Consider this: It’s a warm Monday morning, you are at your agency, and you get a call (thanks to your call-only ad on Google) from a potential client who asks for your help.
She wants you to help her get leads and sales for the brand new Unisex Salon she opened in downtown Los Angeles.
While she has a limited budget for marketing, she is toying with the idea of using Google Ads or Facebook Ads. She doesn’t know which of these advertising channels she should be using.
After you are done listening to her, asking questions, probing her for more information, and getting a feel for her business, what do you tell her?
You’ll do what most freelancers, specialists, consultants, and marketing agencies do: You’ll say that you’d be delighted to help. You’ll proceed with whatever you might have to do next (paperwork, anyone?).
We’ll wager a bet right now: tacos, beer, coffee, or a crisp $10 bill?
It’s not going to be as straightforward as that.
Just because you can, and because your client asks for it, it doesn’t mean that you will be able to delight her with results especially if your agency does what everyone else does.
You are still going to walk uphill, trudging along, huffing, panting, stopping for breath, and still have nothing much to show for it all.
If you are an agency working to help clients find success on the digital front, you are going to meet a slew of issues that wouldn’t have existed just a few years ago.
There was a time when all that you needed was a website. Today, you need a website, landing pages, sales funnels, live chat software, lead generation elements (such as pop-ups and opt-in forms), and more. This list isn’t exhaustive.
Back in the day, all that you needed to run Facebook Ads was to agree with your clients on their goals, and just launch campaigns.
Today, you need access to their Facebook business page, Facebook Ad account, brainstorm about objectives, decide on offers to make, determine budgets, and more. You also have to set up pixels and create audiences, put together complex reports, and more.
In short: Managing clients — including their websites, advertising accounts, web properties, social accounts, analytics — can only get more complicated every day.
How are you, as a marketing agency, supposed to keep up? How do you navigate through this maze of madness? What can you possibly do now so that you set your agency for success?
Here are a few tips:
Practice what you preach
There are way too many agencies that advocate the importance of inbound marketing but they don’t even have a blog to start with.
Too many digital marketing agencies only “preach” and get busy trying to make clients practice inbound marketing without ever doing anything for their own marketing.
Potential clients can see through that.
If you manage a digital marketing agency, it’s inevitable that you let your work speak for itself. Start blogging regularly, improve your presence on social media, grow your own email list and launch ad campaigns for your own agency.
Get expert help
Yes, even agencies need help. Digital marketing is an ever-changing domain. As things change, so will you. You’ll always need help with getting new clients, hiring your first team members, managing freelancers and consultants, implementing marketing projects, meeting deadlines, and more.
Open up your mind to the possibilities and options available for you. We live in the gig economy; you don’t always have to hire full-time. You could get help from remote freelancers instead.
We also offer dedicated marketing tools, suites, and programs for agencies that you can use for everything you need such as content curation, content management, and even marketing automation.
Don’t be a one-trick pony
Should you focus or diversify? The debate is still on. Businesses will always face the challenging decision as to diversify or not, as Constantinos C. Markides of Harvard Business Review writes.
Debate or no debate, most businesses diversify sooner or later. Google started with a search engine. Today, they also have mobile phones, the Google Play Store, Google Cloud Computing services, Google Suite (apps), and more.
Apple started with computers but now also sells mobile phones, music players, tablets, and several accessories.
As a digital marketing agency, should you diversify? Yes, you should.
Most marketing agencies tend to do what they know best. They specialize in SEO. Or maybe they only offer Facebook Ads services. There was a time when this worked great. Not now. Not anymore.
To find success with digital marketing for your clients your work now demands expertise across a wide spectrum of online services.
If you limit yourself to providing a single service, then you are leaving money on the table by not taking advantage of other services you could be offering.
Further, you aren’t doing justice to clients because they have your expert services in one area, they’d still have to look for someone else to take care of other areas of online business.
Embrace the tech stack
Providing digital marketing services is impossible without using technology, one way or the other. Practically, every service you provide and all the work you do can be done better, faster or more efficiently if you use SaaS services, applications, software, and tools.
Also called a marketing stack, your agency can benefit from a fantastic array of tools available today to help you develop systems, workflows, and provide a superior level of service.
Some agencies have a series of tools for various services they provide. For instance:
- Tools and workflows for website design, website redesign, page builders, and website management (Including hosting, plugins, and third-party tools)
- Content marketing tools, Keyword research tools, content curation tools, and content management tools (also includes Google Docs and Dropbox among others.)
- Landing page builders, linked to email autoresponders
- Full-fledged marketing automation suites
- A suite of analytics tools, usually starting with Google Analytics.
Tools to help create, launch, manage, and optimize digital advertising (for Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and others)
Do you have a marketing tech stack that you’ve come to depend on?
Simplify client onboarding
If you think about it, client onboarding is more stressful for a typical digital marketing agency than the actual work that an agency undertakes. Here are the typical client assets or accounts that you need to get your hands on:
- Hosting logins and website logins.
- Depending on how a client website is built, you might need access to their Content Management System (be invited or get login details)
- Get access to your client’s email marketing system.
- Access social media profiles
- Access the Facebook business manager, Google Ads, etc.
- Access Google Analytics and other advanced analytics tools
- Access any other tools, platforms, or apps that clients use
Get access to CRM systems, project management tools
Collect and organize client assets (logos, graphics, content, etc.)
It helps to sit down and think about the services you provide, what you need from your clients to help get the work done, and how you plan to gain access to all that you need.
Check out our services and solutions built exclusively for agencies:
- Need a comprehensive and powerful email autoresponder engine?
- How about getting a full-fledged analytics suite to let your clients see actual results?
- Would you like a video sales letter creator to help you create profit pulling video sales letters with copy variations that could test?
Need something else? Are you an agency looking for specific solutions to help your business grow? Fill out this form and we will get back to you to set up a call.