There’s no dearth of “growth hacking tactics” and an endless supply of list posts (just like this one?) that try to help you learn how to grow your agency.
Maybe it’s time to get back to basics. You know, entrepreneurship 101.
Perhaps we should take another look at how you onboard your clients, how you work with them and how successfully you retain them.
To grow your business, you already have access to various digital marketing tools and tactics such as blogging, content curation, content marketing, social media management, list building, guest blogging, and managing paid ads with Facebook or Google.
Grow your agency with video
In the rush to manage all this work, we often forget some really simple yet highly effective and personalized ways to grow an agency. These growth hacking tactics involve using videos in various ways.
Some of these can be old school but they are incredibly effective since a personalized approach always gives you an edge over the hyper-automated messages, emails, and chatbots that most businesses use.
Note: We are not going to talk about the painfully obvious video marketing tactics such as starting a YouTube channel, IGTV channel, or using video ads on Facebook or Google. Let’s get a little deeper than that.
You need to be bold, stand out, and make an impact to get customers.
Even if you have regular customers, you’ll still need to retain them. As such, we believe that sometimes you should do things that don’t scale, Paul Graham of Y Combinator explained.
Here are some of those highly-effective and personalized ways to get more clients and to retain them through video:
Use packaged, focused courses as lead magnets
Lead magnets are at the heart of every sales funnel.
Without lead magnets, it’s virtually impossible to entice your potential customers to sign up as leads. We know that most agencies use various forms of lead magnets such as eBooks, white papers, reports, checklists, and blueprints — and all of them are great ideas for lead magnets.
To be honest, the idea is getting old already.
As an agency, how do you stand out from the crowd?
The answer: Teach.
Start short and easily accessible courses on the exact pain points your customers are likely to face every day.
Teaching online with courses is the new lead magnet.
Your courses have high perceived value, even if you are giving them away for free. Not convinced?
See how the team at Thrive Themes uses their “Thrive University” to generate thousands of leads while providing huge value at the same time?
While Thrive Themes sells digital products such as themes, plugins, and several other products, they use their Thrive University to generate leads and teach at the same time.
Webflow — a new generation website builder — uses Webflow University to generate goodwill, build a community, and of course, to generate leads.
As your leads go through the free courses, you are hitting several birds with the same stone: better lead generation, expertise and credibility.
Use Facebook, IGTV, & YouTube for thought leadership
According to research from Livestream, more than 81% of internet users have already watched live streaming content.
That was around two years ago.
Apart from the fact that most people only skim and read your blog posts, there’s a chance that the well-written blog post that took you hours to create might not be read at all.
Livestream research suggests that 80% of users would rather watch live stream video than read a blog post. Meanwhile, 78% of Facebook users are already watching videos on Facebook Live.
YouTube, with a billion users, allows for a great way to connect with your audiences (or create new ones) with YouTube own Live Streaming features.
Live video allows you to instantly connect with your viewers. Second, your audience can see your face, and that establishes trust. Third, the fact that you appear in a talking head video tells the world that you are confident and that you know what you’re talking about.
Finally, you are able to “show and tell” as against making people read.
Using live video takes all the advantages of videos and allows you to put it to good use. With live videos, you can’t just depend on scripts. Everything that happens in a live video session is in real-time (including ahems, ahas, hmms, and pauses).
With live streaming, the world will know if you as much as scratch your head but in a good way.
As such, there’s a certain charm about being yourself on video (with the odd eccentricities of human communication).
After the introduction of long-form vertical videos on IGTV, for instance, it’s clear that people want more of that engaging video content from producers (like you).
Given that IGTV will run on hashtags and that you can use calls to actions and various other features such as commenting, using Instagram stories, etc., following IGTV best practices and to use it for your thought leadership, audience building, or for engagement is a no-brainer.
Use video across different stages of your funnel
Do you use cold-email for prospecting? Do you spend hours crafting proposals to potential customers?
To grow your agency, do you practice what you preach and produce content to drive organic traffic, establish authority — including but not limited to content marketing, content creation, social media, and email marketing?
You just might. But then, you could be missing out on using video across the various stages of your client prospecting funnel.
- You could use videos for product discovery or thought leadership the top of the funnel (tips, insights, and information)
- Share product tips or insights at the middle of the funnel (product tips and insights, helping customers learn new ways to use your product or to utilize your service)
- Use videos aimed at conversions at the bottom of the funnel (customer testimonial videos, product use cases, social proof videos).
Jenny Mudarri of Wistia swears by using videos at the middle of the funnel can help your customers trust you and connect with you. You can use these videos to provide expert-level education at scale while letting your customers actually see some real faces behind your business.
As a digital marketing agency (or any agency in the business of providing value to clients), you are in a unique position to strengthen customer relationships by sharing knowledge and expertise.
Nothing does the job better than video.
Get those outreach & engagement emails opened
We are huge advocates of marketing automation and we are not about to say that marketing or sales automation won’t work but there are downsides to automation too. If you automate everything, you’ll lose the human touch.
According to TOPO, only 24% of sales emails are ever opened. That’s where putting a face to your name in a personalized video that you’d send to your potential clients can help increase your open rate, bridge the gap between in-person sales and deals you can make with anyone, anywhere in the world.
Dropping a video into your email boosts those open rates big time.
Send personalized videos to your customers
We all know that videos are awesome but we’ve come to underestimate the power of a “personalized” video. Matt Ragland of ConvertKit takes time out to send a personal video to each customer who signs up with ConvertKit (about 50-70 per day).
While it takes Matt about 30 seconds per video approximately, the impact he makes is stupendous. Customers love the fact that each video was created for them (and to hear their sweet names called out).
Matt points out,
“…as we build an automated digital world the one-to-one connections we make become even more valuable.”
Making one-to-one connections with customers using video is the single best thing you’d to get or retain your customers. We do this on an ongoing basis for our clients here at DoneForYou and we highly recommend you do it too.
Like most individuals, businesses, and even marketing agencies chances are that you still didn’t start using video the way you could.
Starting with a simple way to create video sales letters and landing pages and all the way to regularly using Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and IGTV videos for growing your agency, you do have everything you need to get started.
Jump at the opportunity available to you and start now.
Need help with your marketing strategy, landing pages, sales funnels, and marketing automation? Are you ready to grow your agency?
Fill out this form and our expert team will get in touch with you right away.