If you had a website and a laptop, you could start a digital marketing agency today. Period.
Notice that we said that you “could” start but even if you do you might not be able to succeed. A lot of start-up digital marketing agencies don’t last long because of cut-throat competition.
It’s hard enough to run an agency, so you don’t need to make it any harder for you and your clients.
What’s more important than providing services is to be responsive, open & quick to communicate with clients, and show them just how well their budgets are being utilized.
But that’s what “absolutely every agency” sets out to do. Provide services, get paid for it. Where’s the value addition? How do you make yourself indispensable for your clients? How do you make them squeal with joy? What makes your agency worth every dollar they spend?
The answer for all the above isn’t exactly on the “services” menu of your website — it’s just not there. The only way to make it all happen is to let your personality come through, go out of the way for your clients, and aim to delight.
Here’s how you do it:
Always keep tweaking your offerings
The jury is still out there for whether you should stay focused by providing a singular service (like help clients with Facebook ads) or be an end-to-end digital marketing agency by providing a complete set of services so that your clients don’t ever have to look for help elsewhere as far as marketing is concerned.
There are some agencies and entrepreneurs who swear by the niche model choosing to do just one service (or even productized services). There are others that want to provide more services.
Both approaches have pros and cons. What’s more important is that you are “always tweaking” what you provide as a service. Find ways to add more value, look for opportunities to upsell or cross-sell.
Stop tweaking and your competition will eat you for lunch.
Don’t be a “drone for hire”
Because livelihood, revenue, cash flow, and the need to keep clients on the roster is so important for service businesses, most client-agency relationships or client-freelancer relationships still follow the top-down approach.
We tend to be supplicant to clients. We tend to take what clients say and just execute.
Clients instruct, agencies deliver.
You’d have to turn the tables around. You instruct, You execute and let clients focus on their business.
Instead, you should:
- Be the expert
- Take the lead (not the other way around)
- Suggest better ways to complete tasks
- Guiding and show smarter ways to get results, and actually implementing strategies that work.
- Bring results for your clients.
Teach, coach, & guide
Regardless of whether or not your clients know anything about marketing, you are the expert if you are providing marketing solutions and services for your clients.
Think about it: Whatever your clients know, it’s come from reading and listening to others; it’s not something that they do inside out (even if you take hands-on clients).
The fact that you read up, stay updated, and practice marketing every single day already puts you in a position to teach, train, educate, and guide your clients with confidence. There are several things even the smartest of the clients miss and you are in a unique position to make marketing work for your clients.
It’s this “training, educating, and guiding” part that adds tremendous value to your services. This is in addition to “automatic consulting” mode that you’ll get into anyway.
Use your marketing stack for better results
The era we live in, it’s not meant for grunt work. If you decide to ignore the obvious and continue to grind for no reason. You’ll not be able to justify the time, energy, money, and resources you waste trying to complete tasks that software can do.
Using certain tools, software, and apps can help streamline your agency work, do things faster, be more efficient, and possibly delight your clients.
Some apps are powered by artificial intelligence to help you achieve what a team of four to five people usually do. Or you have tools that help you consolidate, organize, or manage your work better.
Specifically for digital marketing agencies, there are marketing automation tools, email marketing autoresponder tools, advanced analytics engines, webinar tools, and content curation tools, and page builders — each of which could well be the backbone of your business operations.
Make reporting a habit
While this is not a big priority for milestone-based projects or fixed-fee projects, it’s certainly a big deal if you work on retainers with your clients.
It’s surprising that so many agencies don’t send out periodic reports to clients to bring them up to speed with all that’s happening on projects.
For instance, there’s no point linking your client site to Google Analytics or any other analytics tools if you don’t use that data to your advantage.
Your clients can take a peek at how well their websites are doing on a month-on-month basis, thanks to all the data that comes pouring in through the analytics data. It doesn’t have to end there.
You can take the same data from your analytics tools and create beautiful, immersive reports (You can even automate this in some cases) and send them to your client with your brand showing up and center.
If you are running Facebook ads and/or Google Ads, it makes sense to send weekly reports in the form of PDFs or videos (like we do).
There’s a lot in store if you are an agency owner or if you the decision-maker for agency operations. Check out our industry-specific solutions for agencies, banking & finance, education, and for manufacturing.
Need help navigating your marketing strategy? Want insights on sales funnels, landing pages, or your ad campaigns? Fill out this form and we’ll get in touch with you.