According to a study from Datareportal, experts can estimate that roughly 4.20 billion people utilize some form of social media. That adds nearly 500 million new users in the past year.

Despite the prevailing negative attitudes toward social platforms, the power of their popularity is indisputable. Social media is continuing to change the way we deliver and consume content, learn about news, and purchase products or services.

With that in mind, is it possible to deliver a strong marketing strategy without establishing your brand on social media? The statistics are available, and marketing is simply mandatory if you want to compete and remain relevant throughout the rest of 2021 and beyond.

If you're still not convinced that you need to rethink your marketing strategy, take a look at these 50 social media statistics that you need to know as a marketer in 2021.

• General Social Media Statistics
• Facebook Statistics
• Instagram Statistics
• Twitter Statistics
• LinkedIn Statistics
• YouTube Statistics
• Pinterest Statistics

General Social Media Statistics

1. 4.20 Billion People Use Social Media - 53% of the World's Population

Regardless of how you view the value of social media, more than one in two people log in regularly. Individuals can access their profiles at home or on the go with mobile devices, making it easier than ever to stay connected.

In seconds, users can search for brands, research products or services, and make new purchases with just a few screen touches. Regardless of the platform, social media revolutionizes the way we interact with each other and with brands.

Does this mean that your brand should go all-in on posting and paid social ads? Maybe not, but it is essentially nonsensical to ignore the sheer size of the audience waiting to discover your brand. Even for general awareness, establishing your brand online can greatly impact your business's success.

2. The Average Daily Time Spent on Social Media is 2 Hours, 25 Minutes

The average amount of time spent on social varies by nation, with the Philippines leading the globe at 4 hours, 15 minutes, and the United States sitting at roughly 2 hours, 7 minutes.

For comparison, experts estimate that total daily internet usage by user ranges from 4 hours, 25 minutes on the low end, to nearly 11 hours total per day. This means that on average, roughly a third of the time spent on a device is spent on social media.

Sources: We Are Social, Hootsuite

3. 55.7% of that Time is Spent Using Mobile Devices

Mobile phones serve as the predominant way that all users visit the internet. Additional sources estimate that a staggering 91% of social media users are logging into their accounts with cellular phones.

For marketers, this means that the opportunity to reach your audience is now available nearly all hours of the day. Consider the ways that new users are discovering your brand and content, and be sure to optimize it for an enjoyable mobile experience.

The smoother you make the buyer's journey from discovery to purchase via their phone, the better your chances are for online success.

Sources: We Are Social, Hootsuite, Lyfe Marketing

4. The Number of Users by Social Media Platform

Thanks to an article from the Pew Research Center, we have a strong estimate of the number of social media users by platform.

YouTube leads the way by far with a whopping 81% of adults reporting to use the site regularly. Slightly further behind is Facebook with 69% of adults. The rest of the numbers are as follows (percentage of adults):

• Instagram – 40%
• Pinterest – 31%
• LinkedIn – 28%
• Snapchat – 25%
• Twitter – 23%
• WhatsApp – 23%
• TikTok – 21%
• Reddit – 18%
• Nextdoor – 13%

While YouTube easily dominates as the premier platform for video, Facebook has long been the market leader above everything else. With access to such a large and diverse userbase, marketers can curate content to target specific audiences.

Facebook makes this even easier with an easy-to-use advertising platform that tracks data from users who see and click on your ads. You can even utilize this data to create lookalike audiences to further target users that demonstrate an interest in your brand.

While the percentages decline significantly thereafter, those platforms still maintain loyal users. It's essential to learn more about who makes up those percentage of users so that you can curate a strategy that speaks to each platform's unique audiences.

Sources: Pew Research Center

5. 44.8% of People Use Social Media to Check Out Brands

The same digital report for 2021 featured above explains that a little less than one in two people will look for your brand on social media before they go anywhere else.

However, these statistics get more interesting when you view the breakdown by generation, with more than 50% of Gen Z users using social over search. Millennials aren't far behind at just under 50%.

That means if your brand isn't on social media, half of the people won't explore it any further. Competitor brands in your industry that are on social media will likely take their attention away, causing you to lose out on those potential leads forever.

While older generations still utilize the traditional search method, any marketer needs to understand their audience and the best ways to reach them. Remember - every corner of the internet is competing for a user's attention every second, so you're not doing yourself any favors by ignoring the top-performing platforms.

Sources: We Are Social, Hootsuite

6. Industry Experts Find Social Media to Be An Effective Marketing Tool

A Visual Objects report shows that 81% of small businesses plan to make a social media marketing investment in 2021. Social media use by businesses continues to grow as professionals are no longer able to ignore the value of what these platforms offer.

A slightly older study from Hootsuite shows that nearly all of them use social media to promote brand awareness among interviewed businesses. Additional reasons cited for utilizing social media as a marketing tool were managing reputation, engaging with the community, increasing sales, and learning more about their audience.

Social media allows you to skip the middleman and reach out directly to the individual. You can recalculate your marketing strategies based upon community feedback. Paid advertising campaigns will also automatically gather insights concerning engagement from those who may not comment, like, or share directly.

Sources: Visual Objects, Hootsuite

7. The Content That Performs Best Varies by Platform

Studies show that your business is better off taking a more targeted approach to reaching your audience depending on each platform.

For example, a survey of Paid Media specialists reports that video content can yield twice the amount of clicks as an image with text. Clients may report a 20-30% increase in conversions with better video content.

Instagram, on the other hand, is seeing a steady rise in Carousel engagement. Images still dominate as the primary type of user post at 67.82%, while only receiving a 1.74% engagement rate per post. Carousels are receiving 1.92% engagement and rising, while Instagram video receives just 1.45% engagement.

Finally, Twitter posts with images get 128% more retweets than videos. The tone of those posts generally differs due to the average age demographic that utilizes the platform.

This means that the job of a social media marketing specialist is to keep up-to-date with ever-changing trends. While dynamic content like video is almost always engaging, it may not always be worth the resources when you can get proven engagement with less. Getting better results for your business on social requires you to be an active participant in the community, not just selling to it.

Sources: Databox, Social Insider, QuickSprout

8. It's Time to Get Political

Your brand should stay on the sidelines when it comes to current social and political events, right?

Wrong.

Experts are finding that consumers expect brands to take a stand more than ever. 70% of online respondents felt it was important for brands to broadcast their values openly. This is largely due to the belief that a brand has greater influential power and reach to instigate meaningful change.

However, what are you to do when your stand represents the opposite of what some consumers believe? There is no concrete answer, but saying nothing and remaining on the sidelines may be as harmful as saying the wrong thing in some circumstances.

Nevertheless, consumers expect brands to speak out against issues, especially if they directly pertain to the business itself. Navigating these murky waters can be challenging, but it's important to be consistent in your values, to look out for your employees and consumers, and to promote sincere awareness and action on anything you believe is worth advocating.

Sources: SproutSocial

9. Social Media is a Cost-Effective Means of Customer Service

Responding to customer queries effectively is a problem every business needs to face. Using up employee time isn't effective, and hiring personnel just to fill up call centers isn't the most cost-effective solution in the long run.

Fortunately for business owners, studies show that quick customer service interactions cost nearly 1/6th of a call center interaction. The benefits don't end there. Responding to a query and solving the problem quickly greatly boosts positive brand impressions, and is far more likely to result in positive reviews, shares, and recommendations.

However, customer interactions on social media can be a double-edged sword. Failing to reply to customer concerns or leaving them with a bad experience can cause as many as 88% of consumers to avoid buying from your brand ever again.

Sources: SocialMediaToday

10. Great Customer Service Online Increases Sales and Engagement

The risks of social media are worthwhile, as a positive experience on social media makes users more than three times as likely to recommend your brand or share your content.

In percentages, 71% of consumers who feel good about the interaction will share, while only 19% who do not get an interaction will still share. Moreover still, those customers are likely to spend as much as 40% more as a result of this personal engagement.

A little goodwill and honest effort go a long way on social media. Remind your customers that there are regular people behind the brand, and make them feel good every once in a while!

11. Lack of Interest is the Number One Reason People Will Unfollow You

Most social media users will eventually unfollow a brand at some point. The question is, what are these brands doing wrong if anything, and what can you do to avoid the same mistakes?

The solution is as different as each user that initially follows, but the problem always comes down to a lack of interesting content. The key reason that anyone uses social media at all is to constantly be entertained, humored, or to get something personally beneficial out of the relationship.

Nearly 80% reported unfollowing because they were no longer interested, 67% said that the content was no longer relevant to the brand, while 41.5% said that the brand posts too often. Perhaps shockingly, reporting false information and poor quality products was the least of anyone's concern when it comes to following!

Sources: GoodFirms

12. Social Media is a Cost-Effective Way to Generate New Leads

The cost of social media advertising varies depending upon the platform as well as your goals. CPC, or cost-per-click, is generally the most cost-effective bidding option and can boost brand awareness and help gain valuable insights about your audience.

Take a look at the estimated CPC per platform to give you an idea:

• Facebook – $0.97 per click
• Instagram – $3.56 per click
• YouTube – $3.21 per click
• LinkedIn – $5.26 per click
• Twitter – $0.38 per click
• Pinterest – $1.50 per click

Facebook remains a dominant social marketing platform due to its enormous social reach, low advertising costs, and intuitive Business Manager. Due to shared ownership, you can seamlessly run your campaigns on Instagram as well with a few button clicks.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn still proves to be the best platform for B2B even if the CPC is a bit higher. All platforms give you the freedom to personalize your budget and monetize your campaign in a way that works best for your unique business goals.

Sources: WebFX

13. More Customers Are Beginning to Buy Through Social Media

eCommerce continues to explode in growth more than ever as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, are people entering their payment information directly on Facebook or Instagram?

A Hubspot survey seems to indicate that social media purchases are trending upward. More than 50% of the interviewed users reported purchasing on social, with 36% using Facebook shopping, 24.5% on Instagram, 13.5% on WhatsApp, 10.5% on Pinterest, and 9% making up the remaining social platforms.

While it's by no means a prevailing number, it's very possible that social shopping will increase as these platforms build awareness around their shopping capabilities and establish the trust necessary for users to enter their sensitive information.

In theory, adding products to social media directly can greatly simplify the buyer's journey and result in additional sales for you and your business.

Sources: HubSpot

Facebook Statistics

14. Millennials Make Up the Greatest Share of Facebook Users

Statista reports that 43.3% of users are millennials, falling in between the 25-44 years of age range. There is a noticeable user dropoff in either age direction, with young teenagers and the elderly community making up the smallest percentages.

With that said, Facebook is still the primary platform used by the 65 and older group, with YouTube following closely behind. Younger users are likely to choose other social media platforms as their app of choice.

Sources: Statista

15. The United States Makes Up Just 10% of Daily Active Users

It's worth noting that the United States and Canada only make up about 10% of daily active users, with the majority coming from Europe and other parts of the globe.

Similar studies from the same source indicate that 56% of users are male, while 44% are female. In regards to income rangers, Facebook features an even split. If we can trust recent trends, more older generation users will pick up Facebook, meaning users with more income to spend on your brand.

Sources: Hootsuite

16. Facebook's Advertising Revenue Grows 22% Year-over-Year

Facebook offers one of the most diverse userbases and the largest share of the global population using social media. Along with its incredibly easy-to-use marketing center and costs that beat out other platforms, it's easy to see why the lion's share of Facebook's income comes from advertising.

Thanks to the 2020-2021 pandemic, Facebook expects accelerated growth as more of the globe adapts to eCommerce as opposed to brick-and-mortar shopping.

This also speaks to just how effective Facebook advertising is proving for small businesses. If you weren't already convinced that you're late to the party, you should be now. Facebook estimates that three million businesses now use their platform for advertisement.

Sources: Facebook Investor Relations

17. Facebook Stories Get 500 Million Views Daily

Nearly all of us are visual consumers. It's effectively a given that images and video will substantially boost interest and engagement with any given post. However, the Facebook Stories feature may be a key tool you're not utilizing in your marketing efforts.

Facebook Stories automatically appear at the top of the screen, guaranteeing maximum visibility for your content.

This type of disposable video content began with Snapchat. Shortly after, Instagram and Facebook dove in to capitalize on their version. The key detail to note is that while not everyone uses Stories, those who do demonstrate higher engagement rates, especially among the younger generations.

Sources: Hootsuite

18. Local Business Searches Grew by 23% in 2020

This is another trend that Facebook expects to continue as a result of the pandemic. While many are learning how to take advantage of eCommerce shopping, many others are making active efforts to support their local communities.

Facebook's internal search engine makes it convenient and easy to discover local businesses by industry. Just like any directory listing, keeping your business profile up-to-date on Facebook can be an easy way to draw in new customers with very little maintenance on your end.

Customers can learn more about your business on Facebook through business pages and groups, which leads us to.

Sources: Facebook for Business

19. 1.8 Billion Users Are Active Participants in Facebook Groups

Anyone on Facebook including individual users and brands can create private or public groups on Facebook. This presents an easy way to curate content specifically for a group that chooses to opt-in. When users join your Facebook group or follow your business page, you can trust that those users are there to learn more about your content.

Instead of focusing exclusively on chasing new leads through paid ads, you can invite users to learn more about your business directly. Post regular updates, offer promotions to group members and watch your engagement steadily increase over time.

Image Source

20. 1.3 Billion Are Using Facebook Messenger

Facebook isn't just for posting but serves as a primary means of text communications for many users.

You can further enhance your customer service capabilities by downloading free add-ons that allow you to distribute auto-responses to customer queries. Users feel confident knowing their questions are in queue for reviewal and allows you to win social currency for your brand.

Sources: TechCrunch

Instagram Statistics

21. Instagram Boasts 500 Million Daily Users, 1 Billion Monthly

While Instagram doesn't exactly have the reach of Facebook or YouTube, its monthly active users make up an enormous share of the global population.

Perhaps the most important statistic for your small business is that Instagram's popularity peaks in the United States. Note that monthly active users refer to anyone who has an account and logs in at least once every 30 days.

If you recall the statistics at the top of this article, Instagram ranks 3rd overall in our list (5th total if you were to include Messenger as its own platform along with WhatsApp).

Sources: Backlinko

22. Similar to Facebook, Millennials Make Up the Bulk of Users

Nearly half of users are millennials, falling between the ages of 25 and 44. However, this is the first platform we are looking at up close that consists of a bigger Generation Z userbase at nearly 30%.

Instagram proves to not be a popular item among young teens, and also sees a sharp dropoff in users aged 35 and over. The statistics show that Instagram is a young person's platform with just 5.9% of users making up the 55 and older community.

Sources: Statista

23. Tuesday's Are Red-Hot for Brand Engagement

Though overall trends tend to peg millennials as weekend content consumers, lunchtime weekday engagement proves to be primetime. This is likely the result of the work-from-home increase in 2020 but shows no signs of changing any time soon.

While Wednesday appears to demonstrate the longest timeframe for activity, Tuesday yields denser activity on average. Perhaps surprisingly, brand engagement on weekends is significantly lower than any weekday.

It looks like everyone needs the occasional workday distraction. Armed with the right research, it's the best opportunity for your brand to strike.

Sources: SproutSocial

24. Instagram Users Are Most Likely to Follow Brands

Each platform has its unique audiences with unique goals. It turns out, one of Instagram's primary purposes is to connect with exciting brands.

This survey study at Audience Project shows that 36% of Instagram users are looking to follow brands that interest them. This survey assesses each platform's userbase by user intent on each platform. Twitter is nearly identical for brand following.

Other popular platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook see a noticeable dropoff in this trend, indicating that brand connection is less of a priority for those users. While a platform like Facebook may offer a larger overall audience, perhaps the engagement tendencies of Instagram users may be more appealing for your brand.

Sources: AudienceProject

25. 130 Million Click on a Shopping Post Monthly

Facebook & Instagram report directly that an estimated 130 million active Instagram users click on shopping posts every month. Those users enjoy using Instagram to learn more details about a product before making a purchasing decision.

As Hubspot reported earlier in this article, 24.5% of Instagram users regularly shop and buy products directly through the app. As we continue to trend toward more social shopping, it's worthwhile for all eCommerce brands to start integrating new products and promotions within the Instagram platform.

Sources: Facebook, Instagram

26. Instagram Confirms There Are 500 Million Daily Active Instagram Stories Users

The video story trend started by Snapchat continues to work well for Instagram users. Any social feature that works well for everyday users is a feature that your brand can’t afford to ignore.

Merkle reports that Instagram Stories accounts for one-third of total ad spend for Paid Ads managers and accounts for a not-so-small 36% of all impressions across BOTH Facebook and Instagram combined.

Moreover still, despite the engagement rates that Instagram Stories can provide, ad spend for your average campaign continues to lower on Instagram every year.

Sources: Merkle Inc.

27. 50% of Stories Viewers Will Buy the Product

Instagram once again boasts that 50% of surveyed Stories users went on to purchase the product or service they learned about on their app. It’s important to remember that traffic, reach, and impressions are great metrics, but ultimately do not amount to much if there’s no buyer intent.

To summarize, Stories users demonstrate high levels of engagement, are very likely to complete the entire story, and have a 50/50 chance of becoming a customer after gaining awareness of your brand. As a business owner, you have to like those odds.

Image Source

Twitter Statistics

28. Though Not as Popular, Twitter Features 353.1 Million Monthly Active Users

Though it’s not quite in the same league as the platforms above, Twitter still features 353.1 million monthly active users, with 192 million of those participating daily.

The United States Makes up the largest percentage of those users at 68.7% with Japan following not too far behind at 52%. There is a steep decline in users from the rest of the world with India being a distant third at 18.9%.

Sources: Backlinko

29. Generation Z and Late Millenials Love to Tweet

Another Statista study proclaims that generate2% of 18-29-year-olds enjoyed engaging on Twitter out of surveyed respondents. The userbase drops off heavily with 30-49-year-olds making up 27% and 25% being 50+.

This is a continuing upward trend, however, as there has been a noticeable increase since 2019. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the United States election drew additional attention to the platform. Global leaders utilize verified accounts to communicate directly to users online.

It’s also a platform that’s popular for spreading the news as the Tweet format forces these sources to truncate the most essential details into limited characters. This presents a great format for marketers to quickly grab attention and link out to articles, products, promotions, and much more.

Sources: Statista

30. Twitter Saw a Healthy Boom in Ad Engagement and Revenue Last Year

Twitter reports that the end-of-year 2020 saw ad engagement increase by 35% along with a subtle 3% decrease in cost-per-engagement. This is likely due to steady user growth along with continual eCommerce growth due to the pandemic.

In addition to this, Twitter announced in November several notable improvements to their ad platform to make building new creatives easier, while also improving algorithms and introducing the Learning Period. They also launched a new and improved Carousel ad format.

Sources: Twitter

31. 91% of Twitter Users Are Okay with Brands Getting Involved, with a Catch…

It turns out that Twitter users are very open-minded about brands joining the conversation, but only if their contribution is helpful and authentic.

While this is a general truth and a good rule for brands to follow on any platform, it might be especially true on Twitter as a result of its limited format. Humans are all about first impressions, and with just 280 characters to use, you need to make it count.

For example, simply jumping on a trending topic with a hashtag is likely to ring out as false. However, demonstrating meaningful efforts or donations toward a cause goes a long way toward creating a favorable reception.

Sources: Twitter

32. Well Over 500 Million Tweets Go Live Every Day

While that may seem like an overwhelming number, it’s important to understand how noisy that platform can get. That means that it’s important for your brand to curate a smart tweeting strategy that will allow your brand to take advantage of those 280 characters.

Another reason is to note that Twitter is one of the few platforms where posting more is better. The optimal tweeting amount per day is anywhere between 15-25 tweets. This is compared to just 1-2 posts per day on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

The shelf life of a tweet is drastically shorter than a post elsewhere, so be prepared to get involved if you want your brand to stand out on Twitter.

Sources: LiveInternetStats, Buffer

LinkedIn Statistics

33. LinkedIn is the Most Trusted Social Platform

According to a Business Insider Intelligence survey, LinkedIn ranks number one as the most trusted social platform for confidence and security.

The list contains nine different social platforms with the rest of the list as follows: Pinterest (2), Reddit (3), Instagram (4), Snapchat (5), TikTok (6), Twitter (7), YouTube (8), and Facebook in the last place.

Why does this matter? It means that users feel the most secure with entering personal information and engaging with content freely on LinkedIn. This is likely due to the highly professional nature of the platform and the focus on networking and employment.

34. It’s One of the Best Platforms for B2B Marketing

This should be of no surprise based on the nature of the platform. LinkedIn reports that there are over 57 million companies now actively using their service. It’s just as important for these businesses to connect with prospective business clients as well as scouting new talent.

It’s also the platform where you will find Fortune 500 company leaders and other like-minded professionals that can help you achieve your business and marketing goals.

LinkedIn is more about highlighting the leaders and decision-makers of a company than the company itself, allowing you to market directly to those who are interested in learning more about your products and services.

Sources: LinkedIn

35. The Average User is 36 – 55 Years of Age

This makes sense as the average LinkedIn member is typically a professional looking to network and further develop their career prospects.

This study of United States Users shows the breakdown of monthly users per age group:

• 15-25 – 16%
• 26-35 – 27%
• 36-45 – 34%
• 46-55 – 37%
• 56+ – 29%

Sources: Statista

36. The Average Conversion Rate on a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form is 13%

A study by WordStream indicates that your average lead-generation landing page converts only 2.35% of the time. However, the best-performing landing pages feature rates of 11.45% or even higher.

LinkedIn reports that its lead forms see a success rate of about 13% and generate about twice as many leads compared to every other social channel. This is likely due to the overwhelming B2B presence on the platform.

Like-minded professionals are interested in offers, products, or services that can benefit them or the business as opposed to grabbing the general cold customer through paid ads.

Sources: WordStream, LinkedIn

37. Taking Too Long to Reply to Those Leads Reduces Likelihood of Contact by 10x

Generating all of those leads won’t matter much if you don’t have a system in place to make contact with those individuals promptly. Studies indicate that waiting just five minutes reduces the likelihood of contact by as much as ten times.

While most companies will not be able to reliably deliver such an efficient response time, it’s essential to react quickly. This statistic can also help illustrate whether or not your sales team is receiving more leads than they are effectively able to deal with.

A large stream of leads may be an indicator that your marketing plan is working but ultimately results in a wasted budget if you don’t have the resources to capitalize. Determine an actionable goal for the number of new leads your business can handle and plan to make quick contact through multiple avenues including phone, email, and text messages.

Sources: HubSpot

38. LinkedIn Saw 60% More Content Creation in 2020

Marketers are successfully proving that LinkedIn can be about more than employment and networking. LinkedIn business reporting indicates that not only is that platform seeing more sales funnels, but the average CPC is dropping while the quality of leads and engagement improves.

However, compelling blog articles work great here, too. Consider that Bill Gates personally published some of the platform’s most compelling content that year. Professionals are hungry to learn from other professionals who have knowledge and insight to offer about important social matters and personal success.

Content creators can hugely benefit from reviewing content from some of the world’s most successful people while seeking to emulate it for your business. It ought to be every marketer’s mantra that content is king.

Sources: LinkedIn

39. The United States Features the Most LinkedIn Users

Individually, the United States as a country easily has the most active LinkedIn user accounts at around 178 million. The second closest country is India at roughly 76 million users.

Looking further down the list of most popular countries reveals that the rest of the world combined still makes up over 70% of all LinkedIn users, making it a viable tool for connecting and marketing around the globe. Tens of millions are using the platform throughout Asia, South America, and Europe.

It’s interesting to note that LinkedIn is one of the few international social platforms that is not currently banned in China.

YouTube Marketing Statistics

40. YouTube – The 2nd Most Popular Search Engine in the World

YouTube isn’t just a search engine, it’s one of the most powerful in the world only behind Google itself. While nothing may ever be able to outperform a platform that’s now become a verb, YouTube receives more volume than most other search engines combined.

In 2021, YouTube now represents so much more than funny, low-budget videos. It’s a neverending library of content relating to DIY, exercise, technology, music, video games, makeup, health & beauty, self-care, and business-related content. That list is far from exhaustive, and merely shows the potential the platform has to enhance your marketing strategies.

What makes this even more attractive is that since Google controls both platforms, YouTube video content often ranks well over videos hosted through other outlets. YouTube itself also now offers more than video, providing a direct social feed, direct messaging, and the ability to send notifications directly to your subscribers.

Sources: Forbes, YouTube

41. 1 in 3 Baby Boomers Actively Seek YouTube Content

While this generation generally makes up a fairly low percentage of many social platforms, YouTube has something for everyone.

Google estimates that as many as a third of baby boomers are taking advantage of YouTube to learn more about products or services before making a purchasing decision. It presents an extremely convenient way for people to learn and help themselves without needing to enlist others.

YouTube also provides the benefit of on-demand content that you can enjoy at an hour that’s more convenient for you. Long gone are the days of needing to catch people in front of the television with your advertisements.

Sources: Think with Google

42. 42% of Small Businesses Are on YouTube in 2021

A survey indicates that YouTube is now one of the most widely used social networks for advertising, only falling short of Facebook. This marks a rapid change in how and where businesses advertise. Shooting professional video used to be an intimidating venture, but new technology has made it easier than ever.

You can shoot short, quality clips with a modern-day smartphone and upload them to your channel within minutes. Businesses can tailor their channel according to their brand and easily share video content on other platforms. YouTube also makes it incredibly easy to embed video content on landing pages, websites, and more.

YouTube also offers some basic editing tools that can get you started. A quick Google search will also reveal several widely used editing software that can get you up and running.

One of the most important things for a business to do on social is to appear relatable and trustworthy. Personally made video content allows your audience to see the people behind the computer screen.

Sources: Statista

43. Creating Beginner Content May Significantly Boost Your Views

Google studies show that in March 2020, videos titled with the word “beginner” or some variation received 50% more views compared to the rest of the year.

The result of this specific statistic is once again a result of quarantine regulations during the pandemic. However, it does show that users on the platform are keen to look for tutorials and how-to content they can use from home.

Image Source

As an expert in your industry, you could create personalized, instructional content that your audience can directly benefit from. People remember when a trusted brand provides them free, valuable content, and will be more likely to subscribe and share your content with other potential buyers.

Sources: Think with Google

44. YouTube Can Be a Huge Boon for the Fitness Industry

If you’re a fitness expert or work in the industry, you know that getting people out of their comfort zone is one of the biggest hurdles in acquiring new customers. YouTube may offer a convenient, alternative solution.

Since March 2020, home workout videos increased in daily views by an incredible 515%. While this is once again an influence of COVID-19 restrictions, many users are looking for comfortable, private ways to lose those extra pounds from the comfort of home.

A quick search of the platform will reveal countless gyms and personal trainers creating effective workout videos designed to help users lose weight, gain muscle, and achieve other fitness goals.

Put out some great fitness content that can help your audience learn the basics and gain some confidence in their body. Once they’re a subscriber, you can continue nurturing those leads and convert them into paying customers.

Sources: YouTube Culture & Trends

45. Buyer Intent Beats Demographics, but Both Work Best Together

Google is helping out marketers by conducting their own studies to see how video advertisements perform depending on the targeting methods used.

Most marketers will utilize broad demographics, especially starting, to allow your campaign to learn. As they gather metrics, those experts will complete optimizations to get better results from the most active groups. This Google study shows at least with video content, buyer intent trumps demographic targeting.

Across all ads, there was 100% more purchase intent when targeting by intent alone. There is also a 167% increase in awareness and an incredible 267% increase in consideration. Ad recall also receives a boost of 32%.

The results were slightly higher when targeting both simultaneously. While you may not have the budget to do everything, the results show that intent should be the primary focus.

Sources: Think with Google

Pinterest Statistics

46. Pinterest Features a Potential Audience of Roughly 200.8 Million Users

While Pinterest ranks 14th on the popularity scale, it maintains a dedicated userbase that is continuing to grow in the past year.

A study previously used in this article from Hootsuite and We Are Social suggests that out of its total users, 200.8 million of them may be reached with advertisements.

The greatest number of these users are in North America, specifically the United States, with over 100 million active accounts along with over 10 million more from Canada.

The platform also has a strong footing across the United Kingdom and Europe with over 80 million more additional users. It does not have a strong basis in Asia, with no country cracking the top 20 countries by reach.

Sources: We Are Social, Hootsuite

47. Pinterest Reveals That 77% of the Ad Audience May Be Female

No other platforms in this article feature such a difference in users by gender. Pinterest reports that just 14.5% of their userbase that is part of the ad audience is male. However, this number may be changing as the number of male pinners grew throughout 2020.

Sources: We Are Social, Hootsuite, Pinterest

48. Millennial Women Make Up the Greatest Share of Users

The study shows that 30.4% of women ages 25 – 34 make up Pinterest’s advertising audience. That same age group features 6.2% men and another 4.2% unspecified.

The second closest age group is 35 – 44-year-old women making up 14.1%. However, it’s worth noting that Gen Z users saw the biggest growth growing 40% year over year according to Pinterest.

Sources: We Are Social, Hootsuite, Pinterest

49. Pinterest is a Video Platform, Featuring One Billion Views a Day

While most are aware of video prominent platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, Pinterest videos are blowing up.

The actual statistic shows just under one billion views a day. Pinterest is continuing to develop new ways for businesses and advertisers to better target their video advertising to users by demographic and interests.

This can prove effective on a platform that’s already known for promoting positivity, sparking creativity, and inspiring people to take up new projects and chase ideas. While you’re creating those tutorial videos on YouTube, it might be a good idea to cut some content specifically for your Pinterest audience.

Sources: Pinterest

50. Pinterest Shopping Visits Grew More than 50% in 2020

Finally, Pinterest reports that it saw a substantial increase in shopping activity throughout the platform. Additional studies indicate that as many as 85% of users are likely to buy something based on a pin.

That’s thanks to the fact that Pinterest’s platform can act as a built-in sales funnel for your various products when set up correctly. Users not only sell products but provide visual evidence of the value each can bring for their home or future projects. It’s a far more attractive proposition than simply browsing listings on Amazon.

Sources: Pinterest, HighSpot

There you have 50 valuable marketing statistics that can help your small business or marketing agency create an effective marketing plan for the months ahead. If there are any additional details you’d love to learn about these platforms (or to learn more about one that wasn’t discussed), please let us know and we’ll be sure to update you in future posts!

Businesses these days are spending a lot on marketing and advertising to generate leads. It is painful to see when those leads are not converted into sales despite the best efforts from your sales team.

Here are some of the problems salespeople face. According to a survey, 48% of salespeople complain that they feel threatened by the low price competitors, and it's a big issue while closing a sale.

The average closing rate is less than 50%, even for the best salespeople.

Furthermore, the closing rate has been incessantly undergoing a sharp drop for the previous six years due to increasing competition.

So, is there a formula that the most successful salespeople across the world use to increase conversion?

It is also true that 20% of the best people close 80% of overall sales deals. Would you like to know the secret of their success? According to experts, your sales pitch plays a crucial part while closing the sale. So how should you write your sales pitch?

In this article, you'll find three essential tips and an eight-step process to write a winning sales pitch that will change the game for you forever.

A. Make It More Conversation-Oriented

Traditional sales pitches don't work anymore. You can see smart salespeople in formal suits making sales presentations. Still, the percentage of salespeople hitting their sales targets has dropped from 63% to 53% since 2015. So, it is more about meaningful conversations in the reversed situation than making pitches more like a one-way street.

It's no wonder that only 13% of executive buyers believe that salespeople genuinely understand their business issues while demonstrating a way to solve them. Most salespeople are so obsessed with their products and brands that they completely forget who they are talking to and their struggles. So, initiate conversations and discuss the problems your prospects are facing.

Reverse-engineering the sales pitch may dramatically change the game for you.

One major drawback with a traditional sales pitch is that it leaves you with just two options - a "yes" or "no." It is not aimed at building relationships. And it would help if you had a dialogue to build strong relationships rather than a monologue.

B. Reverse Engineer the Game, Put Buyers First

Now that you have moved away from pitching, you need to start a need-based conversation with the buyer. When conversations happen, you build trust and establish effective communication. Since every buyer is different in terms of personality, situation, buying capacity, and needs, you need to assess their needs first. During the sales meeting, you can discuss in detail how your product or service will meet their needs and address their pain points. It will also help you to display a need for them to buy the product.

It will also help you know whether your customer is a right-brain thinker or a left-brain thinker. The left-brain thinker thinks and decides based on logic and facts, whereas the right-brain thinker is more creative and emotional.

C. Don't Keep It Dry and Formal; Use Storytelling to Connect

Storytelling is extremely helpful in sales because it allows you to connect with your customer. It helps them relate to your brand on a personal level and gives them a reason to buy your products or services. Storytelling is scientifically proven to impact the human mind, especially the subconscious mind, and it aids in training, education, marketing, and sales.

It also helps in boosting sales as all humans perform 99% of their activities using the subconscious mind and only 1% with the conscious brain. So try to engage your buyers with storytelling as it will help you close the deal and generate revenue quickly.

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Your sales pitch is indispensable to maintaining your company's cash flow and revenues. It is imperative, therefore, to pay attention to your sales pitch and make it right.

The Eight-Step Process to Writing an Effective Sales Pitch

Here is the eight-step process to writing an effective sales pitch that you can use to improve your sales numbers:

1. Identify the Buyer Personas for Your Business

It's essential first to create detailed buyer personas for your business to write an effective sales pitch. Here is a simple way to do that:

A. Describe your offer and how it can help people or businesses solve their problems.

B. List all the features of your product and then write down the corresponding benefits. While writing benefits, you need to be highly creative. Go beyond the general benefits and think about benefits to a wide range of people and customer segments.

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C. Now brainstorm the buyer personas of the customers who are likely to buy your product. You can also dig into your CRM database and customer profiles to get deeper insights into the buyer personas you can target using your sales pitch.

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The idea is to use a different pitch for each buyer persona to make it even more effective.

2. Create Attention-Grabbing Headlines and Email Subject Lines

According to Copyblogger, 80% of people will read your headline, and only 20% will read the rest. Readers' attention span is decreasing sharply with increasing content on the web, so you need attention-grabbing headlines to hook them. The same is true for email subject lines.

With a flood of emails in users' inboxes, it becomes highly critical to choose the subject lines that can instantly attract the user. A slightly dull subject line can reduce the open rate significantly. Again defining buyer personas will be extremely helpful here as it will help you craft the headlines and email subject lines according to the interest of your audience.

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Here are a few tips for writing better headlines:

A. Use emotions in your headlines because it increases the engagement manifold. The articles with emotionally charged headlines perform better than articles with straightforward headlines.

B. Don’t keep your headlines short. A study by CoSchedule reveals that headlines between 16 and 18 words produce the most engagement.

C. Still, as mobile users are growing exponentially, it is advisable to use short and sweet headlines so people can read them on their tiny screens without being distracted by the wordiness.

D. Use power words such as “horror stories,” “never again,” “price break,” “Frenzy.” and “Frugal,” to boost conversions.

However, consistent testing of your headlines is recommended as it will help you figure out the types of headlines that grab your audience’s attention and lead to increased response.

3. Support Your Claims With Data

People love to read the data that is reliable and is backed by authentic references. According to a study by Dimension Research, 90% of respondents confirmed that positive online reviews influenced their buying decisions in a big way. Because online reviews are taken as proof of your claims, your pitch needs to be full of facts and stats.

Since you are making a serious claim that you can solve a problem for your buyer, it would help you support your claims with case studies, stats, survey results, and references from authentic sources.

4. Ask for Sales

In the previous points, you learned how to use a sales pitch to address your customers' pain points and tell them how your product solves their problems. You also learned how to use facts and data to support your claims. The next step is highly crucial, and most people skip that. 85% of the meeting sessions between sales guys and their prospects end up without the sales representatives ever asking for the sale and it's a considerable number.

The above stats also explain the reason why most of the sales pitches fail. Now that you have convinced your prospect that your product has excellent features and can solve their burning issues, it's time to tell them what to do next. Otherwise, it will fade away from their memory, just like a Netflix show or an Instagram post.

The call to action may include asking them to click a website link or dial a phone number to close the sale. Make sure that all your efforts may go to waste in this noisy world if you don't use a pre-decided call to action.

5. Refine Your PitchĀ

A few last-minute tweaks can completely change your pitch and make it more professional and feeling. So, run a spell check and a grammar check, look for missing information, broken sentences, and missing words and phrases.

A rushed or hastily written pitch can throw a negative impression, so polish it before clicking the “send” or “publish” button. And don’t forget to add the touch of personalization in the end as it might make it much more effective.

6. Write a Follow-up Message

Even the best pitch written by an expert will not work if you don't have a follow-up schedule. There is a 21 percent chance that your follow-up email will get answered even if your first email is not responded to. After several follow-ups, the possibility that the recipient will respond increases by up to 30%.

For sales pitch examples on how to write sales emails and follow-ups, refer to these templates.

7. Be Consistent and Systematic

Even the best pitches and follow-ups aren't going to work if you aren't consistent and lack a systematic approach. Decide how many pitches you have to send in a week and follow-ups with the clients you have already approached. If you are consistent, the conversion will keep on happening, and it will keep your business afloat.

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To be consistent, you can do the following:

1. Decide the number of pitches to be made every week.
2. Decide the number of appointments to be made every week.
3. Spend some time on improving your pitches to achieve better performance and results.

With this kind of planning, you will maintain consistency despite your busy schedule, meetings, and other obligations.

8. Keeping on Experimenting and Tweaking Your PitchĀ

Like other marketing strategies, you should keep experimenting and tweaking your sales pitch to figure out what kind of messages are most effective. It will help you write beautiful sales pitches that produce the best results.

Conclusion

With the above steps, you can consistently improve your pitching and keep on adding clients successfully. You will also be able to write your sales pitch within 10 minutes.

So before you approach your prospective customer the next time, use the tips given above and see the results for yourself.

Remember, traditional pitches are no more effective in sales because these are more about your brand, products, and features. Your customers might not be interested in who you are and what you do. They are more interested in how you can solve their problems. Keep the customers' requirements before everything else and tailor your pitch accordingly.

Contents

Introduction

1. Outsource from Reliable Vendors with a Proven Track Record
2. Discuss the Long Term Costs with Your Vendor — Both the Current Estimates and Surprise Elements If Any
3. Choose the Outsourcing Partner Based on Their Core Competence
4. Make Sure There Are No Communication Issues or Language Barriers
5. Make Sure They Can Handle Emergencies and Challenges Quickly and Efficiently
6. Have Face-to-Face Conversations When You Outsource Critical Services
7. Discuss a Clear Scope of Work
8. Communicate the Budget in as Much Detail as Possible
9. Ensure the Safety of Your Data and Intellectual Property
10. Make Sure Your Partner Uses Agile Methodologies
11. Check Their Infrastructure and Technologies
12. Make Sure Your Outsourcing Partner Provides Post Development Support
13. Outsource with a Proper Plan
14. Conclusion

There are always two options for digital marketing agencies: Set up your in-house operations or outsource your projects. Outsourcing is considered an intelligent business strategy these days. It is practiced worldwide where businesses delegate their tasks and projects to someone else for a price that is agreed upon in the contract.

It can be highly advantageous for both startups and well-established companies alike if used strategically. So it's essential to have a plan before you outsource. It allows you to focus on your core competence and helps you reduce costs. It can be a lifesaver for growing businesses struggling with their day-to-day challenges. In addition to that, it allows you to maintain operational control at the same time.

However, the common challenges include handling it properly and choosing the right outsourcing partner for your agency.

Here you will find 13 no-nonsense tips to choose the right outsourcing partner for your agency:

1. Outsource from Reliable Vendors with a Proven Track Record

Outsourcing from a novice and lesser-known company can be the biggest mistake of your life. Royal Bank of Scotland wanted to upgrade its banking system in 2012. So, it signed a contract with a lesser-known IT vendor.

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However, it proved to be a significant mistake on the part of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The glitches in the software left millions of customers disgruntled as they could not access their accounts, check balances or perform even basic banking transactions. The glitch was so severe that millions of accounts lost visibility.

As a result, many customers lost faith in the bank's ability to manage their accounts and moved to other banks. It is a lesson that the Royal Bank of Scotland will never forget.

You can check customer reviews on the following review sites:

1. Google
2. G2
3. Capterra
4. Cuspera
5. CrozDesk
6. Serchen
7. SaasWorthy

Google Reviews of DashClicks

DashClicks Reviews on G2

Key Takeaway: Outsourcing has become inevitable in modern times, but it also has downsides if not handled carefully. It might ruin your branding and adversely affect your reputation and customer loyalty if your outsourcing partner cannot manage critical functions and eventually commits a grave error.

2. Discuss the Long Term Costs with Your Vendor ā Both the Current Estimates and Surprise Elements (If any)

Failure to understand the project in its entirety can be disastrous for your business. A similar payroll system outsourcing disaster happened in Queensland Health Department in Australia in 2010. The contract was awarded to IBM in 2007, and they made the same mistake when they miserably failed to estimate the long-term cost of the project.

We know that very few people can doubt the capabilities of IBM. Yet, it became the most spectacular technology failure on the planet. As estimated by IBM, the project's initial cost was AU$6 million, but soon it realized that it was far more extensive and challenging than they had initially imagined.

They announced in the middle of 2008 that the project cost was more than AU$27 million. So after several years of struggle and no success, the Queensland Health Department finally asked IBM to take its finger out. But by then, the project cost was already touching 16000% more than the original estimate.

When the application was being implemented, it led to over 35,000 payroll mistakes in the aging system. As a result, most of its 85,000 employees and healthcare professionals were either incorrectly paid or not paid at all. In addition, the minister of health had to resign because the facility was a public sector undertaking.

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Even after spending AU$1.2 billion, the software application was not working correctly. IBM failed to understand the scale of the project and proposed a cost that was too good to be true, but IBM was awarded the contract because of its global reputation. Later on, it dawned upon them that they had committed a historical blunder, and the project cost was beyond their wildest imagination.

Key Takeaway: The job of project estimation should be given to experts familiar with the destination country, the nature and size of the project, and the complications involved. Your outsourcing partner must understand the intricacies and challenges of the project, and if they don't, you should convey it to them. It's better to include surprise elements, if any. Please don't fall for the lowest quote. It may lead to disaster.

3. Choose the Outsourcing Partner Based on Their Core Competence

Apart from the Queensland debacle, IBM faced another fiasco in 2004 when JP Morgan fired them from one of their megaprojects worth $5 billion. It was a seven-year IT contract when JP Morgan suddenly changed their mind, fired IBM, and employed its own in-house IT team. But this time, it was not IBM's mistake.

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It was the wrong decision of the bank and their failure to assess their core competence that led to the disaster. It caused millions of dollars to the bank with abysmal results when they reemployed their in-house team. Choosing the right outsourcing partner is crucial to your success, especially if you don't have the core competence in a particular field.

For example, many agencies in the US have core competence in SEO or web designing, so when their clients ask them to run Google or Facebook ads for them, they approach a professional white-label agency like DashClicks and outsource these services. It saves them a lot of time, hassle, and money.

DashClicks has large teams dedicated to providing best-in-class digital marketing services such as White Label SEO, White Label PPC, White Label Facebook Ads, White Label Social Media Posting, White Label Content Marketing, and InstaSites.

Ref: White Label Reselling vs. Doing It All Yourself‍

Ref: 11 Benefits of Using White Label Digital Marketing Services

Key Takeaway: If somebody tells you that outsourcing is terrible and you should try to do everything in-house, itā€™s best to ignore their rants. The fact is: outsourcing exists for a reason, and people go for it as it helps them achieve their business goals and scale their operations, especially when they can't afford to hire expensive in-house employees.

4. Make Sure There Are No Communication Issues or Language Barriers

Hiring the wrong outsourcing partner can be pretty expensive for you. Here is a firsthand account shared by Jonathan Long, a business consultant. One of his clients outsourced SEO Services from an overseas company that agreed to sign the contract for less than $500 per month.

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When they started running the campaign, they circulated a press release. Unfortunately, its outsourcing partner mentioned in the press release that the products caused health issues. Obviously, they didn't mean to say that, but the communication issues led to misunderstanding and seriously damaged the brand.

Key Takeaway: Ensure that the SEO reseller or the white label services you hire are competent enough. To minimize communication errors, they should preferably be native English speakers or non-natives with proficiency in the English language.

5. Make Sure They Can Handle Emergencies and Challenges Quickly and Efficiently

Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic outsourced check-in and boarding software and airline booking services to Navitaire, a software development company. Software failure is the last thing airline passengers can anticipate, but it happened twice in three months, and every time, it took more than 24 hours to get back on track. As a result, many flights were canceled, and thousands of customers were thrown into panic.

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Key Takeaway: The ultimate test of your outsourcing partner's proficiency is how quickly they can fix things if an emergency strikes and shuts down operations wholly or partially.

6. Have Face-to-Face Conversations When You Outsource Critical Services

HR is a critical function in small and medium-sized companies, but they outsource it to cut costs and save time. However, its execution is much more complicated.

When a third party is assigned to recruit and manage people, there can be a massive discrepancy regarding the new hires' skill-sets, attitude, and work culture. It can be detrimental to your organization's interests and prospects.

Key Takeaway: When you decide to outsource HR functions, have face-to-face conversations with your outsourcing partner and communicate with them your exact requirements along with your Agency's vision and work culture.

7. Discuss a Clear Scope of Work

It would be best if you had a clear and well-documented scope of work before you even think of approaching an outsourcing partner. It's imperative to have a clear vision of your business goals. You must also have a crystal clear understanding of your needs and how you can meet them to achieve the desired results.

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Sometimes agencies are not able to clearly define their scope of work because of the technicalities involved. In that case, you can jot down a few questions and start answering them:

• What exactly are you looking for?
• What could be the most feasible solution for this problem?

Brainstorming these questions may help you crack the code of writing a clear scope of work given the issues faced by your organization. When you can identify the core problems, you can prepare a blueprint to solve each one of them with a minimum spend.

Outsourcing shouldn't be considered a plug-and-play type of arrangement where you can automatically anticipate the desired outcomes. The only person who knows everything about your business is you. It takes time for the 3rd person to understand your business and breed familiarity, which breaks down barriers and ensures the desired results.

Key Takeaway: Vague requirements don't work with outsourcing partners, so for the best results, try to be as specific as you can when it comes to sharing your scope of work.

8. Communicate the Budget in as Much Detail as Possible

The cost of the project is the most ignored but highly crucial part of your outsourcing contract. It impacts everything from your relationship with the vendor to the quality of services. Both these factors are critical to the success of your overall project. Don't expect to receive superior services at highly discounted prices.

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So before you discuss the precise scope of work, you should also figure out the exact amount you will invest in the project and communicate it very clearly to your outsourcing partner. If possible, make sure that it gets mentioned in the contract. Many a time, it happens that the outsourcing agencies or businesses agree to a budget in a rushed meeting, and soon, the costs start snowballing quickly due to incorrect estimates.

Key Takeaway: Don't rush when it comes to preparing and communicating the budget. You should do it very carefully and every minute detail should be taken into consideration to avoid surprises later on.

9. Ensure the Safety of Your Data and Intellectual Property

In the digital age, data security and privacy are among the two most prominent business concerns. Handling sensitive information of your customers is crucial to the survival of your business as your customers have exhibited a lot of trust in your enterprise. When you outsource business processes, you also end up sharing sensitive customer data with your vendor. Therefore, it is imperative to manage data with a high degree of safety and security and sign a nondisclosure agreement with them.

Key Takeaway: Outsource with a vendor who has the best systems, tools, and practices in place to ensure data security and intellectual property rights. They should also have a proven track record in it. If possible, hire a local service provider who can regularly conduct network and security audits at the premises of your outsourcing partner to make sure that they are taking the required precautions to ensure the safety of your client's sensitive data.

10. Make Sure Your Partner Uses Agile Methodologies

In this fast-paced business world, customer requirements and demands are changing rapidly. If you are not an agile business, you may soon lose your client base. New companies might take you over if you don't use Agile methodologies to satisfy your customers' specific and ever-changing requirements.

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Key Takeaway: To use agile methodologies, your outsourcing vendor should have a high degree of collaboration among their teams. They should have people with leadership qualities and problem solvers to understand and respond to new requirements immediately.

11. Check Their Infrastructure and Technologies

Before you finalize your contract with your outsourcing partner, try to make sure they have the infrastructure and technologies required for your project. If they are located outside your country, make sure that you visit their premises in their home country.

Key Takeaway: Unscrupulous businesses worldwide offer the best prices to win outsourcing contracts, but either they don't have sufficient infrastructure or depend on the infrastructure of others with no infrastructure of their own. The same goes for the technologies they use. So before you sign the contract, make sure they have the proper infrastructure to run your project.

12. Make Sure Your Outsourcing Partner Provides Post Development Support

Post-development support is crucial to the success of any project. There can be several things or issues after the project is completed where you might need the help of your outsourcing partner. Ensure that your outsourcing partner provides this, or else you would have to pay for it additionally and waste a lot of time and money.

Key Takeaway: To avoid hidden charges and unnecessary inconvenience related to the lack of post-development support, make sure that you read lengthy contractual agreements along with all the fine prints.

13. Outsource with a Proper Plan

Outsourcing is not a bad idea as long as you have an outsourcing plan in place. It helps you scale when you don't have sufficient infrastructure. It is also one of the most innovative strategies that a startup can implement. In the light of the above examples, you should have a proper plan before deciding to outsource so that you can avoid the apparent mistakes a startup can make.

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Ref: Exact Steps To Building, Growing & Scaling A 7-Figure Digital Marketing Agency

Conclusion

In a rapidly changing business world, where business requirements change frequently, outsourcing can boost your efficiency and allow you to focus on your core competence without losing any of your clients, thereby propelling the growth of your agency.

There are lots of companies that have scaled through outsourcing in the previous two decades. It's a long list that includes HP, Intuit, Microsoft, Apple, Citi, Procter & Gamble, Orange, Cisco Systems, Oracle, Nestle, Dell, GE, AT&T, Verizon, American Express (Amex), Facebook, Fidelity, and IBM to name a few. It is your turn now! Follow these tips and choose the right outsourcing partner for your agency's growth.

Bringing in new customers is not easy for a digital agency, startup, or eCommerce company, but generating revenue from existing customers is not a cakewalk. With such biting competition, most companies offer the same value, so it becomes crucial to differentiate your business from others.

How to Increase Revenue for Your Agency?

The trust factor has become a watchword in the business world as it decides customer loyalty for a lifetime. If you have grown your brand to the extent that people trust you blindly and can buy from you without thinking twice, you are already on the road to success.

So if you want to know how to maximize repeat business and generate more revenue from existing customers, here are 11 killer strategies you can implement.

1. Create a Loyalty Program

Do you know what happens to customers who don't feel appreciated?

They leave.

When customers feel valued, they are easier to sell to. If you want to see more repeat customers, offer a reward for choosing your brand. A loyalty program is invented for the same purpose rewarding customers for repeat purchases. Companies distribute cards or use apps to track customer purchases and rewards.

The program works on a point system, giving points to the customers each time they buy your product or services. A certain number of points is required to win a reward: a free item or a discount. The program is designed to pull the customer back to your company instead of letting them go to the competitors.

Example of a Customer Loyalty Program

Designer Shoe Warehouse (or DSW) runs a loyalty program. It uses points to reward each purchase. Customers can unlock the different tiers of rewards as they spend more.

How it works

DSW uses a seamless online system to register the points rather than any punch card. However, customers need to remember the loyalty program to make the system work. If they forget about the scheme, the scheme will no longer entice them to spend. So, DSW regularly updates their customers about the points they have accumulated and what they could earn by spending more at their store. This way, they keep their customers engaged. They also send emails occasionally to inform their customers about the status of their points. Personalization is the key to success here.

DSW conducted an email reward campaign recently, in which they shared with their customers exactly how many reward points they needed for a $10 certificate. They also updated them about other deals their customers were eligible for.

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DSW won't stop here; they go beyond reward updates and share a snapshot of customers' interactions with the brand over the past 24 months.

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DSW Email Campaign Results

It was a highly engaging and customer-centered story, which the brand used in a personalized email with rich visual elements. DSW saw the following results at the end of the campaign:

• Email open rate went up by 64%
• CTR went up by 13%
• 59% of recipients who opened the email read it for over 15 seconds

Welcoming the Returning Customer the Lucy and Yak Wayā

Lucy and Yak, a dungarees brand, has a unique customer loyalty platform that they call Yak points.ā  It's also used to encourage returning customers to their website. The imagery is used to showcase how the customers can earn points.

They use a high degree of personalization. For example, you can look at the following loyalty program example and notice the values or mood of your business.

The message says, Welcome back, Mollie, nice to see you again. You have 150 Yak points.ā  Such statements immediately invoke customer loyalty and encourage them to buy more.

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2. Unlock Growth with the Right Pricing Strategy

You can adjust the price if needed, but it should align with the market situation and competition. At times, it seems that increasing prices is one of the best ways to increase revenue, but you shouldn't do it at the cost of losing your customers or sales. You should do a market survey and see how your competitors are pricing their products to take a position about your products.

Consider increasing your prices gradually in bits rather than a sudden, sharp increase. A slight increase in prices may not sound significant, but overall, it may substantially increase the profit margins.

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3. Creatively Package Products or Services

Combining your products and services into pre-configured packages is a brilliant way to increase revenue from existing customers. It boosts the individual sales value, improving profit margins.

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Bundling of High-End Products

Treat your customer with a bundle of high-end products to entice them to switch to a better and more exclusive package.ā

A Tip for B2B Companies & Digital Marketing Agencies

You can offer retainer-based packages to eliminate common frustrations that clients face. For example, if you provide digital marketing and guest posting services, consider offering a retainer that checks and confirms that all the backlinks made through guest blogs are intact.

If any of these links are removed or the site gets penalized by Google, you will create another backlink on a site with similar domain authority for free. By doing so, your clients will trust you more and continue to use your services while boosting your cash flow.

4. Use Effective Marketing Strategies

Running data-driven marketing campaigns is another way to improve sales and boost revenue. It's a 2-step process:

1. Analyze data around consumer behavior and product preferences
2. Develop targeted data-driven campaigns for specific customer segments using ad messages and offers

You can use the following channels for marketing and promotion:

• Website
• Social media
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
• Remarketing (Google Ads)
• Email marketing
• Public relations
• Content marketing
• Traditional marketing through flyers, banners, billboards, newspaper ads, and word of mouth

Try Remarketing

Remarketing is a proven and highly effective way to boost conversion. Visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert on the website. Furthermore, a retargeted ad's click-through rate (CTR) is 10x higher than the CTR of a typical Google display ad. So, it would help if you also tried remarketing ads to boost conversion and generate more revenue.

5. Stay in Touch with Your Customers

There are two ways to stay in touch with your customers ā- Social media and email marketing.

Social Media

Social media pages and accounts are used to stay in touch with your fanbase. You can also use email for this purpose. Most companies have at least one social media account that updates regularly and informs and engages their customers. It's crucial to know what your audience wants from you and build a community around it.

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Newsletters

Various companies use email marketing to remind their customers about their products and services regularly.

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Mobile App

You can always stay in touch with your customers by utilizing push notifications on your mobile app. It is one of the most effective ways to remind your brand since you can convey your message, promotions, brand news, etc. directly to your customers' phones.

You can use the following channels to stay in touch with your customers:

A. Text messages

B. Phone calls

C. Video chat

D. Other Chat Apps like WhatsApp

E. Live Streams (Q&A sessions, demos, announcements)

F. Comments on online posts

G. Live Chat on your website

H. Respond to online reviews

I. Host webinars or other virtual events

6. Offer Great Customer Support

Customer support is the backbone of any business. Yet, according to the Annual Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report, 89% of shoppers have stopped buying from online stores after they've experienced poor customer service.

So, make sure that you offer excellent customer service as a business. According to the same study, 86% of U.S. adults will pay more for a better customer experience.

So, better customer service will lead to enhanced client satisfaction, retention, revenue, and extended business contracts.

7. Make Their First Purchase Special

The first impression is the last, and it's essential to make an excellent first impression on the business. Here are a few ways to make a customer's first purchase a pleasant and unforgettable experience:

A. Send a welcome email

Send a welcome email as soon as the customer registers on your website. Tell them why it's beneficial to do business with you and how important your customers are for you.

B. Offer discounts and freebies

Everybody wants to be treated as someone special, and your customers are no different. So offer them a discount or a gift, so they remember you for a long time and return to you for the next purchase.

C. Mind what you say

An email should be personalized and not very formal. As an effective communication tool between you and your customer, keep it free from unnecessary jargon and practices such as "Do Not Reply" emails.

8. Find the Unmet Needs of Your Customers

In this age of ruthless competition, it's essential to figure out a product or a service that meets people's expectations.

To fill up the gap in the market and differentiate your product or service, you need to find your customers' unmet needs.

If you don't want your product to be ignored, you need to discover what your customer is looking for. Here are a few ways to identify the unmet needs of your customers to find better business opportunities.

A. Map Your Customer Journey

Identify your customers' pain points, frustrations, and struggles and create a customer journey map. It will help you visualize different processes that a customer goes through before buying a product or service.

It also lets you know the touchpoints at various stages in the process that you can use to influence their buying decision and convert them into loyal customers. By mapping a buyer's journey, you can also identify the problem areas in the process where a customer can get out of the funnel and becomes a lost opportunity.

Here is an infographic that explains the customer journey map:

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This infographic will help you know where exactly your customer is stuck and how you can fix this issue to push him to the next stage in the sales funnel.

B. Use Existing Customer Data

Getting first-hand customer data is not very difficult. You can compile the questions and concerns they raise about your product or services to get a host of valuable insights about that user. Look into their calls and chat logs, reviews, purchase history, and social media conversations using social monitoring tools. It will help you know the product features and services they must be looking for.

C. Listen to the Voice of the Customer (VoC)

Voice of the customer (VoC) is an important metric used by BPOs, call centers, and customer support departments in various companies. You can also know the VoC through surveys to get real-time feedback and insights into your customers' thoughts and feelings about your products and services. Voice of the customer. VOCtrade helps you design a better product or service, increase customer satisfaction and generate more revenue.

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D. Perform Competitive Analysis

Getting familiar with your competitors and their products and strategies will also help you stay relevant to your audiences. Your competitors will not only help you with the product ideas and market segments to target,Ā  but they will also assist you with the market trends, new features to be introduced,Ā  and new market strategies to adopt.

9. Find Opportunities for Cross-Selling or Up-Selling

You can find so many cross-selling and upselling opportunities if you are ready to do some deep thinking. Then, you can communicate these ideas to your sales teams and train them to grab such opportunities without fail.

You can run targeted upsell campaigns. Apart from that, you can also run targeted promotions to existing customers. You can find your best sellers and add their variants and complementary products to them. If any of your products are selling well, combine them with other related products.

A Complete Roadmap to Earn $10k a Month Through Upselling

Here is a video tutorial by Chad Kodary, the CEO of DashClicks, the prominent white label services. Chad presents the roadmap to earn $10K a month to digital marketing agencies in this video. He also explains how to generate sales online using proven and repeatable techniques.

You can upsell several related services to your clients, beginning with a website you can create within five minutes using InstaSites, a white-label tool offered by DashClicks. The services you can upsell to your existing clients can be SEO, paid to advertise, Facebook marketing, social media postings, directory listings, and website designing.

Source: YouTube Video Tutorial: How to Make 10k a Month: Step 5-Upselling

10. Make Your Sales Channel Appealing

Infuse some energy into your sales channel to generate enthusiasm among your audiences and offer them a reason to buy. Create attractive sales collateral using bright and vibrant colors, typography, and excellent graphics. Convey a sense of urgency through your marketing messages and incentivize your sales partners and employees to make them work passionately.

11. Give Your Customers a Reason to Come Back

You should always have proof to back up your claims about your products and services. Customers need evidence and not plain claims. This proof can be customer testimonials, reviews, case studies, experts' reviews and opinions, and endorsements by influencers and celebrities. What people say on social platforms can also be used as social proof.

Show a Demo Video

A great demo of how your product works and its features can be one of the best revenue generation strategies. Create videos for various uses of your products and services and distribute them on different social platforms.

Conclusion

Your business can potentially grow,Ā  survive or fail.Ā  A wrong step and everything can go with the wind. Apart from the above strategies, it's essential to listen to your customers' demands and feedback. Your ability to listen to your customers and interact with them will differentiate you from the crowd and help you become a successful business.

With these insights, you can easily modify your products and sales strategies.Ā  These insights will also help you revamp your processes for better quality and productivity. You can also try the latest tools such as chatbots to interact with your website visitors and address their concerns.

Nobody wants to continue the nine to five grind for a lifetime. Furthermore, with so much job certainty in the market, people want to start their agencies. However, running a digital agency successfully and growing it to a 7- figure agency is not easy. So, we decided to share the complete modus operandi of starting and growing a digital marketing agency with tips from experts and successful agency owners. We have explained different steps in detail so that even a novice can understand them and implement them on their own. Each phase follows a small action list that sums up the steps you need to take to accomplish your goals.

Here we split the journey of a successful 7-figure digital marketing agency into three phases:

• Phase 1: Priming the pump (You go from $5k to $20k per month)
• Phase 2: Erection of an agency’s structure (From $20k to $50k per month)
• Phase 3: Scale your agency even further (Rise upwards of $50k+ per month)

Phase 1: Priming the pump

It is the first phase, where you focus on building your cash flow. During this phase, you should focus on the following things:

Step 1. Pick a Niche and Identify Your Target Market

Choosing a niche is exceptionally beneficial for new agencies. Since you target a particular segment in niche marketing, you get some fantastic perks. Some of these perks are as follows:

Step 2. Build Strong Relationships

It helps you to focus on quality engagements and use more personalization in your communications. When you target a niche market, you will be able to offer custom services tailored to your customers' needs and handle their special requests. Better customer support and dealing with your customers on an individual level will always pay off in customer loyalty and long-term relationships.

Step 3. Shrink Competition

When you target a niche, you automatically minimize much of your competition. For example, if you sell a keyring, you face stiff competition from suppliers, but you offer keyrings with the customer's name inscribed on them, your competition lessens to a great extent. Furthermore, when you sell a keyring with the name and pics of your customer and their fiance or better half, you position yourself as a rare seller with very little competition. Your competitors will find it difficult to emulate your strategies if your product or service mix is highly specific.

Step 4. Enjoy Increased Visibility

With unique product offerings, you gain increased visibility and a chance to stand out from the crowd. It also means more customers and an increased online presence. As an additional perk, you get featured in media outlets but getting in front of the right people is often more important than getting in front of the masses. That's where conversion happens.

Additional Benefits

Apart from that, there are several other benefits of marketing to a niche audience are as follows:

1. Achieve Brand Loyalty
2. Spend Less on Marketing and Advertising
3. Enjoy Higher Profit Margins
4. Acquire Expertise

Caution: However, while targeting a small niche, make sure that your efforts boost your prospects and not detract the rest of your audience.

Ogilvy is a super-successful agency that specializes in digital marketing for the media and entertainment industry and has 131 offices across 83 countries! Ogilvy has an impressive turnover and annual gross income.

But specializing in a particular niche is easier said than done. First, you need a big pool of experts, cash flow, and other tools, strategic alliances, and partnerships.

A white-label service provider can be beneficial if you want to achieve specialization in a particular segment. They will also assist you in increasing your gross income, which is a core achievement for an agency.

• Create marketing assets
• Free online educational resources (such as blog posts)
• Free video tutorials (see video blog)
• Educational webinars (see webinars)

As a successful marketing agency, you should offer your clients free educational material and tools to empower them and make their life easy. Make sure that these resources provide value, so during the initial phases of your agency, you can earn free organic traffic from Google.

Free Facebook Group (see Facebook Group)

Building a community offers many benefits, such as creating awareness and earning loyalty and credibility. It would help if you used the most popular keywords on your Facebook group description as Facebook is also a vast search engine.

Source: Marketers Mindset by DashClicks

A Landing Page for Paid Ads and Organic Search

The importance of a landing page increases as an agency grows and scales. This page is crucial because all the traffic coming through retargeting ads and organic searches is diverted.

Tips for Creating a Landing Page

1. The page addresses the pain points of your niche tactfully and offers value to your targeted audience.
2. To add an element of credibility and trust, it should contain a lot of social proof and testimonials from your customers.
3. Last but not least, don’t violate the advertising guidelines of your social network.

Make a Lead Generation Strategy

• When you start building authority and gaining exposure to your target audience, you also start generating sales leads.
• It has two steps. First, you need to create a marketing message and then find the channels and avenues to spread your message.

Create a Marketing Message

Create a marketing message or a pitch to use while addressing your audiences on different social channels. For example, these messages could be along the lines of the following statement.

"I help media and entertainment companies by delivering cutting-edge digital marketing and PR solutions using the services of experienced digital marketing and PR professionals across the world."

Once you have different variations of your marketing messages ready for use, it's time to build your digital footprint. Then, take your high-value content to your prospective customers using the unbelievable reach of the web.

You can use the following steps to spread your message:

A. Use Your Social Media Profiles for Posting

Use your personal profile on different social channels and use it as a sales page. Publish your marketing message and high-value content. It will act as your top-of-the-funnel activity.

B. Post in Your Own Facebook Group

Create your Facebook group and build a community by posting high-value content. Later on, you can use a content marketing funnel and create high-quality content to engage these people.

C. Post in Other Groups in Your Niche

The next step is to introduce your content to a wider audience by posting your content in other people's groups. But, again, make sure it doesn't look like spam, as spammers are not welcome in most groups.

You should also not publish the same content in more than one group because it will look like it is stacked to a person who is a member of both groups.

D. Share Your Content via Newsletters

It's also essential to build your email list and start sending your high-value content in the form of newsletters.

You can follow this flowchart:

Action List

1. Create high-quality content and craft marketing messages and share them via the following:

a. Your personal profileb. Your own Facebook groupc. Other groups in your niched. Newsletters

2. Identify 10-20 Facebook groups that have the same buyer persona as yours.

3. Create a content calendar and have a well-planned content posting schedule to target all the customer segments and buyer personas.

4. Repurpose content to increase the volume and number of pieces of shareable content.

E. Attract New Audiences

Now that your marketing roadmap is ready, you can start connecting with new audiences on different channels. For example, as your social sphere grows, more and more people start visiting your website.

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Action List to Engage With Your Audience

Here is an action list to attract and engage with your audience:

1. Write Attention-Grabbing Posts

Create engaging, informative, and entertaining posts on social media. However, you should keep them short, crisp, and to the point. The length of your post should be between 40-80 characters.

2. Establish a Dialogue With Your Audience & Prospects

Connect with anyone who likes, comments, or shares your content. Whether they are looking for information or writing a review, it's essential to make sure you respond to everyone, whether itā€™s positive or negative.

3. Positive User Experience

Improve the user experience on your social media pages and add a call to action so that the users can contact your business efficiently. A positive user experience makes the visitors return to your website or social channel. Use attractive pictures and graphics.

4. Track Customer Engagement

Track engagement such as actions, clicks, and impressions using the built-in tools in social networking sites. It helps you know what kind of content you should produce and the best time to post on social channels.

5. Trending Hashtags

Use the appropriate hashtags that people are using or topics that they are searching for. Hashtagify is just one online tool that provides a percentage of how popular a word or term is.

6. Video, Images & Graphics

While Facebook Live is gaining popularity, the best way to attract social media users to your post is to use an engaging photo or short video. It attracts "likes" and "follows."

7. Freebies & Offers

People love offers. So, organize a quiz, run an offer, or giveaway. You can also use it for contact capturing.

8. Do Social Media Marketing Every Day

Follow a definite number of accounts on Instagram every day. You can do the same on Twitter and LinkedIn. Participate in social events, discussions, and conversations. Collaborate with influencers.

9. Spend Some Time for Lead Generation

Use tools like Expandi and put your lead generation and LinkedIn outreach campaigns on autopilot.

How to Make a Sales strategy?

Sale is often considered the most challenging part of business, and the very survival of enterprises depends on it. Here are ten points strategy to boost your sales without working too hard for it:

1. Change your mindset by focusing on the process.
2. Help your prospects understand where they stand at the time of conversation and where they want to be.
3. Use this gap to fill with your products and services.
4. Visualize the future and help your prospect visualize it too.
5. Spend five to ten minutes to demonstrate the value of your product or service. Respond with an open mind to their objections and what’s holding them back.
6. Focus on the specific thing your customer wants to know, and don’t try to skip or divert them.
7. Continue adding value till a customer asks for a price, which is often a green signal and closing part of the sale.
8. Make your prospect feel important and convey that you would specifically want to help them. Also, use soft selling, offer choices, and elaborate on what your deal will look like. Such kind of pitching has a high success rate.
9. As an agency, you have an unfair advantage as you offer direct value. So, ask them how much they want to make (the value attached to your services) vs. how much you are charging. Such calculations act mainly as an opportunity to close the sales immediately.
10. You can ask the above question immediately after the objection handling.

Project Management Tools

In the pump-priming stage, it’s crucial to save money. You can do it very well by using project management tools. The two most popular project management tools are Trello and Slack. However, both tools have different functionalities.

• Trello

Trello helps you with managing projects that require different stages of approvals and checks. It also makes client onboarding smooth and helps your team with managing multiple tasks with a single dashboard.

• Slack

Slack is a project management tool that helps you manage large campaigns where different team members are involved. It also facilitates robust communication between the team members working on those projects. Therefore, it saves time and helps you organize your projects and tasks effectively.

Recruitment of Team

It is not recommended for you to go on a hiring spree, especially in the initial stages of an agency. However, when you start earning between $5,000 $20000 per month, it is time to start hiring. It becomes inevitable because you cannot handle all of your tasks alone. Furthermore, you are also required to invest your time in business development, marketing, and operations. You can hire an assistant who will help you execute mundane tasks such as communications, client handling, graphic designing, and social media marketing.

• If hiring a full-time employee is not feasible for you, you can go for a virtual assistant. You can find a virtual assistant on sites such as Fiverr and People Per Hour.
• Make sure the person you’re going to hire is committed and hardworking, and he/she doesn’t shy away from getting their hands dirty while performing mundane tasks.
• So, you have now understood how to define your target audience, find new clients, and maintain cash flow. You have also hired your first employee. Then, it’s time to move to the second stage, which is making the structure of an agency.

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Phase 2: Erection of an agency's structure

Now that you have successfully launched an agency and have managed to maintain its cash flow, it is time to move to the next phase, making your agency's structure. In this phase, the agency owners create systems, processes, and structures. Unfortunately, many agencies don't grow beyond a point because their owners are not ready to decentralize them and keep everything in their control.

Step 1. Building a Team

Even if you hire assistants and employees, they cannot work independently, and everything goes back to the owner again for approval, evaluation, and assessment. So here are some practices that you should consider following to avoid the trap of micromanagement.

Step 2. Decentralization

You need to hire a media buyer or marketer, and they should be trained to replace you. There is no point in hiring employees if you can't delegate essential assignments to them. For example, the assistant you had hired in the first phase can now be promoted to become a project manager. All the operational and client servicing tasks are currently assigned to the media buyer and project manager. You might still be involved with client strategy by a significant part of your load would be shared by the media buyer. He will be in charge of the day-to-day operations and communications with the client. It becomes even more crucial if you have more than 5-6 clients.

Step 3. Client Retention

According to a survey conducted by Blair Nicole, the CEO of Media Moguls PR, adding new clients and retaining the existing ones are among the biggest challenges faced by agencies worldwide.

The average client churn rate is 30% per month which is relatively high. It means that if you have ten clients, three will leave every month. So you should have a proper strategy to check the churn rate. A client retained is a client earned.

The media buyer you hire is generally responsible for Quality Control and managing the new team members. They are not directly involved with project management or its implementation part. In the new agency structure, your media buyer would be handling a significant portion of the tasks you managed earlier.

Here are a few proven methods to lower the client churn rate:

Step 4. Onboarding

It sounds strange, but it’s true. A highly organized, fast, and well-planned onboarding can reduce the churn rate to a great extent. During the onboarding process, you need to complete many tasks such as:

• Get the account information form filled
• Link client’s Facebook Business Manager to agency
• Create spreadsheets with crucial content, log in details of client’s assets, content calendar, and digital marketing strategy documents and add them to Google Drive
• Send onboarding email with payment methods
• Set up invoicing
• Create KPI worksheet

Automated onboardings can save you a lot of hassle and time. Fortunately, various onboarding tools can help you onboard clients, on autopilot such as DashClicks's white-label onboarding tool.

Step 5. Communication

Communication plays a vital role in client retention. Conflict and mistrust occur when proper communication is absent. Some project management tools allow you to communicate with the client. You can also use white label tools that are pretty user-friendly and easily accessed from the dashboard.

Step 6. Setting KPIs

Setting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for at least three to six months helps you in multiple ways. First, it helps in setting expectations and gaining clarity about the campaign. Secondly, it subconsciously makes up their mind to think in longer terms to achieve tangible results. So even if you sign a contract for one or two months, it's advisable to set up KPIs for at least three months.

Step 7. Use a Project Management Tool

Move over Trello. It's time for a project management software that is more advanced and powerful. You can try Basecamp for team management and internal communications. It is even more advanced than Slack or Asana.

Basecamp has the following features:

• Campfire – A place where team members can communicate with each other regarding the project
• Message board – A feature specifically built to enable your client to communicate with you and your team
• Docs and Files – The tool can store data and information, i.e., content, forms, and files
• Automation check-in – Send automatic messages to your client
• To-Dos – Useful for the current tasks and also onboarding process

Step 8. Predictable Lead Generation

During the pump-priming phase, you heavily relied on organic campaigns to generate leads. All this will change in the second phase, as you need some predictable lead-generation model to ascertain consistent cash flow.

Start investing $50 per day on retargeting your website visitors. However, this doesn’t mean that you will stop your organic activity. The other marketing campaigns will remain as they are. The only difference here would be that you would start investing a small amount into paid ads to see some easy conversions down the line.

To attract visitors through paid ads, you should focus on promoting the following three things:

1. A high-value lead magnet (such as a free eBook download, membership, or access to a tool)
2. Daily newsletter
3. Webinars

Tips: The ad you create should be a video that highlights the following:

1. Explain why the client’s current marketing campaigns are not yielding any results; cite specific reasons and ways to fix them.
2. Tell them why your agency is remarkably different and give them some strong reasons to provide their email address.
3. You can mention the lead magnet, educational webinars, and newsletters as the main reasons. The CTA should contain these three offers.

Action List

1. Create a landing page
2. Connect page to ActiveCampaign
3. Create a powerful lead magnet
4. Choose an email marketing tool such as Constant Contact, GetResponse, or MailChimp. Design a daily newsletter
5. Shoot a video to promote your lead magnet
6. Create marketing copy for the video ad to target cold website visitors
7. Now that you have a structure ready for your agency, you can easily attain the target of $50k per month by creating systems and processes. Your lead generation is also on autopilot, and fresh leads are coming. It’s time to enter the next phase — scaling.

Phase 3: Scale and Grow Your Agency

With all the systems and processes in place, you need to move to the next scaling phase. In the 2nd stage, you built a small team to manage your limited projects. However, now that your client portfolio has increased, you need a larger team to manage them.

Step 1. Expand the team / Outsource / White Label

With an increasing client portfolio and an increased focus on building the teams, you should hire more professionals, media buyers, and project managers. You may need to hire SEO professionals, graphic designers, and paid advertising experts. Media buyers are account managers who manage client relationships and customer support.

Step 2. Try Outsourcing

Apart from hiring a full-time team, you can also outsource various services or processes to cut costs and boost workflow. But, of course, apart from full-time employees, you also must have freelancers and virtual employees, so your projects don’t suffer in the absence of the required headcounts.

Step 3. Resell White-Label Services

Reselling white-label services is another smart option these days. White-label services are offered by trained professionals and sold as they are to the clients. Reselling white label services allows you to scale your agency while staying lean and agile.

Step 4. Create a Repeatable Upselling Process

You can build upsell processes by guiding your clients through the upgrading process to use more premium products or services. Renewing a pre-existing customer’s subscription also falls into this category. You can create a checklist to see if you can upgrade your existing customer to a premium product. You can do it in simple steps by assessing the individual needs, their purchasing power, and willingness to scale. The checklist involves the following points:

1. Record important details
2. Fetch the contact details of the customer
3. Send an email to see if they are interested
4. Record their response
5. Schedule a phone call if the email has been read
6. If not, then get ready for a cold call
7. If they don’t express interest or not ready to buy, send them a “thank you” letter.
8. Initiate a call with a customer-centric approach
9. Ask questions like:
10. What motivated you to use our product, to begin with?
11. How did you start using our product?
12. Have you expanded your operations since then?
13. How do you feel about the recent changes and upgrades made to the product?
14. Would you like to share the current limitations of the product, if any?
15. Where did you register the most significant success in your business operations with this product?
16. Would you like to give some suggestions regarding the product improvement?

If your customer has mentioned that it would be nice to have more users on their team within the platform, you could explain that the next subscription level would alleviate that problem.

As a sales representative, do some due diligence. If the premium features can make a task more accessible and more straightforward for the customer, then go ahead and explain those advantages. But first, you need to investigate if the customer regularly executes those tasks.

Brush up your product knowledge and explain how the pricing of the premium product would work in favor of the customer and not against them.

Be ready to face the common objections from your customer and offer them rebuttals.

Tip: Be honest throughout the sales process, and it will work in your favor. If your customer doesn’t need the premium product, don’t push it aggressively. On the other hand, don’t try to rip off the customer if you want to retain them for a long time.

Step 5. Hire a Business Development Team

To free up your hands and delegate the day-to-day sales-related tasks, you need to hire a Business Development Manager. He will be responsible for building lists, generating and nurturing leads, funneling, and closing the sales. He/She would also maintain the sales data collected from different channels and internal processes. In addition, the Business Development Manager may recruit telemarketers and sales representatives for prospecting and making cold calls. Thus, the sales team will take a lot of the burden off your shoulders.

Step 6. Review and Analysis

In the end, you should learn the analytics and numbers to add an element of predictability to your agency’s operations and revenue targets. For example, you should know the hiring cost of an individual and their total contribution to the process.

Conclusion

Now that you have a sound understanding of how to launch, sustain, and scale a digital marketing agency, your agency is up and running and heading towards $100K per month. You are all set to achieve a 7 figure target for your business that too shortly. However, the understanding of the minutiae can be crucial to the survival of your startup. We have outlined the best strategies and what you need to do to become a 7-concrete. All you need to do is to approach it with passion and intensity.

The perks of being an agency owner are many.

Besides giving you freedom, it also offers you satisfaction, higher income, and greater financial security. However, it would help if you tread with caution while launching your dream venture, as even minor mistakes can damage your prospects of becoming a successful agency owner. Unfortunately, most agency owners are clueless about the right blueprint to succeed.

Most people don't start, because they have fears, planted deep into their subconscious minds. And these fears are not baseless, so do your homework before you dive in. Many roadblocks down the path can deter you from achieving your goal.

Most startups fail in the first five years. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more.

Here we have listed seven steps to launching your own successful digital agency:

Step #1 - Acquire Necessary Skills

Apart from the personality traits such as creativity and intelligence, you need some real experience in the field of digital marketing. Nothing can replace the real-life exposure to actual problems users face and how you can fix them as an agency. Some of these skills are:

1. Communication, negotiation, and persuasion skills
2. Keyword research, basic HTML coding, WordPress, on-page, and off-page SEO
3. Designing ads
4. Website and landing page designing
5. Report generation
6. Crafting marketing messages and brand positioning
7. Google Analytics, Facebook advertising, Google ads
8. Using tools such as UberSuggest, SEMrush, Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce
9. Using team management and project management tools such as Asana, Basecamp, and Toggl Plan
10. Managing clients and offering robust customer support

Step #2 - Pick a Niche and Identify Your Target Market

For a startup, targeting all the segments and industries can be a recipe for disaster. The best practice is to identify your target audience based on their niche, company size, and the type of business, such as local, SaaS-based, etc. It would help if you also designed your offering according to your customer base.

Don't try to position yourself as a full-service agency, especially in the beginning, because most agencies specialize only in one or two areas. But when they start marketing themselves as a full-service enterprise, they get trapped in the vicious cycle of mediocre services, increased churn rate, and lower pricing.

The ideal strategy should be to specialize in only one area while improving your services and brand image. Then, you can pitch your clients accordingly. You are likely to attract more clients when you pitch as an expert in a particular field.

How Microsoft Diversified Its Products and Services Range?

Microsoft started as a software company and made an operating system DOS for IBM personal computers in 1981. Later on, it launched the popular Windows software with a visual interface in 1983.

When the Internet became popular in 1995, it launched the web browser "Internet Explorer" to dominate the still unchartered territory. Then, in 2001, it launched the Xbox gaming console. Now, Microsoft's primary business is not Windows OS but its "cloud" computing services.

Create Your Customers' Buyer Personas

It's crucial to determine the buyer persona of your target audience before you announce your service offerings. You should try to find the exact answers to these questions to build your customer avatars.

• What factors or things motivate them?
• What puts them off?
• What are their business objectives?
• What issues and challenges are they struggling with?
• If it seems difficult for you to answer these questions, ask them to fill out a survey in exchange for a small gift offer.

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Step #3 - Focus On Getting New Clients

According to a survey conducted through HARO (Help a Reporter Out) by Blair Nicole at Media Moguls PR, getting and retaining clients is the biggest issue facing digital marketing agencies. Even if you are the best PR person or marketer in town, your agency will cease to exist if you fail to sign up new clients.

Here are some proven ways you can try to attract new clients:

A. Get Testimonials

If you are a beginner, you can focus your attention on getting as many testimonials as possible. If you don't get it naturally from your existing clients, you can offer someone to work for free, and they would likely return the favor by giving you positive feedback.

B. Offer Free Advice and Position Yourself as an Expert

The best way to establish yourself as an authority in any subject and create awareness about your agency is to offer free advice. It's a proven technique many startup owners have successfully tried. So what is the best way to market yourself as an expert and gain an edge over your competition? You can try channels such as Quora, Reddit, Facebook groups, live events, and forums to answer people's queries and offer tips and advice.

C. Target Startups

You can visit Crunchbase or Angel and find the startups that are in the incubation period or the initial stages of their operations. Then, you can prepare a report of the loopholes in the marketing strategy. The report should be comprehensive and also include possible solutions to fix the issues.

D. Try Aggressive Cold Outreach

You should do your outreach aggressively for quick results. You shouldnā€™t restrict yourself to email marketing as the email "open rate" is relatively low.

The best way to ensure that your message reaches the right person is to visit their website, find their contact details, and straightaway fix an appointment to discuss what you can do to boost their brand and increase their revenue.

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STEP #4 - Invest in Content Marketing

Content marketing can change the game for your agency. The website conversion rate for agencies implementing content marketing is almost six times higher than that of agencies. Still, it costs about 62% less than outbound marketing. Content is also considered the most effective strategy for SEO and organic rankings. In addition, content marketing is understood to produce three times as many leads as advertising.

Furthermore, it has a compounding effect because it's already there on your website, consistently attracting leads for your funnel, unlike paid advertising which shuts down its lead generation engine as soon as you stop making payments.

After the disruptive innovation of Internet-based business solutions, branded content is considered even more effective than traditional modes of advertising such as radio, TV, magazines, direct mailers, or PR.

In this scenario, investment in content marketing becomes essential for marketers.

Here are some helpful content marketing tips digital agencies can follow to succeed in this competitive space:

1. Treat content as an essential tool for the conversion
2. Set the processes for producing quality content
3. Create relevant content and lead magnets
4. Focus on quality than quantity
5. Try content repurposing

A. Create Content According to the Marketing Funnel

To create a 7-figure digital marketing agency, you must know how to create content according to the content marketing funnel:

What is a Content Marketing Funnel?

A content marketing funnel is a system that helps you attract fresh leads to your business through a variety of content. These leads are then nurtured and passed through different funnel stages to convert them into paying customers eventually. It is achieved by progressively "funneling" them through specific, personalized, and product-focused content. The objective is to push the reader to the next stage of the funnel.

Various marketers split the content marketing funnel into four to six parts, but there are mainly three stages that you can consider:

• Top of the Funnel (ToFu)

The content for this stage focuses on increasing brand awareness and boosting website traffic. Therefore, toFu content should be attention-grabbing.

• Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

The content created for this stage focuses on the generation and nurturing of leads. Therefore, MOFU content is primarily educational.

• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)

The content created for this stage of the funnel focuses on conversion and purchase. BOFU content is personalized and decisive.

B. Try Content Repurposing

Take your best content and convert it into a video or a podcast or vice versa. In addition, you can take your content to an entirely new audience by repurposing your content. Here are the different ways to repurpose your content:

Smart Ways to Repurpose Content

Many subject matter experts, influencers, and YouTubers conduct interviews with other experts in their field through video conferencing to attract new audiences to their YouTube channels. It also imparts value to their existing viewers.

Here are a few tips for repurposing content:

A. You can conduct interviews with experts in your field. Then, you can use their tips to create a ā€�tipsā€¯ or ā€�how toā€¯ article and can even make an ā€�expert advice ebook.ā€¯

B. You can also conduct a webinar and convert it into a podcast using a free video converter. A webinar can also be converted into a video tutorial with ease using a video editing tool such as iMovie or VideoPad.

C. You can share your agencyā€™s internal data and campaign stats and create impactful case studies out of it.

So, here are three possibilities for content repurposing that you can try.

1. Interviews => Tips & Expert Advice Ebook
2. Webinars => Video Tutorials
3. Internal Data & Campaign Stats => Case Studies

So, you can try the following possibilities and repurpose the content from long-form to short-form and visual content and vice versa.

If you are successfully implementing content marketing, you will:

1. Invest a minimal amount in paid ads
2. Increase organic search traffic through quality content written for the audiences
3. Create buzz and increase brand awareness
4. Get higher conversion rates

C. Boost Your Content Creation Capacity

As a digital agency, you should try to produce more and more evergreen content once you get a few clients in hand. The best example of evergreen content is Wikipedia, and you can take inspiration from some of the topics on this online encyclopedia.

However, a topic such as "The best strategies to create backlinks in 2021" is not evergreen content as nobody would like to read this content once 2021 is over. Wikipedia attracts more than two million visitors every month because of its evergreen content. Your content should have the following features to drive significant results from your evergreen content:

1. It should be comprehensive and long-form
2. It should be educational
3. It should address the pain points of your audience
4. It should add value to the lives of the readers
5. It should contain long-tail and intent-based keywords
6. It should be correctly formatted
7. It should contain visual elements and graphics
8. It should list the key takeaways

You can use the following tools to check the quality standards of the popular content for your chosen keywords.

• BuzzSumo
• Ahrefs
• Ubersuggest
• SEMrush
• Exploding Topics

Your post should stand out, so it doesn't go unnoticed in the pile of 2.5 million blog posts being published online every day. It would help if you focused on quality, frequency, and comprehensiveness while creating content. Also, make sure your content is visually appealing.

Key Takeaway: Ā To differentiate your blog post from the flood of posts published on the web every day, you should find a unique angle.

You can follow these tips to find a unique angle:

1. Check out other blogs:
2. Use Google search and tools like BuzzSumo to find the top-ranking posts in your niche and add something of your own to this content.
3. Use skyscraper technique to create longer content with helpful screenshots
4. Add up-to-date info
5. Add your research and insights
6. Cover the topic from a different angle

D. Expand Existing Content

Google loves fresh content, and it brings lots of opportunities to the table for marketers. For example, you can expand the existing content, explain it with examples and stats, and add new tips and tricks.

Use a tool like Clickflow to find your decently performing posts in organic search, which have partially lost traffic. It provides you the Content Decay report with a ranked list of pages you need to update to win back traffic quickly. Update the content in these posts using different methods discussed above, and you'll see a sudden rise in traffic.

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Apart from a boost in organic rankings and traffic, updating content has the following benefits:

• Increase your click-through rate (CTR)
• Fix issues in the existing content
• Tell Google that you have fresh content
• Add fresh context
• Replace broken links
• Update stats and facts with the latest info and resources

E. Follow Influencers

Another way to find out the content gaining traction from social media audiences is to follow influencers. There are hundreds of thousands of influencers, and you can divide them into four major categories viz. nano, micro, macro, and mega influencers. These can be defined as follows:

1. Mega Influencers: More than 1 million followers
2. Macro Influencers: 100,000 to 1 million followers
3. Micro-Influencers: 10,000 to 100,000 followers
4. Nano Influencers: Less than 10,000 followers

The different tools you can use to find these influencers are Followerwonk, Awario, Klear, etc.

Key Takeaway: See the posts generating conversations and use these topics and ideas for your next blog post. Once you publish your post, inform the particular influencer that your blog post is inspired by one of their social media posts, and they will likely share it from their social handle.

Further reading:

• 11-Point Content Marketing Checklist Proven to Boost Your Engagement
• Startup Marketing: Your Ultimate Strategy For Incredible Growth
• How to Grow and Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency in 2021
• The Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing
• 8 Game-Changing Benefits of Content Marketing

STEP #5 - Scale Your Agency by Delivering Results

Now that you have successfully launched your agency, the next step is to scale it upNow that you have successfully launched your agency and created a compelling launching page, the next step is to scale it up.

A. Choose a Model

You need a business model first to scale successfully and deliver results as a 7-figure digital marketing agency. Without a predefined model, you will not have a clear strategy and specific goals in front of you. Instead, you can choose your niche and define your income goals while selecting a business model.

B. Put Processes and Systems in Place

It's essential to have proper internal processes and Systems to create a 7 figure and digital marketing agency, These processes start with hiring experts, trainees, and freelancers and onboarding newĀ clients.

Setting up processes is a tedious job, but once these processes are in place, they would help you to increase your efficiency as an agency. Document everything that you learn, plan, systematize, and automate. If you have proper processes in place, you will not have to spend too much time onboarding a new hire for a client. A few white-label platforms also offer automatic onboarding.

Since most onboarding tasks and communications are predefined and planned, these automation tools reduce your Headache as they take care of all the information you need. It also brings consistency which is highly appreciated and expected by your client.

You can use project plan templates and use them in your campaigns.

However, in the absence of proper processes, your team members may change the processes as per their whims and fancy. Moreover, it might annoy your customers as they want more transparency, consistency, and accuracy.

If you have standard processes in place, it will help an employee efficiently perform the job for another employee on emergency leave. It will also allow you to step away from the business when you go out of town or need a break.

Key Takeaway: Better processes and excellent customer support reduce client churn rate.

C. Grow Your Team

It is essential to hire experts and interns Whose wavelength is in sync with your agency's objectives, vision, and work culture. So, their personalities, attitude, and work ethic should match with your agency's work culture. If they are not ready to put in extra efforts to turn your agency into a revenue generation machine, don't keep them. Instead, design your compensation and bonuses based on an individual's performance and contribution to your agency's growth.

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D. Find and Nurture the Right People

The biggest mistake agency owners make is mistreating their best employees. They are forced to work long hours while their underperforming counterparts work as they want. If you want to create a 7 figure agency, make your best employees feel valued and respected. When hiring employees, you should select them based on the following characteristics:

1. Problem-solving skills
2. Integrity and honesty
3. Focus on excellence and quality
4. Persistence
5. Empathy toward clients

STEP #6 - Collaborate with Others

To become a 7-figure digital marketing agency, you must collaborate with others. Since you can't operate as an island, it is crucial to have channel partners.

A. Find Channel Partners and Other Agencies

A successful digital marketing agency works with many channel partners, agencies, and content providers. For example, web designing is a part of digital marketing services. Therefore, it is recommended that you collaborate with competitive web designing companies to design websites for your clients. In addition, it will decrease your dependency on full-time web designers on board to finish things in time.

B. Collaborate with Influencers

It is also imperative to collaborate with influencers as they help you to present your content in front of new audiences. They also help you in conversion by introducing your product or service from their social handles. Influencers can also increase your website traffic dramatically and send you high-quality traffic. It will save you enormous time and money spent on paid advertising.

C. Collaborate with White-Label Agencies

You can also leverage technology and use white label tools to your advantage. For example, you can use DashClicks' white-label platform and InstaSites to create hundreds of professional-grade websites within a matter of seconds. InstaSite is a tool that helps you build hundreds of niche-based websites for your clients in less than a minute. All you need to do is choose a template based on your niche, enter your clients' basic details, and press the submit button. The idea is to save time and scale your agency. Here is an example of a content-ready website created by InstaSites.

Step #7 - Leverage Tools

As a successful agency, you can build your tools and offer them to your clients for free. Therefore, it can be an excellent strategy to create backlinks and attract traffic. Apart from that, it would also help you in creating brand awareness.

A. Build Tools

As a digital marketing agency, you can build an SEO, plagiarism detection, or backlink tool and offer it free of cost on your website. Successful marketers such as Neil Patel have done it earlier with keyword research tools such as UberSuggest.

B. Use Tools to Automate Processes

Similarly, you can use tools to automate processes such as Kissflow Process. You can also use a white label dashboard to manage everything about your campaign from a single dashboard.

C. Use Tools to Save Time and Add Value

It will save a lot of time and hassle for you. For example, to generate digital marketing reports for your clients, you can use a white label tool InstaReports. It will create beautiful-looking reports with lots of data and insights. Usually, in-house employees procrastinate when they need to generate a report, mainly because it’s pretty monotonous and boring. InstaReports can generate professional reports with minimal effort.

Other Growth Strategies

Mergers and acquisitions are among the other most popular growth strategies which numerous agencies use to their advantage. You can acquire a struggling agency and turn it into a successful business, and it will become an extra source of income for you. Apart from that, you can start free coaching programs for working professionals, arrange workshops, and participate in sponsored events.

You can also try affiliate marketing to become a 7-figure digital marketing agency. Hire interns and train them to do repetitive and time-consuming tasks. It has advantageous for both parties. Fresh employees get a break in the digital marketing industry and learn the cutting edge practices, while you can cut the human resource cost and still manage to get the same results.

Conclusion

The strategies and tactics discussed above will provide you with a blueprint to turn your struggling agency into a 7-figure digital marketing agency. It is essential to create standard processes to get an edge over your competition and improve your workflow.

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Customer support is also a necessary part of agency growth, and it should be on top of your list to keep your customers happy.

You should also invest in training your employees. It will pay off tremendously in the long run. Conduct workshops and training programs periodically for your employees, and you will see an unexpected growth in productivity and performance. If you make your employees feel valued, they will give their best to help you become a multi-million dollar agency.