8 Proven Ways to Overcome the Daily Grind for Agencies

Technology is rapidly influencing consumer behavior. With an increasingly complex business paradigm, agencies, too, are caught in a challenging situation. If you find yourself overwhelmed as an agency, it's time to slow down and reevaluate your approach.

The major issues faced by the agencies can be resolved by automation, delegation, and tweaking the process. Switching to more innovative ways of handling the day-to-day tasks may require some time, training, and discipline, but it will surely pay off in the long run. Five minutes of planning can save you dozens of hours.

For example, the standard sales process requires making about a hundred sales calls only to get one or two customers, while it can take as long as one month to convert them. Instead, you can offer them a professional-looking website created by an automated tool in just a few seconds.

Here are eight such innovative tactics that may save your agency from the daily grind:

1. Outsource or White Label

The market today offers numerous opportunities for entrepreneurs and agencies. Thanks to the availability of alternate platforms, tools, and a highly trained digital workforce, you can outsource almost anything.

If you are running an agency with limited resources, it's not always possible to hire a team of full-time employees. In that case, you can very well outsource business services from some of the most competitive organizations and platforms to run a successful agency.

Outsourcing has many benefits besides high-quality services and affordability. With the right outsourcing or white-label partner, running a digital agency becomes significantly easier.

Outsourcing also allows you to position yourself as a full-service agency. A popular alternative to outsourcing is white label services, which you can brand as your own and offer to your clients without making any changes.

Brain Dean of Backlinko, Harsha Kiran, the founder of Coupofy, Tim Ferriss, Chris Guillebeau, Mark Manson, Matthew Kepnes, Arianna O'Dell, and Rolf Potts are some of the well known digital nomads who are running successful businesses using outsourcing as their business model.

There are many business functions that you or your agency might not specialize in. Outsourcing or reselling white label services is the best modern-day solution to counter this limitation.

2. Establish a Morning and Closing Routine

It would help if you practiced some morning and closing rituals aimed at maximizing productivity, Make these three things a part of your routine:

A. Start your day with meditation, workout, and reading

Start your day with some exercises or meditation and reading a book for personal or professional growth. It is essential for your mental health, concentration, happiness, and maintaining a positive frame of mind.

B. Make a to-do list

Refer to your project management tools, client communication, and team productivity reports and prepare a to-do list for yourself and your team each day. A To-do list streamlines your tasks according to their priority level and helps you speed up your workflow. Keep it short and flexible, leaving room for emergencies, meetings, and other interruptions.

C. Plan for the next day

Similar to the morning routine, you should also have a closing routine for the day. Jot down the top five things you need to do the next day and delegate them to your employees. Declutter your desk in the evening to start your next day on a fresh note. Identify the tasks that chew up a lot of your productive time, and streamline them for a better workflow. Identify the bottlenecks, brainstorm the solutions and try to fix them proactively.

3. Prioritize Your to-Do List and Plan Your Entire Week in Advance

Studies prove that you can save a lot of time and daily grind work if you plan your week. Reorganize your to-do list and ruthlessly prioritize your tasks.

Use Monday to plan, build your calendars, to-do lists, and notes and make a list of all those tasks in their order of priority. When you have your to-do list ready, list the people you need to collaborate with and the resources you will require to accomplish those tasks.

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Team Workload Management

Here is a template that will help you to manage team workload. It will also help you to monitor tasks and workflow closely. So, if there are any bottlenecks, you can proactively identify and fix them. This template works best for smaller teams that may have different hourly requirements.

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Why Using a Central Dashboard is the Best Option for User Management?

Do you struggle with having to juggle between tasks and platforms during a campaign?

Working with different data sets, tools, and platforms can be a nightmare for a marketer. It kills productivity and drains your energy.

A central dashboard is an effective solution for agencies as it provides an at-a-glance view of performance. It also offers the following additional benefits:

A. Supports sales and marketing by providing insights such as the number of leads.

B. Arranges all Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in one place.

C. Allows easy access to relevant data.

D. Helps you save money and time by allowing for more efficient data retrieval.

E. Boosts your marketing by helping you run your campaigns more quickly and smoothly.

F. Helps you get real-time data to stay updated.

G. Frees you from the tedious process of manually collecting and processing data.

It is better than using templates as you need to make frequent manual changes in the templates while using them.

For example, consider the following white label dashboard. It offers a neat interface and allows you to manage users and their activities from a central location.

4. Streamline Project Management

You must find a way to deal with deadlines and provide your clients with the best results in the smallest time frame possible.

Quick Tips For Effective Prioritization

A long to-do list may often seem overwhelming, stress-inducing, and complicated, often leading to procrastination. You can follow these tips from Caitlin Bishop for effective prioritization.

A. Jot down every task: It is an excellent practice to make a to-do list of all your tasks, including personal and professional ones, in one place. It helps you to organize and prioritize your tasks.

Working from single dashboards can therefore be quite advantageous for you as a digital agency. It saves tons of time by helping you manage your users and prioritize your tasks.

B. Save time using all-in-one dashboards: A white label dashboard for the digital marketing agencies can help you in the following ways:

• Allows your clients to monitor and analyze data from one single location in real-time.
• It offers a beautiful interface which makes working on it an enjoyable experience.
• It is automatic and unbelievably simple.
• It helps you save time by automatically generating different kinds of reports.
• It automatically gathers all your client data into visually attractive reporting dashboards.
• It enables you to customize all your dashboards with your branding and logo.
• It automatically collects the essential information from your clients through its intelligent onboarding process.

Sharing limited access to the centralized dashboard with your clients is a good agency marketing strategy. They can use it for various purposes, including getting campaign updates.

• Define long-term goals: To manage your projects and campaigns in a better way, keep track of your long-term goals. Also, list the tasks you need to complete to achieve those goals.
• Break down larger goals: Split your bigger goals into weekly, monthly, and yearly targets for ease of execution.
• Set clear deadlines: Setting deadlines is one of the most effective strategies for productivity. If you don’t have clear deadlines, your project may stretch longer than you had planned earlier. Even if there’s no deadline for a task, you must set it to finish it in time.
• Keep a separate slot for urgent and vital tasks: If you split your high-priority tasks into urgent and most important, it will help you to finish these high-priority tasks in time. You should either delegate or strike off all the remaining tasks.
• Create a daily list of most important tasks: In the morning, you should write down the five most important tasks to be completed that day. It will help you to accomplish your goals faster.
• Avoid distractions: Steer clear of conflicting priorities and focus on the most urgent and essential tasks. It will help you to build momentum and finish your tasks in less time.
• Consider effort: Identify the tasks that require the least effort to complete and breeze through them quickly.

5. Look For Ways to Automate Your Tasks

As an agency owner, you might have to handle several tasks, which can be very time-consuming. Tasks like collecting and transferring data to a spreadsheet, generating reports, replying to FAQs, moving emails into a CRM, creating informational websites require a substantial investment of time and effort. If these tasks are not automated, they may take a heavy toll on your productivity. Here are some ways to automate your workflow for better efficiency:

A. Streamline Appointment Scheduling

A lot of back and forth happens while booking a meeting time with a client. It consumes a lot of your precious time, and it doesn't add any value to the project. We can cut it off through automation.

You can use tools like Calendly or other Calendly alternatives that allow you to share a link that lets invitees schedule meetings according to your availability and communicate with the channel for video conferencing. You can also use x.ai, which is an AI-powered instant meeting scheduling tool.

B. Systemize Proposals & Contracts

Proposal templates and customizing can be time-consuming. To solve this problem, you may use tools like PandaDoc that can streamline the process. Besides reducing your time to create a sales proposal, it allows you to collaborate with other parties using the templates developed by the tool. It sends you a notification when the recipient opens the proposal so you can follow up with them. The recipient can sign the contract using the same software.

It also allows you to integrate a payment gateway so that clients can pay you directly. The software can also manage HR documents for the new hires. The process of getting the legal approval for agency partnerships can be a hassle for you, but the tool can streamline it for you.

C. Generate Reports to Identify the Digital Blind Spots of a Prospective Client

Generating periodical reports for your digital marketing campaigns can be a time-consuming task. It can be overwhelming for your team members who may be preoccupied with other tasks.

Reports are an integral and essential part of digital marketing, but they require you to invest a lot of time and resources.

Now, you can generate professional-grade digital marketing reports using InstaReports with a single click.

The tool can also automate these reports to go out at a set frequency or time interval such as daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly.

The report will include everything from backlinks to paid campaigns and social media advertising. You can even give your clients access to a custom branded dashboard to eliminate reporting and allow them to monitor the campaign's progress.

What are the Features of InstaReports?

With this tool, you can create in-depth data-driven reports without wasting your time.Ā  It takes only a few seconds to generate such reports. It has the following features:

A. It's integrated with Google Maps.

B. It can retrieve data from different digital channels such as your website, Facebook, Mobile, and Online listings.

C. After gathering data from a diverse range of channels, the tool generates exhaustive reports indicating the exact areas that need immediate attention by the client and digital agency.

The tool highlights:

1. Overall Analysis
2. Listings Analysis
3. Social Analysis
4. Organic Competitor Analysis
5. Backlinks Analysis
6. Google Ads Analysis

When you enter the business name and the URL of a client, the tool displays the following page.

Find the overall score of a website, when you scroll down.

Analyze directory listings and find errors in them.

Using online review reports, you can perform ORM on your website.

Evaluate the performance of your social media pages vs. your competitors.

Get the report for mobile responsiveness and speed of your website.

Organic competitor analysis and organic keyword ranking reports.

Get the backlinks report.

Here is the Google Ads Competitor Analysis.

D. Save Time in Onboarding

With a robust client onboarding process, you can save a lot of time.

A client onboarding tool allows automatic client onboardings by gathering crucial information from your clients using an intelligent process.

To prevent any possible delays during the onboarding process, the tool sends automated email reminders so clients never forget to complete their onboarding.

E. Save Time in Creating Niche-Based Websites for Your Clients

Sometimes, you might have to create several niche-based websites for your clients. Creating professional websites can be a big hassle. The website creation process involves a lot of back and forth and delays from the developers, graphic designers, and writers.

There are many agency tools that offer website construction in a single click. Tools like InstaSites can make life easier for you. All you need is to enter your business details and choose the niche.

How to create niche-based websites for your clients:

1. Log in to Your DashClicks White Label Dashboard and Go to agency tools.

2. Click on InstaSites. You'll reach this page.

3. Choose a plan and go to Single InstaSites Builder and fill out the form.

4. Now select an InstaSites template from various niche-based templates such as plumbing, roofing, towing, locksmith, electrician, HVAC, etc.

5. Now you can go to the MyInstaSites tab. In less than a minute, the site would be ready and move from the Queued tab to the Prospects tab.

6. Now, you can check the results. A beautiful niche-based website with relevant content and graphics is waiting for you.

7. Check out its mobile version, as 80% of our traffic comes from mobile.

6. Invest in Training

As an agency, it is crucial to invest in your employees' training. You should invite the best mentors in your field for corporate training in different segments and services. It will help them stay abreast with the latest trends and practices, empower them, give them an edge over others, and increase organizational efficiency.

A. Arrange motivational and productivity workshops for your employees regularly

Motivation and productivity workshops are aimed at enhancing the morale of your employees. Through these workshops, your staffers will learn:

i. New ways of doing things

ii. Time management

iii. Productivity techniques

iv. How to stay away from negative emotions

v. How to prevent burnouts

vi. How to maintain work-life balance

vi. How to improve communication

vii. How to grow as a better professional

viii. How to cultivate leadership skills

ix. How to manage change and encourage innovation

x. How to stay happier

B.Ā  Arrange educational resources for your employees and train them to execute their tasks in a better manner

As an agency owner, it will always be beneficial for you to create and arrange educational resources for employees to execute their tasks more efficiently. You can create a section on your website for such educational resources. You can also conduct webinars and workshops to teach them a new skill. You can create an educational blog or video, or podcast channel to train your employees and your client's employees.

For example, let's have a look at this blog section. It contains the trending topics in the digital marketing domain.

Most of these topics are highly informative long-form articles.

Similarly, video blogs are also emerging as a popular medium of content delivery and consumption. Here is an educational video blog hosted by Chad Kodary, the CEO of DashClicks.

C. Leverage internships

Hiring interns is a great way to cut costs and create loyal employees who are likely to stay with you for a longer time. Since hiring experts can be expensive, it is a sensible step to hire and train interns under an expert supervisor.

You can hire interns for a fraction of what you would pay to a full-time trained employee. Furthermore, these interns work very hard and deliver quality work because they are young and want to prove themselves.

7. Connecting with Customers/Users via Social Media/IoT

You can use social media to provide 24*7 customer support. It helps build trust and increase customer satisfaction. It also helps your agency grow as a responsible brand.

Provide 24*7 customer support through AI-based Chatbots:

AI-based Chatbots have emerged as the most popular medium to provide instant customer support globally. Connecting with customers on a 24*7 basis helps you establish your agency as a brand they can trust.

The way to provide excellent frontline support is to use AI-based chatbots. They can attend to customers' queries 24*7, register their complaints and handle inquiries.

8. Leverage Strategic Partnerships

Strategic partnerships always help a startup or an agency. Since most agencies are not full-service agencies but specialize in just one or two fields, it's essential to collaborate with other agencies.

A. Partner with other agencies

Partnering with other agencies brings its rewards. Besides collaborating on the projects, you can also exchange leads as per your specialization.

B. Collaborate with influencers

Collaborating with influencers has become a global trend. It helps you cut your marketing expenditure as influencers share your marketing messages from their social accounts and endorse your products and services.

C. Explore alternative marketing channels

You can also tap other opportunities for marketing, such as partnering with local communities, clubs, and institutions. Apart from that, you can also try:

• Snapchat advertising
• Experiential marketing
• Pinterest advertising
• Content distribution networks such as Taboola and Outbrain
• Influencer marketing

Conclusion

These tactics will transform your agency business. While automation will save you a lot of time and operational costs, hiring practices such as leveraging internships and collaborating with influencers will save human resource costs. Practicing these tactics with proper planning will significantly elevate your agency’s efficiency and productivity to drive better results.