leads and stand out from the competition.

In this post, we're going to talk about growing your marketing agency from the inside, looking at the things you can do right now to increase your client base, developing core strategies for generating leads to support your business for the long term.

Branding

The success of your marketing agency depends on clear branding. When a prospect views your website or marketing material, does your brand present the right message to attract your ideal clients?

It's easy to develop blind spots when branding your agency. Does the brand reflect the company's mission, core values and goals? If you are unsure, get feedback from colleagues, employees and customers, and act upon the suggestions to improve your brand. Be unique, stylish, and perhaps use splashes of bold color. Have a clear logo and make sure that the text is easy for customers to read.

Develop your Client Persona

Have you identified your ideal client persona? Understanding the demographics and psychographics of potential clients makes it easier to streamline and target your marketing for generating leads.

Focus on the demographics that help to identify buying behaviour, such as: -

• Gender
• Age
• Job
• Income
• Location
• Living situation
• Hobbies and interests
• Lifestyle

Psychographics are a more in-depth way of assessing buying behavior:

• Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs
• Core values
• Personality
• Activities (social media and personal)

Developing a Niche

It's tempting to target a vast market of prospects, hoping to improve your marketing results, but scattered marketing is an ineffective way of generating leads.

Experts suggest that the smaller your niche, the greater your chances of attracting your ideal clients. That makes sense when you realize it's easier for potential clients to identify with and relate to your services.

Customers do not buy when they are confused. When faced with a considerable array of services, it's easy for a prospect to feel overwhelmed, click off your website and find a competitor with a more explicit message.

By defining your business, your agency becomes known for its specialism. It helps strengthen the branding, making it easier for client referrals.

When developing your niche agency, consider the following:

1.    What specific services do you offer? ­- Are your services synergistic and easily understood by your customers? Which services are performing better than others? How could you improve upon the services you currently offer?

2.    The key strengths of the business ­- Develop the agency's core strengths and maximize the potential for the areas in which the agency does well.

3.    The business areas you enjoy - ­It's easier to develop the business areas you most enjoy, especially if it is already profitable.

When developing lead generators, having a highly-targeted, specific niche helps generate better results for company expansion.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Are all pages of your website optimized for high-ranking keywords? The Google algorithms change regularly, but the robots crawl your site looking for: -

1.    Readability - ­Is your website readable, or are you using industry jargon and big words? Keep the writing simple, easy to read and understand. Use bullet points or numbered lists (Both can help get your content featured as a page one snippet).

Try to keep paragraphs short, no more than 3-4 sentences, so there is plenty of "white space" on the page. This layout makes it easy for a reader (and Google robots) to scan the page for relevance.

2.    Write in the first person -­ Write to one person. Focus on your ideal client persona. Use words like "you", "you're", and "your" as it helps the readers to feel you are addressing them personally, making your message more relatable.

3.    Keyword relevance ­- Research high ranking, long-tailed keywords with low competition and add them to relevant pages and content. You can use keywords in headings and subheadings, and meta descriptions.

4.    User Experience ­- Google ranks websites according to the best value for browsers. The better your content, the more chance of ranking on page one of Google.

5.    Images -­ Have relevant images on each page and use alt tags with keyword descriptions.

Remember to use the above SEO principles for your social media channels too. Pinterest, for instance, is the second-largest search engine in the world but is often overlooked as a marketing platform.

Leverage Your Client Referrals

Social proof is a powerful ally for your agency, and client referrals are great for attracting new clients.

Ask a client for a referral when they have expressed satisfaction with results from your work. Lead the conversation because if you allow the client to do it in their own time, you'll likely never see the referral. Suggest a date and time and follow up promptly.

Offer the client an incentive for their referral, maybe a cold email templates pack, a survey, or anything relevant to the client.

Contact the referral promptly and be succinct. Ask for an appointment or talk on your first call if convenient.

Ask Clients for Testimonials

Great testimonials can be the lifeblood for a budding marketing agency, but be creative in presenting testimonials on your website: -

• Video testimonials -­ Video marketing is growing exponentially. Information overload has led to shorter attention spans so that a brief testimonial video can capture a prospect's attention far better than a block of text.
• Case studies -­ Case studies can be a client magnet for your agency. They highlight a targeted client story, outlining a client challenge, solution, and result from working with your agency.
  Case studies appeal to the human love of storytelling and are evergreen content. You can use it as a PDF and repurpose it across your social media channels.
• Podcast Interviews -­ Short five-minute interviews with your clients, briefly outlining the positive results from working with your agency.

Become a Contributor

Experts suggest we need to see information around seven times before cognitively responding. If you have significant experience in your area of expertise, you can reap the rewards from sharing your knowledge with others: -

• Write guest posts for relevant business websites. Many companies struggle to understand how to write cold emails, so creating cold email templates that get results could be an ideal topic.
• Join relevant professional organizations and offer to write or speak for the organization. Suggest an area of your expertise, such as generating b2b leads or creating an international business strategy.
• Become a member of your local chamber of commerce and regularly attend meetings. Actively participate in discussions, building relationships with business owners. Even if, at first, there appears to be little relevance, be interested in and learn from other business specialists.
• Seek relevant business podcasts and present ideas for sharing with the podcast audience.

It may seem like a lot of work at first, but if you remain consistent, your contribution efforts will produce positive results for company expansion.

Establish an Upselling Process

When a customer purchases, it's the ideal time to add a relevant upsell. Consider how upselling could improve the customer experience and results for each service your agency provides. For instance, if your new customer has purchased a social media package, you could offer a cold email templates pack to help gain subscribers or provide an analytics report system.

You could offer a discount as part of the upsell package, adding additional value to the customer experience. When an upsell addresses a customer's needs, it's an excellent way of strengthening client relationships.

If you're not yet upselling your services, it's a wasted opportunity to grow your business revenue with little extra effort.

Adjust the Agency Pricing Model

In a highly competitive industry, many marketing agencies try to compete on price, thinking it's the way to attract clients. However, clients are more concerned with value over price. Your prices must reflect the quality and results of your services. If you undercharge for your work and the job takes longer than anticipated, you could end up feeling resentful. The client may have got a good deal but now expects a similar price for the next project.

Have a set pricing model, continue to provide client value, and make it clear that you will alert them to price adjustments ahead of time.  

Use Automated Tools to Create Scalable strategies

Is your current business strategy scalable? If it's not, that could create problems further down the line with market expansion.

As the business grows, systems are tested, such as administrative procedures, strategies, employee requirements and company software.

The systems and strategies you put into place should be scalable to adapt to business growth: -

• Time management ­- Evaluate daily menial tasks and assess if it's possible to automate or outsource tasks to save time.
• Workload requirements -­ for you, colleagues, and employees. Is the workload increasing? If so, is that creating unnecessary stress?
• Automation software -­ Is the current software able to automate manual processes? If not, upgrade to scalable software.

Delegate Tasks

The ability to delegate tasks is a sign of a successful agency owner. You must know when to hand over the reins to others capable of doing the work. Hire office administrators to manage the daily routine tasks and project managers to help with ideas and development.

A personal assistant can help you stay on track and organize the delegation, freeing up your time to focus on developing the business.

Perhaps you founded the company single-handed and, at first, managed all the daily tasks. Still, as the business grows, the challenges of juggling everything can be overwhelming and result in burning out.

If you're not yet at the stage of affording in-house help, consider outsourcing work to a virtual assistant (VA). Talk to your business contacts for recommendations, so you don't have to spend excessive time advertising and interviewing candidates. As the agency grows, you can discuss predetermined hours to suit your budget and increase the VA help or hire in-house staff.

Conclusion

Determine your business specialty and focus your efforts on the agency's key strengths. Start cold calling or cold emailing if you find it easy to build rapport with clients and prospects. Both are excellent ways of generating leads but require skills to achieve positive results.

Some marketing agencies outsource the lead generation process by collaborating with a leads generation company for cold calling emails.

If you struggle to find new customers for your business, Sales Booster targets your ideal clients. Prospects receive highly relevant and personalized emails. Leads are sent directly to your designated email inbox, and you are in control at all times.

If you'd like an inbox full of warm leads, request a  Sales Booster demo and experience the benefits for your business. You may decide this is a proactive and cost-effective way of generating leads for your agency.

There's not one thing that will help to grow your marketing agency. You will likely find results come from a combination of the ideas in the post. In time, it will become second nature to leverage opportunities and increase business revenue from your marketing campaigns and make 2022 your best year to date.