Take a moment and think about what brings people to your business?

In a lot of cases, it begins with a question and they visit your site expecting a solution. At this stage, you need to understand that they are not just interested in your product, but also seek valuable information.

In many cases, content is what starts your relationship with the customer. Moreover, content remains with them through all the steps of the customer journey. Therefore, it is fair to say that content plays a significant role in how your audience interacts with your business.

The Importance of Content Marketing in 2021

In order to make the most of your content marketing, you need to create content that is detailed, unique, and useful. This is because content marketing is extremely helpful in:

• Bringing people to your site
• Engaging customers by providing value
• Generating leads
• Moving people through the customer journey
• Driving sales
• Giving post-sale care

However, simply knowing that content marketing can help your business isn't enough. You need to know how to create an effective content marketing strategy. As per the latest statistics, 64% of marketers wish to know how to create a better content strategy.

There are different tactics that make content marketing strategies effective. As there are many content marketing tactics out there, you have to decide which ones can help your business grow.

How to Select the Right Content Marketing Tactics For Your Business?

Before building your content marketing strategy, spend some time brainstorming. Understand your aim, what your business stands for, and how you want to represent your values. Armed with this knowledge, you will be more informed to pick suitable content marketing tactics for your business.

Here are 30 content marketing tactics to help you pick one that works for your business:-

1. Know Your Audience and Provide Them What They're Looking For

To create successful content, you need to know your audience. The first step you can take is to conduct keyword research to gain insights into your potential customers and their needs.

You can begin by using Google Trends to get a good idea about the current demand for a particular topic you have in mind. All you need to do is enter the main keyword in the search box to see the number of searches it has got within a defined time period.

For more detailed information, you can use Ubersuggest. Here's how you can use it to unlock a plethora of keyword opportunities:

1. Click on your browser and open Ubersuggest
2. Type in your domain
3. Tap on the keyword analyzer located on the left sidebar
4. Select keyword ideas
5. Enter a keyword
6. Get related keywords along with search volumes

2. Segment Audience To Improve Engagement

You should always remember that different people are at different phases of the buying cycle. That's why the content you produce can't suit everyone. For instance, if you produce content for the purpose of creating awareness among new customers, then it will not work for repeat customers.

Hence, you must segment customers according to their personas. A buyer persona is a profile that talks about one segment of your audience. Buyer personas are based on research and describe your ideal customers. It talks about how they arrive at a decision, the challenges they face, and other useful insights.

Image Source

3. Create Content Based On Your Core Values

Core values serve as the building blocks of any business. Dedicate time to articulate the core values of your business in your content. It will help you generate solid content for your audience.

You can also use Storytelling to create content based on your core values. It is always easy to tell stories based on what you believe and know. A marketing effort that appears effortless to your reader will appeal to them the most.

4. Get On The Local Platform

Let's explain this point with an example first. Let's suppose you are a local brick-and-mortar business in California, but your website gets thousands of visitors from Florida. This may not do you much good. 46% of Google searches are made for getting local information. A major chunk of location-based mobile searches leads to an offline purchase. So, it is important to get on the local platform if you haven't already.

For getting on the local platform, you must know about local SEO. It is a fantastic tool that helps people find your business, which can drive sales.

Local SEO is defined as an SEO strategy that helps your business become more visible in Google's local search results.

To drive your local SEO, ensure you produce valuable information for your audience in your target area. When creating this content, concentrate on local keywords.

To know local keyword opportunities, use Ubersuggest.

Image Source

5. Provide Your Audience A Behind-the-Scenes Experience

If you want to increase your site traffic and attract a loyal audience, pre-sell your product or content. Let's suppose you are going to publish a new post next week. Share details about its writing process to your readers.

6. Create An Editorial Calendar

Marketers use editorial calendars for the purpose of planning, organizing, and scheduling the content they are required to share. An editorial calendar helps in creating a winning content marketing strategy. This is because it offers a variety of benefits. Here's how:

1. It enables you to track content events
2. It helps you see the performance of your distributed content
3. It helps to establish expectations and deadlines

Tip: These three steps can make your editorial calendar effective:

1. Understand your audience and the type of content they have an interest in
2. Conduct thorough research for your topic
3. Produce content and measure its effectiveness

7. Reply to Twitter Mentions

Responding consistently and quickly to people's comments and concerns shows people that you care. It humanizes your brand and demonstrates a level of dedication. Hence, following this content marketing tactic creates a great impression on your followers.

Image Source

8. Encourage User-Generated Content

User-Generated Content refers to content in the public sphere in which the creators share their experiences with your services and products.

A lot of businesses encourage user-generated content. Doing so not only helps the businesses save money, but they are also able to distribute engaging content.

UGC comes in different forms such as-

• Images
• Blog Comments
• Audios
• Videos
• Online Ratings and Reviews
• Social Media Posts
• Testimonials

9. Educate Your Customers

Give yourself some time to think about questions like - Do people want to know how your products work? Do they want to know the complete process of how you created the product? A lot of times, people are actually interested in learning more about your product. This helps them gain knowledge on something new, and they are likely to inform their friends as well. So, you must focus on customer education, especially if you are on a low advertising budget.

Let us give you an example of the kind of content you can create to educate your customers about your products. For instance, you want to educate your audience about HVAC systems. You can tell them how they work, what their advantages are, and what to watch out for. Your customers are more than willing to learn about your product, especially if few people are educating them about something similar on the web.

10. Use Trending Topics

Something or the other is always trending online. What you can do is, search for a way in which you can connect your brand with a trending topic.

To know an easy way to figure out trending topics, go to Google Trends. On the homepage, you will find certain topics. These topics are the ones that are currently getting plenty of search traffic on Google.

Remember, at the time of selecting trending topics, always keep your brand image in mind. Ensure you are only selecting the right trends.

11. Use Video Content

Viewers retain 95% of a message they see in a video and 10% of it when they read it in a text. With these stats, you can very well gauge the power of video content.

To produce useful video content for your audience, you can always consider starting a Youtube Channel. With the help of video, you can capture the attention of people who want to learn visually or want to hear useful advice rather than reading it in lengthy guides.

If you decide to make videos, you have to do it the right way. Ensure you have high-quality software and a good camera. Brainstorm what types of topics you can explore in the video form. Brands create product demonstrations, webinars, and video tutorials to showcase their expertise.

Image Source

12. Evaluate Your Competitor's Content

You need to carefully assess what your competitors are putting out there. For this, make it a point to check the types of content your competitors are producing. Also, check the things that they might be doing better, know the keywords they are ranking for, and figure out a unique way of covering the subjects they have already covered.

13. Produce Engaging Visual Content

With the amount of content being put out there, you may find it difficult to break through the noise. Fortunately, visual content can help you do so. People can be really busy and engaging visual content can help you capture the attention of your target audience.

So, start now and create GIFs, infographics, imagery, or illustrations to publish on your social media profiles and site.

14. Repurpose Your Content

Different people consume content differently. So, you can always think of presenting the same information in different formats. This is called content repurposing. It provides you two main benefits:

1) You can cater to more people

2) It saves a lot of time

An example of content repurposing can be:

Choose one of your articles and transform it into a PDF report and provide it as an ebook.

Tip: Repurpose only high-quality content that gave significant results the first time.

15. Create Content According To Common Customer Queries

If you receive a lot of similar questions from your customers, you should create content that answers those questions. Here's how this will benefit you:

1. It saves a lot of time for your customer service team
2. Answering FAQs works well for your SEO
3. It offers you relevant content ideas that you may not find in your keyword research
4. It engages your customer even more

To receive as many customer queries as possible, offer a number of ways in which your audience can get in touch with you. Provide contact or email details. Inform them that you will be answering queries on social media. You can also answer queries via live chat.

In addition to doing this, inform your team to write down any frequently asked questions. You can then consider addressing those questions in the form of video tutorials, comprehensive guides, and more.

16. Try Out New Technologies

Your strategies should acknowledge the current trends in marketing technologies and you must adapt to them accordingly. Nowadays, content marketing has moved to AI, AR, VR, vlogs, and podcasts.

Using new technologies improves user experience and resolves concerns they may have regarding a new service or product. To consider new ways of adopting the latest technologies, assess your competitors to check what they are using. It will give you a fair idea of what you should do.

17. Turn Your Attention To Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging is fast becoming a notable aspect of content marketing. A lot of brands are now approaching experts, influencers, and writing professionals for tips, experiences, and advice in a specific field. Businesses are even asking their own marketers to guest blog on other websites.

18. Personalize Your Content Marketing

There is a high chance that individuals scrolling through their social media will find information about a new product launch uninteresting. This is because they are tired of being sold to. Now, you may think how are you supposed to sell your products and services? We have an answer to your predicament.

You must try to showcase how your product or service adds value to the lives of your customers. To achieve something like this, personalize the way people experience your marketing. Provide tricks, tips, DIY tutorials, and how-to guides that can help your audience. This will help build a connection between your business and your customers.

19. Create Evergreen Content

Make sure to produce evergreen content for your site. This type of content must contain information that will always hold relevance. When you have evergreen content, you give a reason to your potential customers to check your site all year round.

Some evergreen content ideas include:

• How-to-Choose Guide
• Beginner’s Guide
• Buying Guide
• How-to-Make Guide

20. Increase Engagement on LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides better opportunities for businesses to increase their organic reach than Facebook.

To make your content viral on LinkedIn, make sure it is informative and impactful. Also, instead of sharing your blog's link, repost your blog content as an article on LinkedIn.

21. Email Promotion

An effective distribution channel, email marketing is known to bring traffic and leads to a site. To use email marketing for the growth of your business, you can send a monthly or weekly newsletter to your subscribers. Put fresh content in it to engage the reader. Your newsletter should also follow a mobile-friendly format as a majority of people check their emails on their mobiles. Do not forget to write eye-catchy headlines and subject lines for your newsletter and use videos and images wherever applicable.

22. Concentrate on Your Headlines

Put a considerable amount of thought into creating your headlines. Your headlines can impact how well your content performs.

Let's discuss some tips that will help you write attractive headlines:

• Use digits
• Ask questions
• Write different versions and read them out loud to see which one works
• Include the problem or the product
• Choose the most important benefit and include it prominently

23. Create Data-Driven Content

The sales and marketing team have so much data available to them. Thanks to this data, you can produce data-driven content that will appeal to your target customer. Use customer data for planning content for each stage of your buyer journey.

Note: When you dedicate time to analyze your collected data, you save a lot of time and become aware of what your buyers need. By doing so, you can create content that your audience will not overlook.

24. Share Your User's Story

Ever wondered who the best salespersons for your products are? They are the people who have used them. That's why we recommend that you put testimonials on your landing page. Doing so will help a majority of people feel confident about purchasing your product. They would know that people have tried your product and they have liked it.

25. Invest in Learning About Your Target Customer

Content marketing will continue to give high ROI if you put your time and effort into thoroughly understanding your target audience. For this, you need to consistently upgrade your skills and knowledge. Now, you may think how can you do that?

In this day and age, there are so many affordable and effective knowledge resources available. Use these resources to develop useful skills and gain valuable knowledge that will eventually help in the growth of your business.

26. Always Be Ready For A Change

As the content marketing and business world continue to evolve, your business should remain viable. For instance, you should be thoroughly aware of Google's algorithm updates, as doing so will help generate sufficient search traffic.

In case you notice that you are not getting satisfactory results, it is time for a change. Your goal is to satisfy your target audience and for that, you need to adjust and be flexible. The ideal way to stay competitive is to work with the most recent information.

Note: Look for ways in which you can keep up with the ever-changing nature of content marketing. Take a content marketing course or stay abreast of the current trends.

27. Target Gen Z and Millenials with Adaptive Content

If Gen Z and millennials comprise a considerable portion of your target audience, make sure you produce content keeping their needs in mind. Both of these groups have high expectations for how brands use technology. Also, they highly value the experience they have with a business.

A way to target both Gen Z and millennials is through adaptive content. This type of content supports meaningful interactions across every channel. It offers a personalized experience. For instance, you can suggest content based on their previous interactions with your business.

28. Offer Free Tools That Can Address Your Customer's Pain Points

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Are there any common problems your customer may have?
2. Is there a free tool you can provide them to help resolve them?

When you offer free tools that are relevant to your business, you can attract high-quality traffic to your website and gain more customers.

29. Make Your Product Shareworthy

If people tell their friends about your product, then more people are likely to buy it. So, think outside the box and look at ways to make your product more shareworthy. For example, take a look at Coca-Cola's Share a Coke campaign. They put people's names on Coke bottles to give a personalized experience to their target audience. The brand then encouraged individuals to share a Coke with their friends, take a picture, and post it with the hashtag #ShareaCoke.

Image Source

The campaign resulted in 235,000 tweets with the hashtag. They sold 150 million+ Coke bottles, too.

30. Support a Social Cause

A lot of brands avoid taking this route. Although, getting behind a social cause can reap significant results for businesses.

The two groups that are the most vocal on social media platforms are Generation Z and millennials. There is a high chance that they will align themselves with a business that supports a social cause. So, if you want to target younger generations, this is one of the most effective contents marketing tactics to try. With this tactic, you can create real change and also expand your customer base.

Conclusion

These 30 content marketing tactics will help you become more efficient in the way you produce content and help you reach more customers. Just concentrate on creating amazing content and use these content marketing tactics to grow your brand. Do make it a point to test these tactics to check which ones are successful in engaging your audience as not every tactic is going to suit your brand.

Quick Note: Trying different content marketing tactics is important for the growth of your business. However, it is equally important for your business to have an SEO-friendly website. Creating an SEO-friendly, professional niche-based website can take a lot of time. With the DashClicks' agency website tool, you can create an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in just a few seconds.

There are 20,000 digital marketing agencies in the United States alone, as per a 2021 study by IBIS World, and millions are scattered worldwide. The market size of the agency business in the US is $19.8 billion, and it has an annual growth rate of 6.2%.

You have bleak chances of survival in case you are unable to differentiate your agency from others. Choosing a niche for your agency is a proven strategy to specialize in a particular segment, grow and scale your agency.

How Should Digital Agencies Choose a Niche?

The factors responsible for pushing the growth in the digital industry are a growing life cycle stage and consumer spending. It makes focusing on a niche market even more crucial when everyone else is offering generalized services.

If you are still caught in the specialist vs. generalist debate, here are some valuable insights from some of the most successful agencies on differentiating your agency by choosing a niche.

Mauricio Cardenal, the founder of Roofing Marketing Pros, a digital agency specializing in serving businesses that offer roofing services, has a unique business model. His agency provides qualified leads to roofing contractors with the help of a call center software and a digital marketing team.

Image Source

They generate leads using digital marketing tactics exclusively for a specific contractor and then nurture them with the help of a call center. When the lead is ripe, they send it to the roofing contractor to visit the site, provide them with the cost estimate, and close the deal.

So, a laser-focused approach provides you a five to ten times ROI. Unlike an agency that offers generalized services, specializing in a specific service involves using systems and processes that deliver results in very little time.

These processes help you aggressively bring a business in front of its audience and target them. In this case, the target audience is the people looking to get their roofs replaced or repaired.

Marketing Strategy to Target a Niche Market

Most roofing contractors wait for the stormy weather so that they can get new repair jobs. However, it can be highly frustrating for a business that depends on a single service to wait for their phone to ring for a new appointment in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, 90% of callers don't even qualify as serious customers. They call to check the prices, etc. So, such businesses need a sustainable business model to generate leads all around the year and not just during the stormy season.

Roofing Marketing Pros’ marketing strategy is also unique, just like his positioning. Instead of providing a rebuttal to the typical customer queries and objections such as “why should we hire you,” Mauricio Cardenal asks his prospect why he should partner with them.

He questions his customers, “are you genuinely committed to taking your business to the next level?” and “do you want to expand, change and hire more salespeople?“

Please have a look at a compelling and strong call to action on their landing page.

Tip: It's easy to target your audience as a specialist compared to a generalist because it reflects a high level of commitment and expertise.

1. Choose a Niche That You Are Familiar With

What prompted Cardenal to choose roofing contractors as a niche was his exposure to the business as a young intern that liberated him in adulthood. During his college days, he worked for a general contractor and learned the nuts and bolts of the construction business. He realized that PPC or Pay Per Click could be the best digital marketing strategy for a roofing company for short-term business goals, given the average ticket size for a roof. His experience and vision are paying off tremendously in terms of the success he has achieved for his clients.

2. Choose a Niche That Is in Demand

One more reason why Cardenal focused on roofing as a niche for his agency business was that it was an in-demand service.

With the commoditization of digital agency business and mushrooming digital marketing agencies across the globe (estimated to be more than one million), focusing on a specific niche is considered the best strategy for an agency. By doing so, agencies also push themselves to specialize in a particular niche.

So, they hire experts, improve their learning curve, conduct internal training and implement the best practices to improve quality and productivity. According to Mauricio Cardenal, high-quality work that offers value and standard processes in a niche-based agency allows you to charge higher prices, replicate the results and scale your agency. Specialization in a specific segment also enables you to build relationships with the top influencers in that segment.

But, it's crucial to make sure that this niche you choose is in demand and there is not much competition.

3. Find a Digitally Friendly Niche

If you choose a segment that avoids digital marketing, you'll be less likely to succeed as a digital marketing agency. For example, some local businesses that thrive on word of mouth or references may not be very digital-friendly.

Image Source

Some of the companies deliberately avoid digital marketing. You should avoid such niches.

4. Perform Competitive Analysis

To succeed in digital marketing, it's essential to know what your competitors are doing. This way, you can eliminate a lot of time wasted with trial and error. Research your biggest competitors and find out their killer marketing strategies and what they are offering. Conduct a SWOT analysis to know their strengths and weaknesses and discover the service gaps you can fill. However, it's important to note that you shouldn't tread a beaten track. Don't allow your competition to dictate what you should do. Craft your personal and brand identity to blaze a new trail and shout it out loud in your community.

5. Define Your Buyer Persona or Customer Avatar

Defining your ideal customer avatar and buyer persona refines your messaging. Try to know every little thing you can to understand their habits, routine, likes, dislikes, passion, and what drives them to take action. Give your avatar a name. The better you know your prospective customer, the easier it would be to connect with them.

Image Source

6. Assess the Financial Prowess of Your Audience

A company might not be financially sound to buy your premium services even if it's booming. It happens when we have low-profit margins. So, apart from the willingness and interest to buy, they must also have a good cash flow to afford your services. If they hire an agency, a business needs to spend 10-15% of its revenues on marketing initiatives. But, very few companies can afford that. So, don't waste your time on unqualified leads.

7. Evaluate the Niche Opportunity

It would help if you didn't choose a niche like a cryptocurrency, which is still in its nascent stages, or something like payday loans or credit cards which is almost saturated. When something is either too popular or nearly saturated, it will cost a fortune to achieve any results. You don't stand a chance even if there is the slightest opportunity as the giant agencies are already after them. Additionally, you may also avoid an almost obscure niche where your services are not at all required. So, choose a niche where you have ample opportunities to grow and make money.

8. Choose a Niche That Has Long-Term Growth Potential

Several niches are facing existential crises during the pandemic. Garments, textiles, and the warp knitting industry are the worst hit, and millions of people have lost their employment in these niches worldwide. Apart from the temporary turmoil, some industries are on the verge of collapse, and that's often irreversible. So, it would help if you always chose a niche that has long-term growth prospects.

9. Decide to Have a Passion and Deep-Seated Love for Your Niche

You should choose a niche that you love unconditionally and genuinely care for. If you have a real emotional connection with that industry, products, and people, it will help you a lot, especially during tough times. If you're doing it just because that specific niche is booming, chances are you might lose steam soon and don't find yourself giving your 100%.

Image Source

10. Hire a Mentor

In the end, it's crucial to have a mentor who can do some hand-holding when the going gets tough, and you find yourself fighting your battle alone. The best mentor is someone who has the experience of running a successful agency himself. Running an agency isn't for the faint-hearted. It can be the scariest and loneliest experience for an entrepreneur, but if you persevere, it will transform your personal and professional life.

Conclusion

As you visualize opportunities in a specific niche, so will others. So, even though you have a small number of competitors, the competition can be fierce. If you're a bit inexperienced in your field, choosing a niche can be counterproductive. If you don't have the expertise in a particular domain, hire a trained workforce to meet clients' expectations. So, the second most crucial thing after choosing a niche is working hard and acquiring specialization in that niche. If you select a business segment and can still not deliver results, your reputation will be at stake.

How to persuade someone to trust you enough to purchase your product? A long time ago, a marketer called Elias St. Elmo Lewis provided an excellent answer to this question. He talked about a “funnel” –  a number of steps that the customer follows, with each step bringing them closer to buying your product. With this funnel, a stranger can potentially become a raving customer of your business.

As per Lewis, people follow these 4 steps before they are ready to make a purchase:

• Awareness: You have to make people aware that your service or product exists.
• Interest: People must be strongly interested in visiting your website or reading your ad.
• Desire: You are required to get people to express curiosity about your product.
• Action: Whether adding a product to their cart or placing a call to your sales team, your audience needs to decide to take the next step.

Even though this concept first arose in 1898, professional copywriters still use it. Nowadays, companies have some kind of a funnel in marketing, with stages’ names modified according to the company/industry. For instance, you will see an ‘evaluation stage’ in B2B marketing. In this stage, a person puts in a lot of consideration before making the purchase.

Creating Your Social Media Sales Funnel

To build your social media sales funnel, we will take the concept discussed above and apply it to social media. We will expand it a bit more with these two additions:

1. The Evaluation Stage (as nowadays, it has become convenient to research and compare products online)
2. The Advocacy Stage (because the biggest power of social media is helping customers attract even more customers)

Whenever you create a social media strategy, make sure that your tactics cover every stage in the sales funnel. As mentioned below, every step has a particular question your marketing strategy must provide an answer for:

• Awareness: How will potential customers find you via social media?
• Evaluation: How will they use social media to compare similar products? How will they use it for comparison between you and your competitors?
• Acquisition: How will you get them to purchase or convert today?
• Engagement: How will you utilize social channels for staying in touch with your customers (to sell more things in the future)?
• Advocacy: What will you do to get them to suggest your product to their friends on social channels?

A mistake that many amateur marketers often commit is to invest in only some stages of the funnel. For instance, a small business has a great website with product videos, sales content, and case studies. However, they don’t have a strategy to bring people on their website. For instance, Facebook videos or Instagram influencer accounts.

Now, a quick note before we start..

Your social media sales funnel must answer the five questions that we have mentioned above. If you don’t consider a particular stage of the funnel, you will weaken your marketing. For every stage of the funnel, choose two tactics at the most. And when you master these tactics, you can go ahead and add new ones.

1. Awareness: How will potential customers find you?

There are many ways to capture the attention of your potential customers. Select one from this list:

I. Organic tactics

A. Social media contests

Let’s save you some time when it comes to planning social media contests. Here are the top two contests that we recommend:

• Comment or/and like to win

The “comment or/and like to win” contest is held on almost all social platforms to create engagement. For launching this contest, create a post with an informative caption, an entry deadline, and guidelines. While writing your post, do mention something like this – “like and comment for a chance to win…”

To let more people know about the contest, use Instagram or Facebook stories. Using hashtags will also increase the contest’s reach.

• Photo caption contest

An exciting way to encourage followers to comment on your picture and engage with your business is a “caption this” post.

Image Source

B. Use Youtube and SEO to gain new subscribers

If you have a YouTube channel for your business, here are some ways to promote it:

• Strike a balance between trending content and evergreen videos

Upload a few videos which will always hold relevance. When you do this, your subscribers keep returning to you again and again. Famous evergreen content includes tools and resources lists, how-to guides, tip roundups, and more. This kind of timeless content can rank well for years to come, boosting both traffic and SEO. Use social media plugins to share content and build connections with your audience.

• Stay active in the community

Subscribe to channels that have a similar audience as yours. Like and share their content and mention them in your videos or thoughtfully comment on their channels. Doing so helps you know your competitors and gain new viewers.

II. Paid tactics

A. Instagram Ads: Some of the advertising formats on Instagram include:

• Image ads: Image ads help businesses advertise their products and services using a single image. They can add text to the image as well.

Image Source

• Video ads: These ads allow businesses to give a closer look at their products and services. Although in-feed video ads can be a maximum of 60 minutes, shorter videos prove more impactful.

B. Facebook Ads: If you don't want to go with Instagram ads, you can opt for Facebook ads. The types of Facebook ads include:

• Image ads: You can create an image ad with a few clicks. All you need to do is boost one of your existing posts with an image taken from your Facebook page.
• Poll ads: A poll ad is a mobile-only Facebook ad format. For creating a poll ad, you can incorporate a two-option poll to a video/image ad. You can then add separate links for the two poll choices.

Image Source

2. Evaluation: How will they make a comparison with your competitors or similar products?

Getting attention will alone not suffice. You need to ensure you have the required reviews, credible information, and case studies to convince customers.

I. Organic tactics

1. Show glimpses into your business via Instagram.
2. Gain positive reviews on your Facebook page.
3. Make video testimonials from your customers and post them on your Facebook page.
4. Create YouTube videos that have your products’ demo.
5. Have a support team that answers questions on Twitter.
6. Put catalogs and product shots on Pinterest and Instagram.

3. Acquisition: How will you get them to purchase or convert today?

Sometimes you need to nudge your potential customer to buy. The tactics that we mention below help in this regard:

I. Organic tactics

Social traffic is the traffic coming to your mobile site or your website from social media platforms and social channels. Use this traffic for email sign-ups. Then, send offers as a next step.

Note: A mobile and SEO-friendly website is crucial for the growth of your business. Creating a professional niche-based website that is both mobile- and SEO-friendly can take several days. But, if you use DashClicks' agency website tool, you can create a custom branded agency website (which is both mobile- and SEO-friendly) in just a few seconds. A fantastic way of impressing your prospects, isn't it?

II. Paid tactics

• Facebook Messenger ads: Let's start with some social media statistics Facebook ranks 3rd in the list of most-visited sites in the world. Hence, you must use it to persuade your potential customers to buy from your business. Facebook Messenger ads enable you to reach more customers in no time. They are known to increase conversion rates.

A type of Facebook Messenger ad is a Facebook Click-to-Messenger ad that helps you reach new audiences. These ads are engaging and mobile-friendly. With the help of these ads, you get the contact info of the interested person and can message them on Facebook Messenger. A great way to increase conversions, isn't it?

Image Source

• Facebook offers ads: These are mobile-only, customizable ads that attract your audience to make a purchase.

Image Source

4. Engagement: How will you stay in touch with a customer?

We all know that a lot of work goes into finding customers. Staying in touch with them opens up more sales opportunities in the future.

I. Organic tactics

A. Host regular Twitter Chats: A type of public conversation, a Twitter chat is organized around a particular topic.

Tip: Here are some tips to help you host a successful Twitter chat:

• A hashtag creates a digital space where people can connect. Use a hashtag that is memorable, different, and relevant.
• Pick an engaging, valuable, and relevant topic (it can be broad or super-niche).
• Set a date and time and remind your followers about the schedule in advance.
• Assign a moderator who will keep things moving during the chat by asking questions and monitoring the chat.
• As there will be plenty of participants in your Twitter chat, organize questions in the form of Q1, Q2, and so on. Encourage the participants to answer the same way (A1, A2, and so on).

B. Reply to questions from customers in a weekly Facebook live series.

II. Paid tactics

1. Make a private Facebook Group for your customers so that they can connect and discuss your products.

5. Advocacy: How will you get them to suggest your product to their friends?

Provide an easy way to your customers to talk about their experience so far. Provide them an outlet where they share their love for your products. This builds your credibility and attracts fresh prospects.

I. Organic tactics

1. Create a private Facebook Groups for existing customers
2. Create customer communities on Instagram. For instance, create a hashtag that attracts posts from customers. This way, you not only engage existing customers but showcase the amazing features of your products to new prospects.

Wrapping it up

The ultimate goal of a social media sales funnel is to get your customer to buy your products and services and recommend them to others. So, it is necessary to build one and focus on every stage.

Ensure that your marketing strategy provides an answer to the above-mentioned questions, and you are all set! Once you achieve success with the tactics you use for every stage, you can go ahead and add new ones.

As an agency owner, you must make sure that you are making money. The increasing competition in the digital marketing industry is pushing down prices, and it calls for competitive prices to be introduced by the agencies. However, if you don't make a profit, you will soon find yourself struggling as an agency owner.

Criteria to Be Used to Determine the Prices in a Digital Agency

It can be the biggest challenge for the startups, yet as a general rule, the prices charged by you should cover the overheads and the cost of the service provided. So, the pricing model should entirely be based on the services you provide.

If you are curious to know how much you should charge, our digital marketing pricing guide will help you immensely. Please remember that these charges are applicable for the year 2021.

If you intend to charge your customer regularly, the average price should be anywhere between $2,500 to $12,000 per month. The hourly charges would vary from $50 to $600 per hour. The minimum amount for a project would start from $1000, and it applies to small to midsize companies.

How to Determine a Reasonable Price?

With so many price models available, you will likely find a considerable variation in the rates. It makes determining reasonable prices for your services a challenge. These variations in the rates may expand further when you outsource your work.

Companies and agencies that outsource from third-world countries have an obvious cost advantage over their rivals. They can quickly drop their prices significantly without compromising their profit margins.

How should you determine the prices that don't go beyond customer expectations and still cover your operational costs in such a scenario?

Let’s consider two major factors to help you decide the prices you should charge as an agency:

1. Your overall operational cost
2. Agency pricing model you want to implement

1. What is the Overall Operational Cost of Your Agency

There are several expenses you should consider to determine the overall operating cost:

A. Office Expenses

It includes some basic expenses such as furniture and equipment, rent, maintenance, merchant fees, office supplies, etc.

B. Production Expenses

Professional digital agencies spend on team management software, CRM, SEO, digital marketing tools, social media tools, cameras, projectors, etc.

C. Workforce Costs

Staffing cost includes salaries, perks, benefits, insurance, training expenses, and bonuses.

D. Business Setup Fees

Licensing fees, corporate taxes, attorney's fees, accountants and book-keepers, consultant fees, etc.

E. Additional Expenses

Online marketing startups also need to spend on advertising, travel, accommodation, etc.

2. Agency Pricing Model You Want to Implement

You have a wide range of choices available to make digital marketing pricing plans. Some of these options are as follows:

• Hourly Charges: Charging hourly rates is the simplest form of pricing when you are unsure of the time needed to complete a project. Make sure the hourly charges cover your operational costs. Remember to keep a few extra hours as a buffer. It helps the clients to stay within their budget.

• Project-based Charges: If you have the required skills to execute a project, you can charge based on the project. Developing a social media ad campaign or managing online reputation campaigns falls under this category. With new clients, the strategy works best because once they get satisfied with your performance, you can go for more extensive projects with recurring fees.

• Retainer Prices: Once you can build trust and establish rapport with your client, you can charge retainer prices, where the deliverables are predefined. Such pricing gives the agency the actual financial strength it needs the capacity to survive without any external assistance as you start earning a regular monthly income. However, make sure your price doesn’t sound too expensive to the clients.

• Recurring Pricing Model: This is one of the most common pricing models, especially for long-term projects such as SEO projects. Since SEO takes a lot of time to deliver results, which easily stretches from months to years, it marks the beginning of a lasting relationship with your clients and steady income.

• Performance-based Pricing: It is the riskiest pricing model often adopted by reputed agencies confident of their expertise and ability to deliver results. It may be related to sales, conversions, or traffic on the site. However, it would help if you were prepared to provide the right metrics to support your claims and the efforts you have put in. Performance-based pricing is easy to scale, and hence it helps you exert influence and the client’s business. However, it is a significant drawback; you won’t get paid if your agency cannot perform.

• Value-based Pricing: Such a pricing model is adopted by the agencies that are confident of providing value to the client’s business or are convinced that they can solve their intricate problems. It is challenging to implement because agencies can’t achieve challenging goals consistently.

• Customized Pricing: This type of pricing is applicable when you charge for different services offered within the digital marketing domain. It is one of the most transparent and affordable pricing models, which allows you to tailor your services according to the client’s needs. It makes it easier for you to charge on an hourly basis and adopt the recurring price model.

Pro Tip: Remember to send your clients a professional quote – you can easily create one with the free quote maker.

The Average Prices of Digital Marketing Services in 2021

This table will provide you with the standard online marketing rates in the US in 2021:

Apart from that, there are different service plans for which you can charge a monthly fee. It can be $1500, $2500, or $3500 per month.

These packages are applicable roughly for 100, 150, and 200 keywords and include a dedicated digital marketing expert for your assistance.

What Determines Digital Marketing Pricing?

We are going to discuss the different factors that determine digital marketing prices in the section.

It would help if you remembered a simple formula for pricing, and that is:

                                                 Cost + Markup = Price

The cost of the services includes the hourly charges of the experts, administrative fees and office expenditure, and money incurred on buying expensive software and tools. Digital marketing pricing packages also include markup prices. Markup is the money you make on the services provided.

It usually is 20% to 50% of the service cost. This amount is variable, and the discount is offered from the markup only. If you face difficulty determining the markup price, estimate the value you provide to the client, and you will easily do it.

While this holds for SEO services, the PPC pricing may be entirely different. The PPC charges include the percentage of the ad spend, so you can easily mess up these deals. The project may involve more than one contractor, i.e., a copywriter, a content manager, a graphic designer, a video editor, and an ad manager.

It makes it difficult to calculate the actual cost of service. It is up to you to figure out the right pricing strategy in such scenarios. It can be hourly or campaign-based pricing, whichever suits best for you.

How to Price Social Media Marketing Services?

Knowing how to price your social media marketing services is instrumental for your success as a digital marketing agency. Social media is vast, and your presence on the platforms your audience uses the most determines your success. Posting engaging content regularly on these social media sites requires teamwork.

Agencies hire freelancers and full-time employees to manage their clients' social media accounts and provide value. Agencies markup the cost of the services they provide when billing their clients. According to the pricing structure discussed above, they may add a markup of 20-50% of the service cost. For premium agencies, this charge maybe even higher.

To determine the cost, you need first to figure out the roles and costs associated with your social media account management team. Hire content managers, graphic designers, and video editors and estimate the cost of hiring their services for your clients' social media projects. Add the desired profit margin to it to calculate the prices you can charge.

Formula to Calculate Social Media Agency Pricing

The actual cost of hiring social media professionals and designers + cost of the software & tools being used + your profit margin = PRICE a digital agency should charge for a social media project

Here are the hourly charges of some of the roles as in-house employees in a digital agency:

Image Source

Here are some of the possible social media roles associated with a social media project:

Social Media Management

To determine the average cost of social media management, you must know the different tasks associated with it and the roles you’ll need.

Different tasks associated with managing a social media account:

• creating content
• providing customer support
• monitoring conversations
• analytics
• working with influencers
• community management
• running paid ads

Social media roles you will need:

• strategist
• ad manager
• scheduler
• creative director
• copywriter
• designer
• video editor
• proof-reader
• analytics reporter

One Time Account Setup Fee

Every account needs a one-time setup apart from the recurring services. Setting up a social media account is an essential service because it carries the essence of your branding. It would help if you considered everything from the tone to the organization's colors, graphics, and mission statement while setting up an account.

It might also involve creating a video cover, profile image, cover page, featured images, and short and long bios. Apart from these, you may also need to create a business manager account and possibly a group.

Therefore, agencies also charge a separate one-time account setup fee.

Social Media Marketing Pricing For Ads

Social media ads management is also an essential service to consider, especially when determining SMM pricing. It involves managing ad spend, setting up the ad campaign, and making it a part of the comprehensive social media strategy. Again, you need an entire team of experts to manage social media ads just as you need it to manage a social account.

Here is an example:

An agency charges for social media ads in this fashion.$500 flat rate + 30% of ad spend (If the total ad spend is less than Rs. 3000/-)

If the ad spend is above 3K, then a percentage fee replaces the flat rate.

A % rate of the ad spend + 30% of ad spend (If the total ad spend more than Rs. 3000/-)

You would also need to charge for image creation (shooting) and editing for social media purposes if the client doesn't supply stock photos.

Don't Undervalue Your Social Media Services and Pricing

The pricing depends on the value an agency offers to the client, but most of the time, social media agencies undervalue their services and charge a meager fee. If you know the worth of your services, you can always set a reasonable price.

Apart from connecting businesses with their customers and building a community, social media does much more than one can expect. It also helps create brand awareness, increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, generates leads, boost sales, and retain clients. Social media also brings quality inbound traffic.

Roles to Be Filled In

To figure out roles to be filled in and the number of hours needed to complete the job is necessary to execute a successful social media campaign. The next step is to decide the markup, usually 20% to 50% of their costs. Keeping some margin in the markup will provide you a cushion against unexpected expenses.

Here is an example:

• The cumulative cost of the contractors/freelancers is $50 an hour.
• Agency charges $70 to $75 an hour.
• It equals a 45-50% markup so that the agency will make $20 to $25 per hour in labor costs.
• Contrary to smaller agencies, the premium agencies may charge anywhere from 70-150% markups. However, they need to deliver exceptional quality to justify the prices.

You need to create platform-specific content to deliver value and drive results for your client. In the digital marketing industry, you can charge according to the quality you provide. Hiring experienced and trained contractors will always be advantageous if you don't want to start from the bottom.

How to Price Website Design Services?

The same formula is also applicable to calculate the price of web design services:

Cost + Markup (profit margin) = Price

Website design is a multi-step process, which makes its pricing a bit complicated.

Here, too, tasks, job roles included, and markup will decide the ultimate cost of the project.

There is a difference between website design and website development. The former has to do with the user interface (UI), and the latter is more related to User Experience (UX).

How Much Should I Charge to Create a Website?

To determine the price of web design, you need to consider the following two factors:

1. The amount of work required for web design
2. The amount of value it will provide to the client

Here are the elements of web design services:

1. UI design
2. UX design
3. Graphic design

Ongoing Maintenance of a Website

The ongoing maintenance of a website should also be considered when figuring out the cost of web design. It includes code maintenance as well.

So, the simple formula you can use to calculate the cost of web design is:

Cost of web design = [Hourly rates of the designers and developers + Web hosting and domain registration fee and taxes + Hourly rates of other contractors such as copywriters, graphic designers, and video editors]

To reduce your expenditure on hiring website developers and designers, try hiring white label web design services. You’ll be stunned by the results, convenience, features, and prices. White label web design services have the following features:

1. Easy drag and drop editor
2. Self-service maintenance
3. Hosting and SSL certificate

How to Price PPC Services?

For PPC, experts recommend charging a flat price until the ad spend is less than $3000. It can be anywhere between $450-$750. When ad spend exceeds $3000, you can charge between 13% to 30% of the total ad spend.

You can lower down the percentage you charge as the ad spend grows. More ad spend doesn’t mean more clients or more business. It’s just that the financial strain has increased on a single client. So, it would help if you didn’t charge more.

If you don’t have a PPC expert on board, you can hire freelancers from sites like FreeUp or Upwork, but finding the right contractor who can deliver results is extremely difficult. So, the best solution is to hire white label PPC services. Reputed white label companies are known for their consistent performance and ROI so that it can be the safest bet yet the most affordable option for the agencies.

What to Expect Next After Ordering A Fulfillment Service in DashClicks

How To Price SEO Services?

You can use the standard formula to price SEO services:

Cost + markup = price of the SEO services

Generally, agencies markup on SEO services ranges between 20% to 50%. Add contactors’ fee, i.e., $50 an hour, to a 50% markup price, and it comes to $75 per hour, which is, on average, the final cost to the client. So, you make $25 an hour on SEO services from a single client.

Premium agencies usually charge a 70% – 150% markup, and most businesses can’t afford that.

Again, there are three significant types of SEO services:

1. Off-Page SEO
2. On-Page SEO
3. Local SEO

SEO requires a lot of activities and effort. Collectively, you should pay an average of $50 for all of these tasks. However, the price is not carved in stone and can be increased or decreased a bit.

The essential elements of SEO are:

1. The site structure
2. A secure HTTPS
3. The page speed of the site (A critical ranking factor)
4. A Robots.txt file (A file that prevents Google spiders from tracking specific content)
5. Keyword strategy
6. Removal of duplicate and thin content
7. Internal linking strategy and creating topic clusters

If you want to impress your client and rank #1 on various search engines for multiple keywords and search terms, try hiring DashClick’s white label SEO services. With access to the white-label dashboard, you’ll also receive automated white label SEO reports that will save your time and efforts.

Conclusion

Making a cost evaluation and establishing a budget is crucial to ensuring profits in an agency business. Most often, the prospects don't know what they want. A consultation and assessment of their budget are essential before you offer them online marketing services.

Hiring white label services is now a trend as not only it helps you reduce the contractors' fee. It also eliminates the hassle of reporting and ensuring the delivery of quality services. DashClicks' white label services are known for excellence and result-oriented services and hence customer satisfaction and business growth. Call us today at +1 (866) 600-3369 to learn more about the various packages and discounts.

Think about what will happen if a business creates innovative, engaging content? One thing is for sure, it will help build trust among audiences and yield success in the long haul. That's why it's advised that even new businesses should implement a solid content strategy from the very start

This is because you published the kind of content that helps your target audience and convinces them to take action.

But, there is a larger problem to tackle here. In order to achieve the desired results, you must know how to build a content strategy that is going to be successful.

If the content marketing statistics of 2020 are to be believed, 38% of content marketers thought that their content marketing strategy was Average'. Only 9% rated their strategy as Excellent'. The data clearly shows that several businesses are struggling to develop a winning content strategy.

To develop a successful strategy, you are required to set goals, learn about your audience, and map out how a buyer will interact with the content you produce and publish. To help you through this process, we have created this guide.

The Guide to a Creating a Successful Content Strategy

For a better understanding, let us first define content strategy. A content strategy is defined as the ongoing process of converting your business goals and objectives into a plan in which content is used as the primary means to attain those goals.

Let’s take an example to understand the content strategy to simplify things further. Let’s suppose one of your business goals is to increase brand awareness (for the ultimate aim of driving revenue). After you develop a solid understanding of your audience, you can execute this content strategy to reach your goal:

• Focusing on your story: To increase brand awareness, one of the best content topics is your business’s story. Write about where you started, what your beliefs are, how you succeeded, and so on. Because of this content, your potential customers are going to connect with you on a personal level.
• Choosing your channels: Many types of content work well in increasing brand awareness. These include:
• ‍Blog posts: Blogs are an excellent channel for driving traffic to your website. They help you become a trustable source in your industry if you keep posting them on a regular basis.‍
• Videos: This type of content can help you in many ways to increase brand awareness. For instance, you can tell your potential customers how you function with the help of videos.‍
• Downloadable guides: We all love anything that’s free, right? If you advertise a free guide that people can download, it will definitely work in your favor.

Now, it is time to know how to create a content marketing strategy. But before that, you are required to answer some questions to nudge your content strategy in the correct direction and ensure it is best positioned to achieve your goals. This means, at this stage, you are required to do some research. After all, research is a crucial step in any strategic endeavor.

Here's a list of questions to ask:

1. Who Will Be Your Target Audience?

The first question you need to ask yourself is ā who will be reading your content? Also, as your content strategy can definitely cater to more than one type of reader, you need to determine the number of audiences you will be creating content for.

Now, you may also wonder how you will deliver content to these respective audiences. But, you don't need to worry about that. There are so many content types and channels to help you engage every type of customer your company does business with.

2. What Problem Are You Solving?

Ideally, your service or product should solve a problem that you are aware your audience has. Hence, the content you produce should coach your audience regarding that problem which will, in turn, help them recognize and address it.

It is important to note that a smart content strategy helps two categories of people:

1) Those who are still finding out their main challenges

2) Those who are using your product to tackle those challenges.

3. What Makes You Different?

Your potential customers must know what makes you different or better than your competitors. So that you can prove why people should choose you, you need to show them why you are worth listening to. This is where content' comes to your aid.

4. What Are your Main KPIs?

You are required to evaluate the success of your program before developing a content strategy. Ask yourself questions such as - do you want to generate leads? Do you wish for more page views? Are you looking for a boost in subscribers?

As content marketing is a long-term strategy, it is difficult to track its success. So, there is an entire list of KPIs that helps you know whether you are on the road to a successful marketing strategy. Some of them are listed below:

• Overall traffic: It is essential to track this metric because it tells you the number of visitors coming to your site and the posts that attract them. When you know this information, you then get an idea of the kind of content you must continue to produce.

• Click-through rate of internal links: Click-through rate is important to check as well. If some content has a higher CTR, you must examine it to see what is the reason for its high performance. This information can help you apply the same principles throughout your content.

• Social shares: These help to measure the engagement that your content is creating.

5. How Often Do you Want to Publish?

Ask yourself - how often will you be able to publish? Will it be daily or weekly? What will be your plan of action in a situation where your team is not able to publish the way you had planned?

6. How Often Will You Revisit Your Strategy?

Because of the ever-changing nature of the marketing industry, your strategy must be revisited and tweaked accordingly. Some of the questions you need to ask yourself at this juncture are ā how many times in a year will you evaluate your strategy's success? How many changes would you be willing to make? And so on.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy?

Now that you have answers to all the important questions, it is time that you get to know the specifics of how to develop your content marketing plan.

At this stage, it is important for you to know that there is no grand solution that any business can follow when we talk about content strategy. The strategy that you develop will be unique as per your situation. However, there are a few tactics that will steer you in the right direction. Let's discuss them one by one:

1. Set Your Goals

Start with a definitive objective. Doing so will help you stay focused and prevent you from publishing content just for the sake of it. Also, during this stage, ensure that your analytics are set up. It will allow you to track potential metrics such as social media shares, page views, and e-commerce conversions in your analytics tools.

Image Source

2. Conduct Persona Research

In order to craft a successful content strategy, you are required to determine your buyer's persona, which is also called your content's target audience. This is particularly crucial for those who are new to marketing. When you are aware of your target audience, you are able to produce relevant content that they would want to read and subsequently convert on.

In case you are an experienced marketer, you must revisit your audience parameters annually. This is because your target may have changed. You may have to re-evaluate if you wish to expand your existing target market or target a fresh group of people. Such a step is of paramount importance when it comes to growing your audience.

3. Research the Relevant Keywords

Now that you have clearly defined your target audience, you need to meticulously research the keywords that hold relevance to your target audience. There are a lot of tools to help you find keywords that will ultimately become the backbone of the content that you produce. So, ensure you research keywords that help you get higher SEO rankings for your business.

Let’s discuss some of the ways in which you can research relevant keywords:

a. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest produces keyword ideas from the search suggestions of Google. You can enter a keyword and Ubersuggest will find long-tail keywords of the term you typed in.

Now, you may wonder what are long-tail keywords. These are search terms with relatively low competition levels and search volume. These are longer in length (more than 3 words), such as “inexpensive life insurance for elderly people” and “order vitamin B12 capsules online.”

b. SEMRush

If you want an excellent recommendation for a paid keyword tool, go for SEMrush. The tool saves a lot of time in your keyword research. Just enter the website of your competitor in Google and examine the list of keywords they rank for. That's it; you can use this ready list of keywords for your own website.

4. Check the Competition

Once you are armed with the knowledge of your target audience and the relevant keywords, now is the time to analyze your competitor's content. This means a thorough examination of the keywords and areas they rank for. Check for the topics, length of content, and the keywords on their site and different distribution channels. In case you spot the areas where you can fill the gaps and offer better value to your audience, use it to your advantage.

5. Choose the Right Channels

The countless amount of distribution channels can seem overwhelming at first. However, it is recommended that you choose a few channels for content distribution, such as a YouTube channel and a blog. This allows the company to concentrate on distribution to the right audience using the right channels.

The channels for distributing your content will differ based on your resources and audience. The categories in which most distribution channels are:

1. Owned media channels: Owned media are the channels that belong to you, so you have control over your published content. It applies to your site, social media accounts, company’s blog, email newsletters, etc.
2. Earned media channels: Earned media channels are also known as shared channels. Earned media is like free advertising. It can range from a press release about your company to a person talking on social media about the products you offer.
3. Paid distribution channels: Paid channels cover media that needs payment for distributing content. Usually, they include paid influencer content, social ads, sponsored content, and PPC advertising.

Image Source

6. Brainstorm Content Ideas

Based on the information you have gathered in order to understand your target audience and competitors, you are now in the position to brainstorm content ideas.

At this point, you can determine the type of content you want. Check what type of content will best serve your purpose.

Tip: For example, if you want your audience to constantly visit your website, going for a recurring schedule of quality blog posts can be a step in the right direction. On the other hand, if you want to showcase how your products work, you can shoot engaging videos for the same.

At the time of brainstorming, don't be afraid to try something new as long as it is backed by research. Build a list of ways that will help serve your purpose and execute your research. Then, narrow it down to the ones that will ultimately work the best.

To help you further in deciding the content types you can choose to execute your purpose, consider these pointers:

Social media content helps connect with younger audiences

Blog posts work well in informing your audience and driving traffic for your site.

Digital media, such as videos and infographics are brilliant ways to engage the audience in a way that they won’t easily forget.

7. Create an Editorial Calendar

Last but not the least, comes the aspect of publishing and managing your content. With an editorial calendar, you will be able to publish a diverse content library on your site. An editorial calendar will help you iron out the details of when and where the content will be made available. It not only helps you keep track of your content, but also ensures that you are consistent in publishing content.

In addition to this, you need to create a social media content calendar so that you can promote as well as manage content on various other sites.

Tip: It is important to go for evergreen ideas i.e. the ideas that will always be relevant. However, you must not ignore timely topics as they help produce spikes of traffic even when they don't form the bulk of your calendar. Keep in mind some niche holidays that will be of interest to your audience at the time of planning the calendar.

Bottomline

It takes a lot of planning and brainpower to devise a perfect content marketing plan. To simplify the entire process, ensure that you always focus on your audience and its needs while developing your strategy. Trust us, if you follow this approach, your audiences will certainly reward your website with page shares and views, with many of them ultimately investing in your business.

When you have a solid marketing plan in place for your business, you have already taken the first step towards gaining an advantage over your competitors.

Now, Happy strategizing!

Digital marketing has gathered momentum, and soon the industry will touch the $375 billion mark globally.

To harness its enormous benefits, you should first spend some time learning its various streams and fundamentals. Developing a roadmap and an action plan is the next most important step. The easy availability of numerous marketing options can overwhelm a beginner solopreneur, so cutting all the clutter, we bring you an actionable plan that includes where to start and how to proceed.

A strategic roadmap template will help you define and shape your marketing efforts to attain your goals faster. So, first, learn how to build and run a digital agency from scratch.

How to Build a Digital Agency?

Here are a few steps to successfully build your digital marketing agency:

1. Spend time on self-education
2. Choose your niche and leverage niche marketing
3. Start local
4. Perform competitor research
5. Create a professional website
6. Build a portfolio
7. Set a pricing model
8. Go social
9. Generate leads
10. Simplify client onboarding
11. Hire white-label services

1. Spend Time on Self-Education

You can get access to a host of free educational material from DashClicks that will sharpen and upgrade your online marketing skills. Most of the study material is designed for agency owners, and you’d easily be able to locate the sections dedicated to agency owners in our blog section.

Here are some of the resources you can refer to:

1. Blog
2. Video blog
3. Marketers Mindset Podcast
4. Webinars
5. Private Facebook Group
6. Support Center

• Video Blog

Dashclicks’ video blog is immensely beneficial for the agency owners as it shares proven digital marketing strategies directly from the successful agency owners, including Chad Kodary, the CEO of DashClicks.

• Dash University

Dash University is the DashClicks' education, and training venture explicitly launched to help agency owners succeed in this challenging marketplace. Branded as a "university for agency owners," Dash University educates you on what works and what doesn't work.

Dash University conducts a new live online training session every week. With four distinct training styles, it helps you absorb all the information with minimal effort. With entertainment and engagement being the top priorities during the training sessions at Dash University, you can learn complicated stuff without feeling overwhelmed.

2. Choose Your Niche and Leverage Niche Marketing

Finding your niche is crucial to survival in this challenging marketplace. Most agencies promote themselves as full-service agencies, but it goes against them when targeting clients from a specific niche. Positioning yourself as an expert in a particular niche is the remedy that works wonders.

To know more about targeting a specific niche and other aspects of niche marketing, read this article - How to Grow and Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency in 2021

According to a HubSpot study, the average agency's profit margins are generally shallow ā reportedly between 10% and 20%. It is therefore essential to distinguish your agency from others.

The big question here is how to define your niche. Do some SWOT analysis and discover which type of company or industry you can serve most effectively, given your experience, exposure, and interest. For example, you can specialize in specific sectors such as tech companies, finance companies, and businesses linked with travel and hospitality. You can also choose the business types such as family-owned businesses, small businesses, and VC-funded companies.

Some of the niches you may consider are as follows:

• Roofers
• Painters
• Landscape architects and designers
• Educational institutions
• Massage Therapists
• Personal Trainers
• Tattoo parlors
• Engineering and technology companies
• HVAC
• Water Damage
• Rehab Centers
• Auto Shops

To pick the low-hanging fruit offered by niche marketing, follow these tips:

Show the proof of success in the category you claim to be an expert in through testimonials, mentions, or case studies.

Acquire expertise and knowledge of your niche as well as current and future trends. Keep yourself abreast with the latest industry updates through blogs, trade journals, and subject matter experts and influencers.

Get access to customized marketing tools and templates related to the niche you want to target.

It’s not necessary to focus on just one niche, you can choose multiple niches at a time, but these three tips apply to all of them. Hard work is the key to success, along with these tactics.

3. Start Local

Being in the same area builds trust among local businesses. It is comparatively easier to introduce your agency when you are a local player. Once you have a portfolio of local clients, you can easily penetrate the international market. Meet local community leaders, attend local events and get yourself featured in the local press. Participate in a social cause.

4. Perform Competitor Research

Performing a competitive analysis helps you in many ways, especially when you need to know your competitors’ specific strategies. You can use Ubersuggest, a keyword suggestion tool, to find the popular keywords and their variations.

Entering a broad term into the software to engage in keyword discovery will bring you many ideas to explore the topic. When you perform competitive research, you should follow these tips:

1. Restrict your competitors to 10-15
2. Find out how they are monetizing, i.e., making money
3. Delve deeper into their content marketing strategy

a. Take a look at their blog posts and social media posts
b. Check their content formats, i.e., podcasts, blogging, or vlogging
c. Analyze their SEO tactics

5. Create a Professional Website

Based on the competitor analysis and content marketing analysis, you can launch your website. All you need to do is choose a domain name and hosting service. Remember, your website is often the first touchpoint for your customers, so create it as per your branding. Avoid clutter and make it user-friendly.

1-Click Agency Website through DashClicks' Agency Website Tool

You can create a professional agency website through DashClicks' Sites App within a matter of minutes. You don't need designers, developers, and content writers to develop these professional and beautiful template-based websites.

6. Build a Portfolio

Building a portfolio is the prerequisite before you create your website. Offer free digital marketing services to your friends and their businesses to make your first portfolio. It will also help you get free testimonials that you can use on your website to build trust. You need not run a full-fledged online marketing campaign for a client to make a portfolio. If they have a local store or local business, you need to do local SEO for them through Google My Business and perform some directory listing.

When you have so many things on your plate and if it seems too much for you, you can order white-label directory listing services from DashClicks at an affordable rate. We are with you at every step of your journey to become a seven-figure agency.

Creating a Facebook business page and an Instagram account for them and creating a couple of posts is also a good idea. This approach has two benefits. First, it will help you in networking and spreading awareness about your business. Secondly, you may also win a paid contract in the process in case your friends liked your work.

Tip: Keep your portfolio ethical and verifiable.

Further reading: 11 Benefits of Using White Label Digital Marketing Services

7. Set a Pricing Model

For essential services, you can charge your client on an hourly basis. A flat retainer or a monthly fee is the simplest pricing model. You can also charge a percentage of spending as your fee, which offers a pretty transparent pricing model. Refer to a digital agency pricing guide or check out the market rates before you launch your agency. Here are some of the pricing options available to you.

1. Hourly charges — Straightforward, but it offers no incentive to work faster.
2. Project-based charges — If you have the required skills, charge a flat fee for any project. It’s understandable and easier to scale.
3. Retainer model — Ensure a good steady income each month. Good for you when your agency produces a large volume of work each month.
4. Recurring model —Offers discounted annual agency pricing plan. It’s Ideal for long-term projects such as SEO.

8. Go Social

Social media platforms enjoy a tremendous reputation as some are the most powerful communication mediums between the business and customers. So, as soon as you have your website live, create your company's social media accounts on the major social networking sites. These are the best places to build brand awareness and engage people to bring them into your sales funnel.

For further reading, please read: 14 Digital Marketing Tools to Boost Your Online Presence

9. Generate Leads

Generating leads can be the most challenging aspect of a business for a new agency, but you shouldn't be discouraged. We are sharing with you a formula that will help you generate leads. Keep your target customer in mind and create their buyer persona. Agencies generally succeed with their lead generation efforts through video marketing, blogging, and affiliate marketing.

Let's begin with video marketing

A. Start Video Marketing

Create a YouTube channel and start posting excellent videos adding your target audience's pain points. You can include case studies, how-to videos, and client reviews and testimonials in these videos. Please make sure you regularly post on your YouTube channel. Otherwise, it will lose its traffic and rankings. If some of your blog posts or articles perform well, you can always make vlogs of them. This way, you will soon develop a small audience that you can divert to your website.

B. Try Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing and cold email marketing also have tremendous potential. It involves referring or endorsing a product or service through a blog or your social media account. Sometimes, affiliate marketers also create a full-fledged website to sell a product or bundle of products. The affiliates earn a commission on each sale made through the unique links placed by them.

Further reading: Get Clients for Your Digital Marketing Agency in 2019 on Autopilot

C. Create a Lead Magnet for Your Website

Most of your website visitors never convert to leads. From readiness to commitment to an inadequate level of trust, there can be "n number" of reasons for this. For such visitors, you can use a lead magnet.

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is used to capture website visitors' contact information, so you can move them into your marketing funnel and nurture them till they convert and become your loyal customer. Ebooks cheat sheets, templates, whitepapers, and other learning resources are pretty popular these days as lead magnets.

Click this link to see the examples of lead magnets used by companies such as Instant Offices.

D. PPC (Pay Per Click)

Pay per click is one of the best marketing strategies for ROI to generate leads when you have little or no organic traffic. Both Facebook and Google Ads can boost your outreach beyond your expectations. PPC ads allow you to target a specific audience looking for services similar to yours, which is why these are highly effective for lead generation. However, it would help to keep a tab on your ad spend as it may soon go beyond your budget.

E. Content Marketing and SEO

The best way to generate leads is through content marketing and SEO. The organic traffic is free, and hence this is the best option to generate, nurture and convert leads.

Write content on topics your audience needs. Answer their queries, address their pain points and tell them how your products and services can help. SEO helps your website to get more visibility on search engines. It boosts traffic on your website that is primarily free. Create a blog and create helpful content and optimize it to attract search engines' attention to your blog.

Pro Tip: Hire white-label SEO and content marketing services as both fields require expertise, and hiring professionals can be a costly affair for a newly launched agency.

Here are the five benefits of hiring white label content marketing services from DashClicks:

In the end, this video will immensely help you to build, scale and grow your digital marketing agency.

The Exact Blueprint To Starting A Digital Marketing Agency

10. Simplify Client Onboarding

When your agency grows, you get more clients on board every month. Onboarding is a tedious and repetitive process, so it consumes a lot of your time and energy. Technology comes to your rescue in this and allows you to handle onboarding on autopilot.

DashClicks' onboarding platform allows you to automate client onboarding.

The intelligent onboarding process prevents all the manual work by gathering crucial information from the client. So, you can either complete it yourself or send them straight to your client via your white-labeled dashboard. The system also sends automated reminders through email to the client, so they don't forget to complete them. As a result, onboarding can be achieved without any delay.

11. Hire and Resell White Label Services

Spending too much on hiring and recruitment, in the beginning, can turn out to be a recipe for disaster. Instead, you should hire white-label digital marketing services, which are pretty affordable yet best-in-class.

It would be best to convey your brand values and preferences to your white-label partner, who will deliver the most suitable solutions to you. So, you can allocate your limited resources and time to marketing and sales and delegate all the functional and operational tasks to us. DashClicks' fully white-labeled marketing platform allows your agency's brand to shine. The platform will enable you to add your own branding wherever you want.

Further reading: Your Complete Guide to White Label Reselling

Additional Tips:

1. Keep your lead response time low. Typically, it shouldn’t be more than an hour, or else you may lose the client.
2. Set up an outbound sales team and create a lead pipeline.
3. Market your website first and bring it on top of search engine results. Try paid advertising on Facebook and Google too.
4. Invest in guest posting for link building and creating brand awareness.
5. Use original pictures & high-quality graphics on your website instead of cheap-looking stock photos.
6. Add personality to your brand. If you look like a replica of Jeff Bezos in his early days running Amazon from a single desk garage office, mention it. Talk about it in your About Us section and reveal your authentic self.
7. Frequently publish on third-party websites and LinkedIn for added exposure.
8. Guard your online reputation. Answer negative reviews, complaints, and queries promptly on social media and elsewhere.
9. Highlight your strengths and share your achievements.
10. Create powerful customer success stories and case studies and share them aggressively.
11. Set your milestones and long-term goals.
12. Build relationships with your customers, deliver excellent results and ask for referrals.
13. Delegate rather than doing it all by yourself.
14. Send letters and gifts to your clients at important events and festivals.
15. Hire and train the right people.

Are You Ready to Launch Your Digital Agency?

Even though the idea of launching a digital marketing agency sounds overwhelming, if you carefully tread the path and follow the tips shared above, with perseverance, eventually you will succeed. It would help if you had the right team, the right strategy, and the right tools to succeed in this competitive and demanding marketplace. DashClicks equips you with the right tools and strategy. Collaborate with your clients and offer free training using DashClicks educational and training resources. There is substantial money in the field of corporate training, and it will reduce your churn rate, too.