How to Grow and Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency in 2021

Running a digital marketing agency comes with its challenges. Different business functions such as marketing, sales, hiring, accounting, payroll, and account management need a concerted effort to run smoothly. However, despite your hard work, sometimes,Ā  your clients may choose to switch to your competition.

You can adopt several measures to grow your agency, such as enhancing your internal marketing and sales processes, increasing your ability to scale the business, reducing client churn rate, and improving service quality and turnaround time.Here are 16 tactics to grow and scale your agency that will transform the way you conduct your digital marketing business:

1. Target a Specific Niche

Since most agencies promote themselves as full-service marketing agencies, you should choose a specific niche and position to distinguish your brand.

What is Niche Marketing?

Niche marketing is a marketing strategy that targets a distinct and unique audience. Instead of targeting everyone who could use your product or service, this strategy focuses exclusively on one market segment or a specific demographic to keep your campaign laser-sharp and impactful.

It doesn’t mean that you should ignore other opportunities, but positioning your business in a neatly defined niche defines your target market, helping you gain an edge over your competitors. On the contrary, marketing your agency as a one-stop-shop without specialization is likely to attract very few eyeballs.

For example, here are a few businesses that market themselves as digital marketing agencies specifically for gyms and fitness studios:

1. Thrive Agency
2. Lyfe Marketing
3. Cardinal Digital Marketing
4. Fitomate

You can focus on some of the niche market segments such as:

• Restaurants
• Educational institutions
• Auto workshops
• Software companies
• Spas
• Plumbers
• Home renovation contractors
• Rehab centers
• Doctors, dentists, and surgeons
• Chemists
• Personal & business coaches

It’s a highly effective strategy as most companies search for agencies with a keyword that identifies their niche.

Here is an example of niche-based keywords: “digital marketing agency for a home renovation company“.

If your website ranks for such keywords, then you are likely to attract qualified leads. It’s important to note that you can’t fool search engines by optimizing your website for dozens of niches at a time. It will confuse search engines, and they might exclude your website from the SERPs altogether.

Apart from these segments, you can also try other segments such as web marketing agencies for WordPress websites, Magento websites, or Shopify stores. The idea is to differentiate your agency from others, so you don’t end up getting lost among a host of similar services.

2. Use a Lead Magnet for Your Agency

Since most marketing tactics become monotonous and boring after some time, you should try a lead magnet such as:

• Template
• Cheat Sheet
• Checklist
• eBook
• White Paper
• Custom Tool
• Free Website Audit
• Industry Report

See how Instant Offices, a multinational office space advisory service, use “the office moving checklist” as a lead magnet. Please note that the topic is highly relevant to the needs of its target audience.

Source: Instant Offices

It would help if you had an irresistible offer to entice your prospective buyers into your sales funnel.

What is a Lead Magnet?

The idea behind using a lead magnet is to capture the contact information of your website visitors so that your sales team can nurture them until they are ready to convert. Many digital marketing agencies worldwide use ebooks and educational material to generate interest among their website visitors. Here are some additional ways to generate leads for digital agencies.

3. Try White-Label Reselling

It is challenging and time-consuming to hire experts for your in-house team, and for a new startup, it is often not financially feasible. However, sometimes you need in-house resources and expertise to win valuable contracts. In such cases, you can opt for white-label solutions that allow you to expand your operations without hiring expensive resources.

White label resellers offer professional services to deliver the best-in-class results for your clients and generate professional reports. They allow you to add new clients to your existing basket without the need to do the extra leg work. White label tools such as agency website software help you scale your operations.

Creating a professional niche-based website is a time-consuming task, and designers may take many days to build it. If you want to impress your clients or prospects, you can use DashClicks' agency website tool and instantly create a custom branded agency website within seconds.

Similarly, creating professional and informative reports is a regular task for agencies. However, it also takes up a lot of time, keeping your employees engaged, which is an unnecessary loss of productive hours. With the DashClicks' InstaReports tool, you can instantly generate white-label reports for your clients. These automated reports will save you time and be immensely useful to your customers by highlighting gaps in their marketing approach and providing relatable solutions.

Sometimes, you need to create bulk websites for your clients. DashClicks's InstaSites tool allows you to do that with a single click of a button using niche-specific templates. All you need to do is to fill up a small form and click the submit button.

What is Startup Scaling?

For a startup, scalability refers to the company's capacity to grow. A scalable business can quickly adapt to an increased workload without jeopardizing quality, performance, or revenue streams.

How to Scale Your Marketing Agency?

You can quickly scale the sales of your agency with a well-planned approach. However, some business models can be challenging to scale as you need to maintain the right balance of staff and clients. While scaling your agency, you may discover that you are understaffed. However, the reverse may also be true.

When you’re overstaffed, you run the risk of stretching your resources thin, especially when your significant clients decide to leave. Here are a few tips and tricks to effectively scale your agency:

1. Increase your fee: You may lose a few clients initially, but you’ll be able to win high-paying and long-term clients in the long run.
2. Track your time and productivity: Overly demanding clients and under-performing employees often lead to financial losses for the agencies. If the agencies can track time and productivity levels, they can successfully arrest these losses.
3. Hire white label services: Hiring white label services is one of the most effective strategies to scale your marketing agency. It allows you to grow without compromising quality or performance. It’s also often more cost-effective.

4. Build a Scalable Process That You Can Repeat

As an agency, when you have your processes in place, it will save you time and help you set up specific policies and procedures for scaling and expanding. Doing it for all your deliverables will save you a substantial amount of time. You should document your processes and convey them to your employees in a timely fashion so they, too, can learn and adapt.

How to Make Your Agency More Profitable & Scalable?

A digital marketing agency is constantly under pressure to work at a fast pace while maintaining accuracy and consistency. As an agency, your focus should be on ensuring profitability and scalability for long-term success. Here are a few ways to efficiently scale your company:

A. Focus hard on client relationships: Acquiring a new client is always more expensive than retaining an existing one. The additional perks of a satisfied client are referrals and word-of-mouth promotion. Therefore, try your best to offer excellent client service.

B. Automate your tasks: Most of the employees in an agency are busy running campaigns, generating reports, and completing other administrative tasks. The good news is that most of these menial, repetitive, and frustratingly time-consuming tasks can be automated using white-label tools such as DashClicks' client dashboards for instant reporting, real-time reporting (with actionable insights), and billing services.

C. Organize your tasks: Organizing all your tasks using a single dashboard can save you precious time spent on wasteful administrative functions. At DashClicks, we offer a white-labeled platform where you can centrally organize all your tasks.Ā  The platform automatically syncs all the data into their appropriate locations, preventing the need for repetitive tasks.

D. Leverage paid ads: You can leverage the power of paid ads to increase your leads and conversion. To make your job easier, you can hire our white label paid advertising services such as Facebook ads, Google ads, and funnel building services and let our PPC experts do it on your behalf.

E. Fix workflow issues that hamper productivity: Without established processes and predefined workflows, your productivity will be severely hampered.Ā  DashClicks' white-label fulfillment services and tools reduce your job to a few clicks, saving you a significant amount of time.

F. Use the right system: To create a successful agency with happy clients, you must invest in a system that offers you more visibility and control. The real-time information of your accounts helps you proactively address any issues that might lead to your client's dissatisfaction. Such systems will help you in situations when a colleague goes on vacation, and you have to dig through email threads to recall the previous communication with your client. DashClicks' white-label platform allows you to cut down the time spent on account management by inter-connecting reports, projects, insights, communications, and updates. It will prevent the wastage of time due to research, vetting, and experimenting with different tools.

5. Market Your Own Agency

Try to find ways of utilizing the work experience gained at other companies to promote the products and services at your agency.

For example, Basecamp, a software that serves the project management needs of a web agency called 37signals, later on, became a tremendous success in its own right.

You can experiment with different digital marketing tactics and apply them to your client's projects. It can be a good learning experience for you as an agency, which comes with many benefits. You can also document your journey in a blog and publish it online for wider consumption.

How to Promote Your Agency?

There are many ways to promote your agency; some of them are as follows:

• Try to achieve a high rank for the keywords your prospects most commonly use. You can hire DashClicks’ white label SEO services to promote your agency with the best keywords.
• Promote client testimonials and success stories using paid advertising and other methods. Make sure these testimonials are genuine and reflect issues of interest to your target audience.
• Create case studies of your successful projects and back them up with data, screenshots, and cause and effect tactics.
• Get yourself quoted by the press and blogs and promote it vigorously on your website.
• Begin an outreach program in local communities.
• Participate in industry workshops and meetups.
• Leverage influencer marketing to grow your business.

6. Create a Website With the Best User-Experience for Your Agency

A website should look professional; it is the first thing your prospective clients visit. It should be clean, presentable, and represent your company's values. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that you need an exorbitantly expensive website. You can choose from several stunning agency themes from WordPress. DashClicks' agency website service allows you to create attractive and impressive agency websites with unique templates in a matter of seconds. All you need to do is to fill out a short form. With DashClicks account integration, you can auto-sync your website with custom branding options. You can create a custom branded website that offers a Secure SSL certificate with fast hosting.

7. Respond Quickly to the Leads

It's crucial to respond to your leads within an hour or risk losing the lead forever. Your potential customers may have contacted many other agencies like you. Therefore, you must respond to queries swiftly. If you allow a likely lead to sit even for a day or two, you may lose it permanently.

According to a HubSpot roundup, the average B2B business's lead response time was calculated to be 42 hours, which is far too long and might be the primary reason why agencies aren't able to convert hot leads. According to a study done by the Harvard Business Review, when you respond within an hour of receiving a business query, you are seven times more likely to close the deal. The same study claims that if you contact your prospect within the next hour, you are 60 times more likely to clinch the deal than agencies that took 24 hours or longer. A slow lead response time is why businesses can contact just 27% of all leads, missing out on a significant chunk of potential clients.

8. Build an In-house Outbound Sales Team

Simply releasing a few paid ads is not enough to make sales. With a dedicated outbound sales team, it will be easier for you to vet and nurture sales leads. You can also try cold emails for this purpose. It can be beneficial, especially when you don't have too many client referrals during the initial stages of the business.

Here are a few advantages of an outbound sales team:

• Highly-targeted sales campaigns with less ambiguity
• Quick feedback to help you adapt your sales strategy
• Personalization options
• Flexibility to adjust the pace of marketing and selling

How to use an outbound sales team to increase conversions?

The sales process work in the following fashion:

The tele-calling team calls the prospects and generates their interest in the product. The tele-caller employs sales rebuttal or objection handling and sets up a sales appointment with the prospect, entering it into the meeting calendar.

The sales rep then meets the prospect and closes the deal.

9. Turn Your Website Visitors Into Leads and Offer Them DiscountsĀ

You can use tools such as LeadFeeder to identify your website visitors through their IP addresses.

This software matches the visitors' IP addresses to the database of companies, so you can quickly identify which company the visitor came from and contact them on priority. Some of them might be using dynamic IP addresses, which can be a problem, but you can still manage many lost leads using this method. Once you identify the company name, you'll also identify the key decision-makers in that company through LinkedIn.

10. Leverage White Label Platforms and Tools

White-label platforms and tools can save you a lot of time and effort while scaling your digital agency. For example, DashClicks' white-label service equips agencies with the tools and platform they need to succeed. What's more, you get it all under your brand name. This platform offers many valuable services to agencies, such as one-click agency websites, InstaReports, and InstaSites. The dashboards provide a truly transformational experience for your clients. You can access it with a single login to control various aspects of your SEO campaign. Fulfillment store allows you to easily order and deliver white-label services for clients with a single centralized system, all under the same brand umbrella. InstaReports will enable you to quickly generate real-time reports by tracking and reporting metrics from campaigns.

11. Use Online Directories to Increase Your Web Presence

If you think online directories have become redundant, it may be time to reconsider. It is one of the most innovative ways to attract eyeballs as it allows potential clients and vendors to find you easily. It is also cost-effective. You can start with Yelp and Google and later move on to utilizing local and industry-specific online directories.

What Are Online Directories and Why Are They so Important?

An online directory is a website where you can find all the businesses listed for a particular area category-wise. Businesses and customers visit online directories to find manufacturers, traders, and service providers. Some of the most popular online directories are Google Maps, Yelp, Bing Places, Yahoo! Local, and Foursquare. The top directories can generate leads for your business while also regularly offering new business opportunities.

DashClicks offers white label directory listing services for agencies. For more information, please speak with us today.

12. Focus Hard on Ranking for Your Target Keywords

It is one of the most successful strategies as it drives free organic traffic from search engines. You can try it even if you are not an SEO company, as it will continue to pay off for a long time. If you cannot rank for highly competitive keywords, you should try for less competitive and local terms. For example, you will rank better with keywords like "digital marketing company Miami" than terms like "digital marketing companies in the US."

With DashClicks White Label SEO Fulfillment service, you can track multiple metrics such as keyword ranking and page ranking. When you hire our white label service, you can impress your clients by getting their website ranked at the top position for multiple search keywords. With DashClicks, you can choose among several SEO reseller plans based on your needs and budget.

13. Boost Your Link Profile and Improve Your Ranking Through Guest Blogging

Guest posting is not dead. It is very much in trend. Guest blogging helps you rank high on your targeted keywords, especially the ones that drive hot leads. Apart from that, guest posting also enables you to increase brand awareness. With planned and consistent guest blogging, you can position yourself as a credible expert in the field.

How to do guest blogging, and how will it help?

When done right, guest blogging can attract thousands of visitors to your website. Apart from its apparent benefits, guest posting offers numerous other advantages. For example, when you write for high-traffic websites, it drives referrals to your agency site and helps build trust around your brand.

Here are a few steps to kickstart your guest blogging campaign.

• Step 1: Find the sites for guest posting.
• Step 2: Pick a destination site in your niche, but with an authoritative link profile.
• Step 3: Write a guest post that offers value to the destination site’s audience and includes your link.
• Step 4: Pitch your destination site.
• Step 5: Write your guest post and send it to the destination site.
• Step 6: Follow up until it’s published.

14. Offer Flexible Pricing to New Clients

It may seem against basic business ethics, but flexible pricing is a smart strategy that works in your favor, especially for startups. If you offer flexible pricing as an agency, you will provide better value to many of your clients, who may not be able to afford an expensive agency.

You can refer to the digital marketing agency pricing guide. While negotiating prices with your new clients, always keep in mind their requirements and budget. With flexible pricing, you are likely to win the contract and make them your loyal customers.

15. Develop Case Studies From Your Successful Projects

Case studies are one of the most popular advertising and sales promotion methods you can use in different ways. You can use them as lead magnets on your website or as marketing collateral for your sales team to help them close more deals. Case studies can also be used for email drip campaigns.

It is not difficult to create a case study. You can easily recall many instances when you have attained extraordinary results for your clients. You can develop the story, mention the tactics you had employed, back it up by data and screenshots of reports, and finally hand it to your graphic designer. Your case study will be ready within a few hours.

You can create multiple case studies based on your buyer personas and use them for promotion and marketing. You can also get your case study developed at DashClicks by our in-house experts. All you need to do is to speak with one of our friendly representatives.

Here are some of the case studies developed at DashClicks for inspiration.

16. Create an Easy Onboarding Process for Your Customers

An easy onboarding process is vital to any agency’s success. During this process, your client will give you access to their social media pages and website CMS. When you hire DashClick’s white label services, it will take over access to your client’s business ad manager.

DashClicks offers client onboarding through its automated onboarding center. The platform gathers essential information from your clients using its intelligent onboarding process to streamline the processes for agencies. It allows you to complete the onboarding process yourself quickly. You can also send it to your client via your white-label dashboard, preventing unnecessary delays during the process. The platform also sends automated email reminders to clients, urging them to complete their onboarding in time.

Conclusion

While the above tips can be a game-changer for your digital marketing agency, you may also consider hiring white label consulting services that will help you implement the best practices to scale your business. DashClicks offers its agency consulting services through its DashElite Coaching Program for Agencies. It is a one-on-one coaching and training program that makes sure that your agency is headed in the right direction. You also get access to DashClicks’ all premium software tools such as InstaSites and InstaReports that will help you grow your agency and share tips to acquire high-ticket clients.