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.

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

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

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

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

1. Outsource or White Label

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Establish a Morning and Closing Routine

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

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

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

B. Make a to-do list

Refer to your project management tools, client communication, and team productivity reports and prepare a to-do list for yourself and your team each day. A To-do list streamlines your tasks according to their priority level and helps you speed up your workflow. If you are a Jira user, you can integrate a Smart Checklist app to break down complex issues into actionable steps. Keep it short and flexible, leaving room for emergencies, meetings, and other interruptions.

C. Plan for the next day

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

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

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

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

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Team Workload Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C. Allows easy access to relevant data.

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Streamline Project Management

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

Quick Tips For Effective Prioritization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Look For Ways to Automate Your Tasks

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

A. Streamline Appointment Scheduling

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

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

B. Systemize Proposals & Contracts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the Features of InstaReports?

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

A. It's integrated with Google Maps.

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

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

The tool highlights:

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

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

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

Analyze directory listings and find errors in them.

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

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

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

Organic competitor analysis and organic keyword ranking reports.

Get the backlinks report.

Here is the Google Ads Competitor Analysis.

D. Save Time in Onboarding

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to create niche-based websites for your clients:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Invest in Training

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

A. Arrange motivational and productivity workshops for your employees regularly

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

i. New ways of doing things

ii. Time management

iii. Productivity techniques

iv. How to stay away from negative emotions

v. How to prevent burnouts

vi. How to maintain work-life balance

vi. How to improve communication

vii. How to grow as a better professional

viii. How to cultivate leadership skills

ix. How to manage change and encourage innovation

x. How to stay happier

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

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

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

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

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

C. Leverage internships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Leverage Strategic Partnerships

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

A. Partner with other agencies

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

B. Collaborate with influencers

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

C. Explore alternative marketing channels

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

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

Conclusion

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

According to a CMI's 2018 B2C content marketing survey, 86% of B2C marketers think content marketing is a crucial strategy, and 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach customers. Still, the content marketing failure rate is relatively high in both B2C and B2B segments.

The core objectives of content marketing are to build trust, crush objections, and make the buyer's journey flow as frictionless as possible. Conversions will flood in if you can meet these objectives. You can use the following checklist to make those goals time-bound and measurable.

One of the chief reasons businesses fail in content marketing is that they aren't consistent with their content production and dissemination. They try something a few times and then quit. To ensure consistency and help businesses boost their content marketing engagement, we have compiled an 11-point content marketing checklist. Make sure you have it pinned near your desk.

Here is the checklist you can use to ensure success in your content marketing campaign:

1. Do You Know Your Target Audience?

You cannot succeed at content marketing unless you know your audience and their needs. To create valuable content for your audience, you must first understand their preferences, interests, habits, and needs. These insights will also let you know the kind of content they would like to consume.

According to HubSpot, 44% of the content marketing failure rate is linked to not creating content aligned to buyers' needs. But before that, you must conduct a survey or do some market research to know your target audience.

Tools You Can Use To Know Your Audience

You can use Google Analytics or other tools such as Moz Pro or Kissmetrics to know your audience.

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It will help you retrieve the following information about your customers' demographics.

Demographic details of your audience you may get through tools like Google Analytics:

• Gender
• Age
• Location
• Job title
• Income
• Monthly spending pattern
• The kind of information they like to see
• Their pain points
• Their emotional triggers

Interest reports generated through Google Analytics

The Interests report will help you get an idea of the online habits of your audience. This report can further be divided into three reports:‍

A.  Affinity Category: This report highlights the general interests of your website visitors in terms of their hobbies and activities they enjoy. This is the top of the funnel, so you can use it for publishing informative content to increase brand awareness.

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B. In-Market Segment: This is the next stage in the sales funnel, which corresponds to the purchase intent and the consideration phase.

‍C. Other Categories: It groups users according to their browsing habits and what else they are surfing, so you can understand their inclinations.To get these reports. Go to the Audience section in Google analytics and click on Interests.These insights will help you understand:

• The type of content your audience likes and shares
• Communication channels they use
• Their buying habits and buying cycles

This information will act as the foundation of your content marketing strategy.Here are a few other ways to take the pulse of your audience:

A. Take a Survey

Take a survey using tools like SurveyMonkey and get the following details:

• Audience demographics
• Their desires, passions, lifetime objectives and goals, sources of motivations, and how much they are willing to pay to solve their problem
• Use both open-ended and closed-ended questions to know how your prospective customers think
• Ask questions that allow them to open up
• Know their biggest fears
• Questions about what would they do in case of an emergency

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B. Perform Competitor Analysis

Use competitor analysis tools such as SEMrush, or SpyFu to find the keywords your competitors are using. It would help if you also find the channels they are using to reach out to their audiences and distribute their content. Try to find out which social channels they are using and what kind of engagement and response they receive when they share their content, such as blog posts.

C. Visit Niche-Related Forums and Facebook Groups

The best way to know the views of your customers is to visit niche-based forums and social media channels such as Reddit, Facebook groups, and Quora.

You can also try LinkedIn forums. Use the search term "forums + (name the niche)" and enter it into the LinkedIn search field.

LinkedIn Forums

Facebook Groups

You'll find numerous forums and discussion boards associated with this niche. However, you should make sure that the particular forum is active with engaging content and people are actively responding to the comments. On LinkedIn, you may find that there are forums where there is no activity for a long time. It would be best if you did not waste your time on those forums.

How to Know Your Audience Using Alexa?

To understand the needs and expectations of your target audience, you need to know their buyer persona. You can easily do it through Alexa using the following steps:

A. Go to Alexa.com>>Type in your site URL>>Click the Goā  button.B. Scroll down the results page to check the audience demographics and other engagement metrics such as bounce rate, daily pageviews, and visitor insights.C. Here you can find the ratio of male and female visitors, information about their education, and the average daily time spent on the site.

It will help you to build buyer personas. You can create a content strategy for these personas.

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2. Do You Have a Predefined Content Strategy?

Make sure you have a robust content strategy aligned with your customers' expectations.

These are the crucial insights that you get from the surveys about the needs of your audiences. These insights will help you in creating your content strategy.

• Audience Statistics
• Age range
• Niche
• Competitors
• Engagement via (Social channels)
• Needs

The action steps you need to build a strategy:

A. Sign up for the Leading Blogs in Your Niche and Follow Them on Social Media

To save time, find out the keywords your competition is ranking for. It is essential to know the relevant long-tail keywords that drive meaningful traffic and are also responsible for conversion and top. The best way to do it is to sign up for the leading blogs in your niche and regularly monitor the keywords they are using. These can be both short-tail and long-tail keywords. You can also follow them on social media to see the terms, phrases, tone, and keywords they are using.

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B. Spy on Your Competitors for Blog Post Ideas

Explore more blog post ideas related to your niche using BuzzSumo and social monitoring and listing tools. Plan your content to attract, engage and build lifetime relationships with customers.

Here are some of the most popular content pieces that BuzzSumo returned for the search query home renovation ideas.

C. Constantly look for ways to attract traffic

Conduct research to know what businesses are doing to attract traffic and boost their brand authority. How are successful organizations engaging their customers using content marketing techniques?

How Orbit Media Uses Content Marketing to Attract 60k Visits per Month on Its Website?

Orbit Media is a web design and development agency with a killer content strategy. They attract nearly 60,000 visits per month, that too entirely from content marketing.

Here are the salient features of the content strategy:A. They use original research and write comprehensive and well-written guides.

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B. They send surveys to thousands to bloggers to conduct original research and get firsthand insights

C. They curate this data into statistics and generate reports

D. They transform this data into branded images, charts, and stories

E. The original research earns thousands of backlinks

Key Takeaway: Original research as a content strategy surprisingly boosts a brand's authority.

3. Is Your Content Data-Driven or Plain Storytelling?

Data-driven content helps in establishing your brand as an authority. It shows that the content you have created is not just a fancy piece of prose, but well-presented information that is backed by data received from authentic sources. So, it is something you can rely on, and it will help you grow your audience.

Another thing you can use is attention-grabbing and powerful headlines that compel people to read further.

A. Make Sure Your Content Is Engaging

Data-driven content with attention-grabbing headlines will not work if your content is not engaging. It will only increase the bounce rate on the page, which can be disastrous for your website's SEO and search engine rankings.

B. Make Sure Your Content Connects With Audiences

Make sure that your content connects with your audience. It's essential to make a lasting impact to boost conversion. Be careful not to be overly emotional.

It's not necessary to write your own story either. You can use your client's story but write it in such a compelling manner that it connects with people and encourages them to take the desired action, which is the whole purpose of content marketing.

Google Using Data-Driven Content Marketing

Google is a market leader when it comes to producing branded data-driven content. As the dominating global search engine, Google has a vast amount of increasing data every day. Google uses this data-driven content for different buyer personas in various formats.

Here is how Google uses real-time data-driven creatives to serve ads that seamlessly link external data to Google solutions.

How do Real-time data-driven creatives work?

A. Google collects indexed data on fast-changing external factors (such as meteorological data)

B. This data is collected on the Google Cloud Platform

C. It is then linked with Google's ad serving systems through Google Marketing Platform‍

D. The ad platform serves variable ad creatives

E. The ads are considered the most suitable according to the data on the consumer's environment

Image Source: Think with Google

Spotify

Spotify, the music streaming and broadcasting app, is a master at customization and data-driven content marketing. They use data to send customized content and emails to their customers.

They use their customers' account details and their data on breakout artists to determine whether these users were early listeners of a now-popular band or artist.

They use data from millions of streams to target users who are in the top 1 to 15% bracket in terms of usage. These data-driven content marketing techniques pay off in huge ways for Spotify.Here is how Spotify uses bug data to create custom content for its users.

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4. Do You Have a Time Management Strategy?

Most agencies waste a lot of time while creating and distributing content is repetitive processes. If you have a time management strategy in place, you will first make a plan for ideation, production, and distribution of content and then allocate tasks to your best-fit staffers. It will save a lot of time in back and forth and unnecessary delays because of chaos and confusion negatively influencing the workflow.

To effectively manage your time and workflow, follow these tips:

A. Allocate Tasks

Streamline your processes and allocate tasks to your team members for a smooth workflow. If you don't do this, a lot of time is wasted because of confusion, vague description of tasks, and resulting chaos.

B. Assign Time for Each Task

If you assign time to each task, it prevents unnecessary delays as work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

C. Have Pre-Written Scripts

If you have pre-written scripts for routine communications, it will save a lot of your time. So, before you launch your content marketing campaign, make sure that you have all the weapons in your arsenal to execute repetitive tasks and achieve a flexible workflow. You should have clearly defined tasks so that you can allocate them to your team members. It will help you measure their performance and monitor the entire workflow.

5. Do You Create Content For Different Stages in a Buyer's Journey?

Your content strategy needs to be tied to a broader goal. However, if you are unable to figure out that goal, it's challenging to identify your target audiences and measure the success of your content marketing campaign.

Components of a Sales Funnel

To understand those goals, you must be familiar with the buyer's journey or the sales funnel. It has been defined in the following steps:

At each stage of the buyer's journey, you should serve your target audience the right content that specifically talks about their needs. These needs severely differ and evolve at each stage.

So, if you have a defined content marketing strategy, you'll achieve the results, but if you are publishing one-off articles without a plan and a target audience, you're unlikely to get any closer to your goals.

Let's have a look at how you can figure out the needs of your target audience to formulate a content strategy.

A. Audience Statistics: Conduct a survey and try to know as many things as you can about your target audiences

B. Age Range: The age range/group of your target audience

C. Niche: The industry they belong to (especially in the case of B2B clients)

D. Competitors: Who are their competitors

E. Engagement Via: List the social channels you can use to engage them

F. Needs: What are they looking for? What are their pain points? Use social listening to know more about your prospective customers.

6. Have You Addressed Customers' Queries in Your Content?

The chief objective of content marketing is to address customer queries and concerns. To include customers' questions, especially the FAQs, is also one of the most effective SEO practices.

To avoid the perils of being friend-zoned by your website visitors, you should be ready with the rebuttals to their objections and arguments. To handle this situation, you should compile FAQs and other possible customer queries you think your customers "should ask" and answer them on your website.

It will reduce your time converting the visitors and help you push the customers further down the sales funnel. So, when your sales team interacts with them, it will have to answer fewer questions.

7. Have You Added Visual Elements and Appealing Graphics?

Images dominate 63% of social media, and the trend will continue to rise in the future. According to the Visual Teaching Alliance, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, which has the power to see images that last for just 13 milliseconds. So, visual content is far more potent than text-based content for grabbing your attention and retention. You can use various websites to find free and paid stock photos. You can edit these pics to use in your blog or social media posts.

8. Are You Creating Shareable Content?

You can write excellent content, but you can't make sure that it will go viral. But there are a few tried and tested methods that will help you create shareable content.

• Use appealing visuals to grab the attention of your audience
• Use storytelling and personalized content to engage your readers
• Write well-researched, long-form content with data to support your facts
• Evoke emotions with your content
• Research your audience and write what your audience wants
• Collaborate with your influencers to make your content go viral
• Use unique research results and use stunning insights information

How to Write Better Headlines?

Moz conducted a study to write better headlines, and they shared the following tips:

• Use numbers and be specific in your headlines. 36% of customers prefer headlines with specific numbers. For example, "Boost conversion by 50% instantly: Hacks you can implement right now."
• Address the reader in your headline. Ways you can multiply traffic by 250%."
• Write "how-to" articles. For example, "How to write 5,000 words per hour."

Questions and regular headlines were the least preferred by the users.

To know the trending topics in your niche, you can use tools like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs. You can also pick insights for your next blog topic from the latest book titles on Amazon.com. You can also read customer reviews for these new titles and gather a lot of information from user-generated content about what your audience is looking for.

9. Do Your Openings Grab Attention?

After an attention-grabbing headline, the second most important thing is your article's opening. Even if you use an attention-grabbing headline, your reader will not likely read your post if the opening is dull and boring. You can use the following tricks to make your introduction enjoyable.

• Start with a story. You can mention a quote in the beginning that reflects the theme or the message of the story.
• Use a teaser and use it to indicate what to expect from the post.
• Use confessions and “before and after” facts in your openings.
• Don’t use a misleading opening.
• Use Data-Driven Content

Modern-day journalists take data from a scenario and use visualization and storytelling to convert it into engaging and meaningful content. Such content becomes popular as it has the trust factor associated with it, so people take it seriously.

You can gather data for your posts, filter your data and use it to articulate your point credibly. Make sure that you tell an exciting story that hooks the readers. To get lots of such data, you can sign up for Google Alerts, and you can also use influencers to mine such data.

10. Have You Optimized Your Post for SEO?

On-page and off-page SEO are essential for a blog because even if you don't rank high on those keywords, they will help you get found by users and drive relevant traffic. If you use a good keyword tool and make it a strategy to use long-tail keywords in your blog posts consistently, soon enough, you will start ranking on search engines. Tag your post with appropriate meta descriptions that will help you get discovered by Google bots. It would help if you also tried to create backlinks through guest posts and other tactics.

However, while doing on-page SEO, try and avoid keyword stuffing as it might attract the search engine penalty. Experiment with conversational writing, and you'll be surprised to know that you can create content within a few minutes. Here are a few standard tips to optimize your post for SEO.

If you find it difficult to optimize a vast amount of content with the best keywords that boost conversion, try white label SEO services. These services are cheaper, reliable, audience particular, and executed by trained professionals.

11. Have You Created an Editorial Calendar?

Content marketing is the process of creating content for every stage in the buyer's journey for different buyer personas. Therefore, to avoid deviating from the content grid, we must have a content calendar. Most bloggers and publishers use a content calendar to not fall behind the schedule and consistently publish on different topics that might be interesting and informative for their audiences. You can create a monthly, quarterly, or even early content calendar and religiously follow it to create content that will help you to increase conversion and engagement on your blog.

A content calendar might include the following information on a spreadsheet:

• Blog title
• Keywords to be included
• Publishing platform
• Targeted date for publishing (Start date, writing completion, quality evaluation, graphics creation, approval, and publishing.)
• Targeted Buyer persona
• Targeted stage in the buyer’s journey
• People the post is assigned to (SEO, writing, Quality Analysis, and proofreading, graphics, and publishing)

Conclusion

It takes a long time to attract an audience who’ll trust you and be loyal to your brand. The key to success in startup marketing is to have a robust content strategy and stick with it. You’ll need to learn and adapt your strategy continually. Content marketing offers tremendous benefits as great content attracts people’s attention, compelling them to take the desired action. The above checklist will make sure that you engage your audience and generate leads. So, make sure you answer customers’ questions, talk about their problems, offer solutions to win their hearts through content marketing.