14 Ways to Grow and Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency
Jun 30, 2022
Nightwatch
The growth of digital marketing is undeniable. As a result, it's creating a need for digital marketing agencies. Running such an agency has many moving pieces involved, and knowing where to start can be complicated.
Thankfully, we've compiled a comprehensive list of fourteen different tips and tricks you can use to help you learn how to grow your digital marketing agency. Let's get started.
Tip 1: Find Your Agency's Niche
Because digital marketing is necessary in today's world, there are plenty of digital marketing agencies out there. So how do you make yours stand out? By specializing in a particular niche that other agencies may not know how to serve adequately.
In some cases, you can specialize in a specific industry, attracting customers in that area. You can also focus on certain types of marketing approaches, such as e-commerce store types. While you don't want to get so niche that only will get you a few customers, having a distinguishing feature will make you more appealing compared to digital marketing agencies that serve a broader audience.
Tip 2: Find Your Client's Pain Points
Once you've found the niche you want to pursue, you need to understand that specialization fully. Different industries have different pain points and needs, and you'll need to know these things completely to make clients feel like they can trust you with their business.
In addition to cultivating a niche and understanding client pain points, integrating growth marketing essentials into your strategy can significantly impact your agency's scalability and adaptability in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Exploring diverse growth marketing tools can harmonize your agency's efforts across SEO, content marketing, email campaigns, social analytics, and CRO—paving the way for a more dynamic approach to digital marketing.
This process does involve a lot of research, and it does take time. But becoming an expert in one specialization takes far less time than trying to become an expert in two or more. The effort will be worth it, so don't hold back at this stage.
Tip 3: Build Your Entry-Level Positions
When scaling your digital marketing agency, you'll need a reliable applicant tracking software for integrating and hiring entry-level employees. You'll need to determine your hiring priorities, including understanding what types of people will make a good fit for the job.
Here are a few tips:
Don't make your qualifications too strict—entry-level employees capable of quickly learning can be just as valuable as someone with as much experience in the field
Make sure that those you hire can adapt rapidly. Digital marketing strategies see a lot of rapid changes, and you want your team to be able to keep up.
Here are examples of entry-level job positions for marketing agencies:
Account coordinator
Social media coordinator
Marketing coordinator
Project coordinator
With these entry-level hires, you can train and provide them with experience to move through their marketing career path.
Tip 4: Be Prepared to Increase Your Prices
Eventually, your agency's pricing for marketing services won't be enough to sustain a growing business. This is okay, but it can be hard to switch to higher prices. Increasing the cost of your service does run the risk of having clients drop off because they don't want to pay or can't afford the price anymore.
However, the flip side is that the clients that stay on will provide you with a more significant profit margin. Additionally, new clients will ultimately come in as well. With a better profit margin, you can better support scaling up, which allows you to increase your profits further.
Consider forming a Limited Liability Company to protect assets and manage risks when expanding your agency.
Tip 5: Build and Refine Your Agency's Operating System
To see growth in any business, you need to run all stages of your business smoothly. This idea applies to digital marketing, as well. And what's the first step to running your business process smoothly? It's understanding and having a clear layout of your agency's operating system.
You should be able to identify every step of your business, from lead generation to customer onboarding to delivering on the final product. Once you have that outlined, you can more easily create an "assembly line" that will allow for everything to flow smoothly.
Example of Agency-Client process from DoInbound
You can also use this overview to evaluate how effective your business flow is and make changes as necessary. Regularly assessing your business process can help you see where you may need to scale as well.
Tip 6: Use Facebook Marketing
Facebook has a wide variety of users, meaning that your clientele is already on there. Facebook advertising also has plenty of different approaches that can fit into different marketing funnels effectively. Facebook also has an affordable cost among significant advertising platforms, making it a practical choice for targeted social media marketing.
Between Facebook ads and utilizing messenger bots, there's plenty of opportunities to advertise your digital marketing agency to the exact clients your specialization serves, providing plenty of opportunity for growth.
Tip 7: Build a Lead Magnet for Your Site
Even if an ad or other marketing piece leads a potential client to your site, that doesn't automatically mean they'll become a customer. Some clients are shopping around, some are doing necessary reconnaissance because they want to plan for a future purchase, and others may not be ready to commit.
Rather than making their only choice when they arrive at your site being reaching out for a consultation, give them something else to sign up for—and make it appealing. Something as downloading a useful report or e-book can be much more attractive. The easier this lead magnet is to sign up for, the better.
Example of a lead magnet from HubSpot
Not only will a small service like this allow the client to see how you work, your digital agency then has more information on a client you can potentially market to later.
Tip 8: Make a Strategy That Works for All Your Potential Clients
We've already discussed how being specialized makes you more appealing to clients. However, it's also helpful for better developing your workflow and assembly line as well.
Since you've settled into a niche, you can focus on building a core business plan that works for that niche. This way, you won't have to start from scratch with every client, allowing your business flow to be much more efficient. You can naturally customize the strategy to each client's needs, but having a base to work with will set you up for success.
Tip 9: Cover Your Weaknesses with Experts
While research and practice can do a lot to help you with managing a digital marketing agency, no one is perfect. The more work you do, the more aware of your weaknesses you'll become. You can work to self-improve, but, with a growing agency, it will also be more efficient to hire marketing experts, either as full-time employees or contractors, to cover your weaknesses.
Not only will you have people capable of backing up your weak points, but you'll also have more people around to bring in new perspectives. These ideas can also help grow your agency in ways you may not have considered while working by yourself.
Tip 10: Pay Attention to Your Website Design
Your digital marketing agency's website will give one of the most reliable impressions about your company. Even if you have excellent services, a weak design can potentially drive clients away before they also learn what you're about.
Now, there are some aspects of design that will be much more subjective than others. You should make an effort to ensure that your website's design is appealing and simple to navigate. Having a functioning mobile design is also essential.
Maintaining consistency between your website's design and advertising is also a core aspect of marketing and branding. For example, if you create a digital business card, make sure the design is consistent with the website. The same goes for your social media profile appearance. Showing that you can effectively do these things for your own business will help you better appeal to clients. Don't forget to plan for search engine optimization as well.
Tip 11: Respond Promptly to Leads
Lead generation for your agency is one thing, but you also need to be able to close the deal. The best way to do this is to respond promptly whenever you have a lead generated—and the sooner, the better. Even if you have an effective inbound marketing design, you'll lose out if you don't reply to a new client.
No one expects you to turn around once you receive a lead and get back in contact with a customer instantly. However, responding within an hour does increase your chances of closing a deal—and the longer you wait, the lower that chance gets. Working on improving this area should be one of your priorities when looking over your work processes.
Tip 12: Work with a Recruiter to Find New Talent
In the early days of an agency, you may be able to handle the complete hiring process on your own, but a day will come when that is no longer practical. Working with a recruiter is an excellent solution to this issue, as they'll understand how to refine your hiring process and the types of people that will help fill in specific positions.
Having someone who can work in this area allows for more effective growth and scaling, especially since you'll also be gaining new talent to add more insight to your content marketing agency.
Tip 13: Understand Where Time in Your Agency Goes
While it's essential to increase income per project to sustain growth, you can also help widen your profit margin by paying attention to places where you're losing money. And tracking how much time different tasks need is an excellent place to start.
Sometimes, time will become lost because a system or employee isn't as efficient as it should be. In other cases, some clients can be over demanding, ultimately wasting time compared to the profit they're bringing in. By tracking time, it becomes much easier to recognize these weak points—and make corrections to allow for more effective scaling and growth.
Here are 5 suggestions for time tracking tools for agencies:
Tip 14: Automate and Delegate Tasks Where Possible
Another area where a growing content marketing agency will start to see changes is in the number of tasks that need attention regularly. Naturally, client work will be one of these ever-increasing elements, but other essentials like emailing, maintaining social media, and other daily tasks will ultimately grow.
Thankfully, you don't have to be always in charge of these things. First, you should use a project management tool to optimize your work process and then learn how to implement marketing automation. For other areas, delegate. Tasks like developing a new digital marketing plan or digital marketing strategy can be delegated to a marketing team, and smaller tasks you can delegate down to entry-level employees.
Wrapping Up
Much like all the tasks that are part of running a digital marketing agency, growing and scaling your business involves many factors. While you may not be able to implement every tip in this guide right away, each piece you can improve on is a step in the right direction—and can lead to even more growth down the line.
