Agency business has a massive demand, but an enormously high agency failure rate keeps jolting the business world.

There can be many culprits behind it, such as increasing competition, difficulty finding the right workforce, lack of tools, lack of proper strategy and processes, and vague goals.

Sometimes agency owners might be shooting in their feet when they don’t have structured processes, robust customer support, and smooth communication. But, these days, external factors such as financial downturns and increasing competition can also spoil the game.

Whatever the case, there is a workaround for it.

This article shares five agency growth secrets for running an agency business successfully.

1. Put Customers First

After the 2008 recession, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, approximately 170,000 small businesses went bankrupt. But Ruby Receptionists, the virtual receptionist service, survived it.

It could be possible because Jill Nelson, the company’s founder, focused on providing extraordinary customer service.

He wanted to establish his company as a trusted partner for businesses in their darkest hour. Business owners faced overwhelming challenges during the crisis, but Ruby sparked hope among them and offered its services as a generous and optimistic human voice guiding their customers.

Ruby not only survived but grew by 15%.

Pro Tip: Offer exceptional customer service and put your customer first. It becomes even more important during tough times such as economic downturns. If needed, go the extra mile to help them.

Image Source: Lexer

2. Focus On Your Core Competencies

David Sardinha, the ex-COO of The Marketing Machine (TMM), an agency based in North Carolina, focused on his core competency of creativity and design during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. He had to move his office to another location while his team was working from home. He lost many of his clients, but he discovered new opportunities amidst this darkness and chaos.

This time the opportunity came in the form of a restaurant, "Margaux's," an ex-customer of TMM.

Some of his previous clients came back to change how they did business in those tough times. The only mantra for businesses to succeed in those tough times was to show their customers that the service providers were still there with them.

Image Source: SuperOffice

Repositioning brands was the best option at the time.

TMM focused on their core competency, i.e., creative designs, to help their client, Margaux's, to reposition their business as a takeout restaurant during the pandemic.

The transformation was not easy.

But it helped them establish themselves as a brand that stood with its customers in extremely tough times, making many loyal customers for TMM.

3. Offer Helpful Resources and Tailored Guidance

B2B businesses act differently than their B2C counterparts. So customer relationship should be their top priority. The best B2B businesses act as consultants rather than retailers or product sellers. They are available at every step of the way for support and guidance, helping their clients achieve their goals.

It includes offering resources and providing tailored guidance.

So, a sale is not the ultimate objective for an agency business. It is actually the beginning of a long journey; you grow with your customers.

This is a crucial step in client retention.

Ask for their feedback and provide value. Be their savior and help them achieve their objectives. The most memorable companies are those that try to become a part of their clients' growth stories.

Pro Tip: You can use DashClicks' project management software to efficiently manage your project. It allows you to track processes and intervene if something goes wrong. It also enables you to finish the project on time and with the right resource allocation.

4. Differentiate Yourself From the Crowd

Every agency claims to be unique, so it sounds more like a cliche. The best agencies successfully differentiate themselves from the competition.

It requires creativity and innovation.

Businesses should have a reason to choose you over others.

Pro Tip: Find your unique selling proposition (USP) and promote it aggressively on the web, including your website and social media. Mention the facts and data to support it.

Image Source: Planium Pro

5. Hire the Best Employees and Put Them First

According to a Marketing Land study, hiring was a big challenge for 44% of the respondents, mostly agency owners.

The ideal employees are the most passionate, not those with the most experience. Agencies are already struggling with a high attrition rate. You won't find people sticking with one agency for a long time.

Extremely high pressure, burnout, and working with dozens of clients are the prime reasons for it.

So hiring and retaining the best people is always a challenge for agencies.

However, if you have the best processes and put your employees first, you can retain them for a long time.

Pro Tip: You should be transparent during the hiring process and honestly disclose your expectations. This way, you are more likely to find the right people for your agency.

Pro Tip: Allocate work evenly in the team, and don't overload your employees. Don't accept a new project if you don't have the bandwidth. You can hire DashClicks' white-label fulfillment services to scale your agency if you don't have sufficient bandwidth and expertise.

Pushing your employees beyond their limits is a sure way to attract attrition. Allow them to use their creativity, and don't blame them if something goes off course. Instead, try to find the reasons, so it never happens again.

Pro Tip: Avoid micromanagement and give your employees complete ownership of what they do. Be generous with support and guidance and set the right expectations.

Final Words

Last but not least, empower your staffers and outsource if necessary. Be lean, thin, and agile. Do your best to stay relevant in the dynamic digital landscape. Respect new ideas and use the best tools. For best results, work with a project management software program and other automation tools. It improves efficiency in your agency and saves time.

The key to success is to specialize in some industries and aggressively market your agency as a specialist in that particular vertical. Improve communication within your organization and with your customers, and keep everything transparent. You can also assign a specific team member to communicate with your client.

If you think about it, local SEO tactics and online reputation management strategies aim to achieve the same goal - To build trust in a business and develop its credibility through its online presence.

Online reputation management refers to maintaining a positive public image of your business. Local SEO, on the other hand, helps drive traffic to a site by boosting its visibility online. Now, if you see, all of this translates to one thing ā aligning local SEO tactics with online reputation management strategies will be one of the best things you can ever do for your business.

But how can you align both of these? Keep reading to know more!

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Before we move on to our main subject, let's discuss some basic terms that you should know.

Firstly, how do you define online reputation management?

Online reputation management means taking control of the online conversation. The strategies and techniques of ORM make sure that individuals find accurate information when they search for your business on the web. It simply helps you put your best foot forward.

Essentially, the aim of ORM is to counteract misleading trends and strike a balance.

Take a look at the different online reputation management activities:

1. Social Media Management

Over the years, social media has transformed into a business hub. If you open a popular social media platform, you can easily see businesses and consumers communicating on it. Chances are, you yourself might be using different social media platforms to communicate with brands.

Now, the great news is, Google recognizes social signals. Hence, some of the things that can help your business with ORM and ranking are having different social media profiles and maintaining continuous activity on your social media accounts.

Image Source: SproutSocial

Examples of reputation management activities on social media include reacting to posts, replying to reviews, scheduling regular posts, and answering questions.

2. Listing Building

Listing building refers to the creation of listings for every relevant citation, including famous directories and niche listing websites. There is also a benefit linked to a higher number of citations ā increased visibility in search.

3. Listing Management

Listing management means regularly updating the information of your business. You also reply to every review of your business (negative or positive). Google views these activities as citations and review signals and hence they are very crucial for your business.

Image Source: SMS

Another important part of listing management are photos. Make sure your business photos are the most recent ones and also relevant.

Note: Google favors listings containing all filled-out sections as compared to listings containing only contact details. So, ensure you fill out every section for Google to take note of!

Aligning Local SEO Signals With ORM

Every reputation management practice is a signal that Google uses in local SEO for the purpose of ranking businesses. Take a look at these local SEO signals:

1. Citation Signals: These signals include the number of citations and the consistency of business information across citations. Here's an important note ā popular listing sites and directories like Yellow Pages, Yahoo, and Bing Places are high-quality and trustworthy sources in the eyes of Google.

2. Google Business Profile Signals: Google Business Profile sets up a local business via Google Maps with the help of signals such as NAP data, proximity, and categories.

3. On-page Signals: Keywords are incredibly important for on-page signals. Google looks for them in the tags, metadata, and landing page titles. It also considers the relevance of these keywords across a website.

4. Review Signals: Examples of these signals include keywords used, the number of reviews, and the number of reviews having text and not only just a star rating.

5. Social Signals: As social media users have started liking as well as sharing business pages, search engines have started to count social signals as a factor in ranking. These signals include mentions from community websites like Reddit and the volume of shares, comments, and likes on different social networks.

Image Source: LinkedIn

Google uses all of the signals mentioned above as ranking factors. These signals pair well with the following online reputation practices:

1. Listing Management: Proper listing management means keeping the information updated and filled out on every applicable listing website. This improves searchability while keeping a positive reputation.

2. Website Management: A web page with a poor design will only give a hard time to the users who interact with it, diminishing your online reputation. To keep your online reputation positive, you need to create webpages that have an intuitive design, offer ease of use, and contain clean on-site copy incorporated with the necessary keywords.

3. Social Media Management: This ORM practice includes on-brand posting carried out on a frequent basis. Ensure you have accounts on those social media profiles that your target audience hangs out on.

4. Review Management: You know what's key to a good online reputation? Prompt replies to both negative and positive reviews. Another practice that adds to the reputation of a business is review requests.

The combination of reputation management practices and local SEO tactics set your business up for success. The right practices and solutions help businesses boost their local search rankings.

Image Source: Synup

The Local SEO Tactics to Follow

Here are some best practices to follow to improve your local SEO rankings and get the benefit of combining both your local SEO and ORM efforts:

1. Local Citation Building

Make sure you focus on Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places for Business, and Yellow Pages. Ensure you are aware of review websites and other citations that apply to your business. Apart from this, all your business information needs to be correct and filled out. Using local citation software can help you manage and update your business information efficiently across multiple platforms.

2. Local Link Building

You know what is one of the most powerful tactics for boosting local SEO rankings? It is local link building. Backlinks are defined as links on one site that point to another site.

Today, you can use a variety of tactics to build a network of links. And the good news is, local businesses can create backlinks more easily than franchises or large stores. The reason behind this? They can ask other businesses, community groups, and local papers for a backlink, all thanks to the strong support of their community that they have with them.

Note: Before you link with a site, check if Google considers the linked site as a trusted source. For this, it should have a Domain Authority of 40 or higher. Use the domain analysis tool by Moz to check for Domain Authority. Another metric to check out is Domain Rating, which you can measure with Ahrefs.

Build Your Credibility Online With DashClicks' Reputation App

Wouldn't it be simple for your business if you had one software that helped you quickly gather reviews from around the internet and respond to them at any given time from a dashboard?

Enter, DashClicks' Reputation app.

This highly reliable reputation management software helps you manage your reviews across different sources from one dashboard. This, in turn, saves time and also helps you win more customers!

If you decide to use the app, you can currently integrate your Google My Business reviews and Facebook reviews. This best-in-class app also helps you track your average rating, peak performance months, and best review sources.

Another interesting feature of the app that you should know of is ā it enables you to invite customers to leave business reviews by sending them SMS messages and emails with a single press of a button. You can also share your public review page with contacts and customers around the internet to get more reviews and useful feedback.

Further Reading:How DashClicks' Reputation Management Software Can Help You Protect Your Brand Online.

Wrapping It Up

The alignment of both local SEO tactics and online reputation management practices helps contribute to creating an excellent online presence for your business. Also, when your site starts to rank higher in search, it becomes even more crucial that it functions intuitively and looks fantastic to anyone who finds it online. Needless to say, ORM and local SEO should always happen simultaneously in order for you to see the best results for your business.

Social media has powerful business benefits, but it can easily overwhelm any marketer. The present social media marketing landscape is riddled with variety and vastness.

As a result, businesses are having a hard time managing different social media channels. Few agencies can keep their channels active. Without a pragmatic plan, inquiries and messages remain unanswered, and you cannot tap the fullest potential of these channels.

You need a cocktail of energy, attention, resources, consistency, expertise, and effort to succeed. It calls for the implementation of robust social media marketing strategies.

Your absence on social media can severely hurt your growth because 3.6 billion people use social media worldwide.

What Is Social Media Management?

You can use social media platforms to achieve many objectives, some of which are as follow -

• Build Relationships With Prospects
• Create Awareness About Your Brand
• Establish Yourself as an Authority in Your Niche
• Nurture Your Brand and Grow It

Efficiently using different social media channels to achieve the above objectives is known as social media management.

Here are the seven tips for digital marketing agencies to effectively use social media for growth -

1. Use Social Listening to Improve Your Marketing

You can drive many benefits using social listening, some of which are as follows.

• Monitor Your Branding
• Develop a Better Content Strategy for Your Brand
• Use Social Listening for Social Selling
• Conduct Competitor Analysis and Learn From It
• Identify Market Trends
• Tap the Most Effective Social Influencers to Promote Your Products

A. Monitor Your Branding

You can monitor your brand name by tracking your brand mentions online. Social listening is also helpful in creating better content. According to Convince and Convert, content marketing is the most effective tactic for 58% of marketing professionals.

B. Develop a Better Content Strategy for Your Brand

But to counter the excessive noise on social media, you need to create highly relevant content for your target audience, and this won't be possible without social listening.

C. Use Social Listening for Social Selling

Social listening is also effective in social selling and is becoming a hot trend globally. People constantly search for recommendations regarding products and services. There are many opportunities you can exploit on social media for selling.

D. Conduct Competitor Analysis

People use social media to discuss your brand and competitors. You will also find people looking for alternatives and inquiring about the features of different products. Social listening also allows you to discover the issues your product or service can solve for people.

Tip: You can use these tools to spy on your competitors.

E. Identify Market Trends

Social conversations allow you to identify market trends and know what people want. If there is a shift in market trends, you can be the first person to get it through social listening and tweak your social media management strategy accordingly. It makes you an agile and highly competitive agency or business.

F. Tap the Most Effective Social Influencers

Social listening will also help you to find the most effective brand ambassadors and social influencers to promote your products and services. Social conversations will reveal which influencers people follow in your niche and why. It will also help you to avoid collaborating with fake influencers that have little or no engagement.

Social Listening Tools You Can Use - You can use many tools for social listening, such as Mention, Brandwatch, and Awario.

2. Tap Social Analytics

Social media analytics is a lighthouse in the vast ocean of marketing. It gives you insightful information about your social posts' performance, audience psychology, hot market trends, and consumer behavior. DashClicks' Analytics App will provide you with a storehouse of information sourced from the analytics section of different social platforms and third-party tools.

Social media analytics also provide crucial insights into audience engagement and referral traffic. These metrics are quite important to succeed on different social platforms. These insights tell you which of your posts are receiving the highest engagement and from where you are getting referral traffic so that you can adopt a minimalistic approach and focus on the most effective channels and strategies.

Tracking your post performance helps you build a solid content strategy and eliminate wasteful practices. Social media analytics also allows you to do competitor analysis. Through competitor analysis, you get to know your competitors' strategies to succeed in this marketplace, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

3. Use a Social Media Calendar

A social media calendar enables you to achieve multiple marketing objectives. It helps you post content according to the different stages of the buyer's journey in the sales funnel. So you have enough content for different stages, such as the awareness stage, consideration stage, and conversion stage.

Promote your blog posts and YouTube channel through social media using a social calendar and also seize the opportunities to utilize events and festivals to promote sales and run marketing campaigns.

Image Source: HootSuite

For example, you can use the first fortnight of February to promote your brand, products, and services on Valentine's week. You can use a social media calendar to create posts to announce contests, promotions, and discounts during the festive season to engage more and more people.

You can also reward your loyal customers on this occasion and use the testimonials and reviews to promote your brand. With a social calendar, it will be possible because you need to publish your posts for the entire Valentine's week, including Rose Day, Propose Day, Chocolate Day, Hug Day, and Valentine's Day.

Announce the contest at the beginning of the fortnight, promote it on your channels, conduct it around the 6th or 7th of February, and build engagement through small contests, rewards, and card samples. Save Valentine's Day for the big announcement of the contest's three winners.

4. Use a Social Media Scheduling Tool

Ideally, businesses use two to three social media channels, which makes managing and scheduling posts manually extremely daunting. Social media scheduling tools such as Buffer, HootSuite, Sprout Social, and Coschedule can ease the burden on your team.

Consistency is the key to success on social media; these tools allow you to be consistent amidst the chaos. Create as many posts as you want according to your content calendar and schedule them to keep your social channels active and prevent missing a post on a crucial day.

Image Source: Yourstory

5. Create a Social Media Strategy

Not every business has the same objective. Some might be interested in brand awareness, while others can be keen on boosting sales and growing their client base. A social media strategy helps you make an action plan to achieve the desired results. But engagement is the key to success in any social strategy you create.

Image Source: HootSuite Blog

You should first boost engagement, and you can easily achieve it if you know what your customers are looking for. Initiate meaningful, relevant, and interesting conversations, be friendly and increase your posts' engagement.

Think about people's needs and desires and put them above yours. Nothing works better on social media than talking about the things people love and crave for. Offer solutions and choose the right metrics and KPIs.

6. Brainstorm What You Need to Share

Social media is not one-way traffic. It gives customers a historical opportunity to interact with brands and sometimes even dictate the terms. The only exceptions are the monopolistic markets.

So, do some A/B testing and ask your teams to brainstorm what to post to achieve the best results. Explore the hot topics and make mindmaps to research interesting subtopics. Share case studies and amazing stats that can be an eye-opener for your audiences.

7. Increase Brand Awareness

You can boost your brand on social media, unlike any place else. You can build a community around your business and offer top-notch customer service through channels like Twitter and Facebook. Many market leaders, including the world's leading brands and airlines, use Twitter to provide instant customer support. Instant customer support helps you build a loyal customer base.

Emirates Airlines uses Twitter to market its brand and tourism in the UAE. It promotes its own services, events in Dubai and UAE, and important milestones the emirates achieve.

Final Words

Social media marketing is tremendously powerful because of the increasing popularity of social media channels. You should maintain an active presence on these channels, even if it is Tik Tok. Building strong relationships with your audience using social media is the key to achieving your business objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, and offering customer support.

You might need different tools to achieve your client's business objectives and manage your social media profiles on various channels. If it sounds overwhelming, you can outsource DashClicks' white-label social posts services, TikTok ads services, and Facebook ads, helps your agency scale quickly.

As per the latest statistics, the Instagram app has 2.3 billion active users internationally.

There are a number of reasons why people use this popular app - to connect, be inspired, or discover.

Instagram is one of the most influential platforms on the internet, ranks as the 2nd most downloaded app worldwide across all platforms and users spend an average of 30.6 minutes daily on the app. The majority of individuals, approximately 38%, use Instagram to share their cherished moments through pictures and videos, making it the most prevalent purpose for usage.

If you are a brand looking to grow your business online, it's a potent platform that you should definitely leverage.

Brands around the world use this social media platform to engage with their target audience. Then, why should you be the one that's left behind?

Generating the right engagement on Instagram develops your brand's community and boosts brand reach and awareness. This, in turn, adds generously to your online presence.

Now, the thing is, generating engagement on Instagram can be quite challenging, especially for businesses that have just started to use it for business growth.

But don't worry! In this post, we'll discuss some proven tips on how to increase Instagram engagement rate for the coming year. These tips will help ensure that your content quickly reaches your target audience, which, in turn, will lead to an increase in engagement. Let's start:

What Is Instagram Engagement Rate? How Do You Measure It?

Here's how you define an engagement rate:

The rate measures how many interactions your content receives based on your audience size, followers, or reach. Examples of such interactions include:

• Comments
• Reactions
• Likes
• Direct messages
• Saves
• Shares
• Click-Throughs
• Mentions

The significant reason you need to calculate your Instagram engagement rate is because you get clarity on how your audience reacts to the content you are sharing on this social platform. Another reason for knowing this rate is because it sheds light on the type of content that connects more with your audience.

Now, to the more important question How to measure Instagram engagement rate?

The method you use for calculating this rate depends on your social media goals. But, here's a formula that offers the simplest way to compute your Instagram engagement rate:

Engagement Rate = (Likes+Comments+Share)/Followers x 100

Image Source: Buffer

Tips To Increase Your Instagram Engagement Rate In 2023

You can always implement some tried and tested tips that will help increase Instagram likes, shares, comments, followers, views, and more. This way, you will be able to develop a strong and lasting engagement over time. Let's discuss these tips:

1. Your Images Must Stand Out

Instagram is a visual medium. However, you don't need to be a professional photographer in order to leverage this platform for your brand. You just need to create images that stand out.

To create impactful images, focus on creating main feed images that encourage people to check out what you have to say and prompt them to like, share, or comment.

To boost the oomph factor of your images, you can use a number of tools out there. Some of the Instagram editing apps you can use to jazz up your images include VSCO and Avatan Photo Editor. You can also use such apps to make your Instagram images look more consistent. When you maintain consistency in your images, your followers start to identify your content and are more likely to pause to take a look at your images while browsing.

2. Learn More About Your Audience

As you are curating content for your audience, it's best to know in detail about them. For instance, you need to know about the demographics of your target audience. Knowing this information helps define a number of crucial things, such as:

• The type of content you should post
• The times and days to publish
• Your brand voice

Instagram Analytics is the best way to learn about audience demographics.

Another way through which you can understand your audience is by using the polls and questions stickers in Stories. This way, you get to fathom what your audience really wishes to see on your Instagram account. Plus, you get bonus engagement and real-time feedback when you do this.

3. Create Video Content

If you are looking for ways on how to increase Instagram engagement rate at a skyrocketed pace, then it's about time you create and post video content on Instagram.

As per the latest stats, Instagram videos get 2x more engagement. Moreover, posts that have videos get 38% more engagement than those with images.

One of the most effective ways to create video content on Instagram is to narrate a story or offer valuable information in your videos. Doing so will help you grab instant attention and boost engagement.

Take a look at how John Liang uses Instagram videos to generate engagement. He helps his audience understand complex finance topics in an interesting, funny way through Instagram reels:

Image Source: Keyhole

Note: Instagram offers a variety of video options, namely: Story videos, reels, video posts, Instagram Lives, and IGTV.

Pro Tip: Whether you want to engage with educational video content or create entertaining reels, we recommend that you create a social media strategy for Instagram on how to fully utilize this platform for videos. This will help guarantee you long-term engagement.

4. Don't Underestimate Captions

While wondering about how to increase Instagram engagement rate, one aspect of Instagram is easily overlooked by many. Yes, we are talking about captions!

Captions are powerful indicators of your brand's personality and hold the ability to boost engagement for your posts. So, ensure you write enticing and insightful captions.

Note: The maximum length of Instagram captions is 2,200 characters, giving you plenty of space to create engaging captions for your posts. You can always create short and sweet captions for your posts, but don't be afraid to write longer captions if you have a great story to share with your audience.

5. Respond to DMs and Comments

A cardinal sin that many brands commit on Instagram and other social media platforms is not replying to comments and DMs. In case you are doing so too, always remember:

If you ignore your audience, they may ignore you too in the future.

Image Source: SproutSocial

Hence, when you see comments on your posts starting to pour in, join the conversation and respond to them. It's polite to do so plus your followers feel seen and heard. They even feel excited and look forward to having a conversation with you sometime again in the future.

Tip: Take out the time to engage with other accounts in your niche as well. We recommend that you like posts of your top fans or comment on important posts in your industry. And who knows? All the engagement love that you send out may get reciprocated to you in some way or the other.

And speaking of engagement, your first impression in the DMs matters too. Consider setting up a thoughtful Instagram welcome message to greet new followers and start conversations on the right foot.

6. Post Carousels

When you learn how to create attention-grabbing images by using the tools we mentioned before, you can consider posting some images with carousels as well.

Now, what are carousels, you may ask?

Carousels are posts on Instagram that possess a number of images. Surprisingly enough, the social team of Hootsuite have seen their carousel posts getting 3.1x more engagement than their regular posts (on average).

Image Source: Oberlo

7. Post Consistently and at Optimal Times

Our list of tips on how to increase Instagram engagement rate cannot be truly over without talking about the importance of consistent posting and the right time to post.

Ensure you follow a consistent posting schedule to keep your Instagram followers engaged. This will ensure you don't keep them waiting whenever they expect a new post from you every time.

Also, posting at the right time is vital. You don't want to be posting content while your audience is fast asleep in their beds, do you? Learn about the best time to post on social media and you are set!

Tip: For increasing engagement rate you can implement Instagram automation. It helps in automating comment replies, DM responses, story mention replies and posts scheduling.

8. Partner With Influencers

When influencers market your offerings, it increases your online presence and helps develop trust. Hence, an amazing way to broaden your reach and boost your engagement rate is to leverage influencer marketing. And the great news is, Instagram is simply the best social media platform for influencer marketing.

Take a look at how you can find influencers on Instagram:

• Carry out hashtag research
• See who your rivals are pairing up with
• Check out your Discover page
• Use an app called Upfluence

The best part about using influencer marketing is that you get great results without spending much. But this can only happen if you collaborate with nano influencers and not the high-budget ones. Nano influencers have a following of 1,000-5,000.

Pro Tip: While it's important to convey your expectations to the influencers you are collaborating with, ensure you give them the necessary creative freedom to promote your offerings.

9. Conduct Giveaways

Another effective way in which you can grow your engagement rate is by harnessing the power of giveaways.

Hosting a giveaway is something that your audience is more likely to participate in given how fun they are and that a prize is involved.

But what's in for you, you may wonder? Well, a lot of comments, likes, and shares. Also, you get to increase your brand awareness and followers.

If you decide to conduct a giveaway, here's what you need to keep in mind:

• Determine the goal of your giveaway. For instance ā do you want your audience to create on-brand user-generated content for you? Or, do you wish to increase your follower count?
• Post a clear picture that announces your giveaway.
• Clearly state what you expect from your audience in the caption. Write down the rules of the giveaway and announce the prize.

10. Go Live!

A tried-and-tested way to increase your Instagram engagement rate is going live on this social media platform. There can be plenty of reasons for you to go live: to sell a product, educate people, or have a chat with your audience.

Going live on Instagram helps you connect with your potential customers and showcase authenticity. Also, when brands use Instagram Live, these live broadcasts are pushed to the top of feeds, further increasing the chance of driving engagement. Your followers will even receive a notification stating that you have gone live.

Pro Tip: Take a look at the things you need to keep in mind before going live on Instagram:

• Make sure the video quality and lighting are excellent.
• There should be no background noise and the sound quality needs to be good.
• You can also co-host a session with an expert. If you do so, you can also quickly reply to the comments while the other speaker is speaking. Responding to the comments will further increase your engagement.

11. Analyze Your Performance

Lastly, don't forget to analyze the performance of the content you put out on Instagram.

To measure performance, you can use the Instagram analytics tool. The tool helps you track your growth and engagement rate. It also lets you know about the posts which showed a great performance and which didn't.

Note: The data you find in Instagram analytics tool will help you inform your approach to creating engagement on Instagram. It will assist you in creating content that catches the attention of your audience and engages them.

Hire Instagram Ads Management Specialists

A lot of digital marketing agencies find it difficult to fulfill their client campaigns. This is one of the biggest reasons why they use Instagram Ads outsourcing services for their clients. If you are an agency that's facing a similar situation, you can also consider opting for these services. The best white label agency to partner with to hire these services is DashClicks.

It's important to note that DashClicks offers Instagram Ads with its white label Facebook ads services. Using this agency's Instagram Ads outsourcing services will help drive qualified sales and leads for your clients.

Also, here's what you can expect when you hire Instagram ads services from DashClicks:

• The team will conduct maintenance and optimization once per week (at a minimum).
• You get a weekly optimization breakdown from the team.
• The experts at DashClicks possess the required certifications to guide your campaigns and ads.
• Results are guaranteed without unnecessary ad spending.

Wrapping It Up

From creating useful video content to collaborating with influencers, there are so many effective ways in which you can increase your engagement rate on Instagram. These tips encourage your audience to interact with your brand's content on Instagram, giving a boost to your reach and followers. A good engagement rate can increase your visibility and boost your reputation and credibility. So, ensure you diligently implement these tips to see fruitful results! All the best.

You need more social media clients for your agency, but when you search online for ways, you find stupid advice that hardly works today. Most "marketing gurus" will advise you to get the names and contact details of the websites and send them unsolicited emails.

But the reality points towards something else. We regularly receive annoying emails with messages such as "I've gone through your website and think I can help you make it look better and get higher rankings." Do we pay any attention to such emails?

How to Find Social Media Clients?

Most agency owners hire sales consultants and do a bunch of different things through trial and error until they find something that works. Or they follow random advice online to get the ball rolling.

The best tactic is to try inbound marketing, post valuable and engaging content on social media, try networking, and run paid campaigns. You can also try the irresistible sales formula we use and teach here at DashClicks. You'll find this proven formula in this article and other tips.

Here are some of the most powerful tips to find social media clients for your agency.

1. Try DashClicks' Irresistible Sales Formula

Selling digital marketing services and expanding the client base is easier said than done, especially for a newbie agency. There are many roadblocks in their way, such as a lack of trust, increasing competition, price wars, etc. So, why don't you try an irresistible offer that people have a hard time rejecting?

All digital marketing activities start with the creation of a professional website. So, many agencies sell their website development services with their SEO services package. The website's design, content, and user interface are crucial for high search engine rankings. A well-built website can be a game changer when you start online marketing for your venture.

Step-by-Step Formula to Sell Your Digital & Social Media Marketing Services

Here is the irresistible sales formula for selling your social media marketing services and expanding your client base. It begins with offering a professional-grade website of 30-40 pages you can effortlessly create using DashClicks' instant website builder, InstaSites.

A. Identify the businesses you want to target, make a list, and proactively create professional-grade websites for them using InstaSites software, and then do the following.

• Start a contact center.
• Train your sales reps (fronters or frontline salespersons) to pitch the people on your cold call lists and offer them custom websites free of charge.
• Ask your prospects to have a look at those websites through preview links.
• Make another call to get their feedback about the website after three days.
• Seek their permission and activate the website for them, if they are happy with the website preview.

B. Next week, make another call to know their opinion about the usability of the website and do the following.

• Tell them during the call that you also offer local listings on some major listing networks.
• Tell them the benefits of local SEO.
• If they need it, sign a contract.
• Outsource affordable local listing services through DashClicks' white label fulfillment center.

C. After two weeks, offer social media and Google paid advertising services to boost leads and conversions and get them fulfilled through DashClicks.

After six weeks, offer social media account management and posting services.

Click here to learn the details of this wonderful fail-proof formula that you can try subsequently. The article also includes the sales script for your sales reps.

Watch this video to know more:

2. Be Your No. 1 Client

If you're focusing too much on client acquisition and business expansion, it's time to focus on your own marketing and SEO. Treating your agency as your number one client will likely improve your online visibility and help you get loads of customers. Invest in your website and increase your social media presence.

3. Try Inbound Marketing

Inbound is the key. People will find you easily and flock to you if you act as an authority. To strengthen your inbound marketing, publish content vigorously. When you do it for some time, Google ranks your website higher on its organic search result pages, and people can easily find you through relevant search queries.

Most agencies focus on conversion and creating sales-oriented sites and fail as a result. So, focus on content publishing and inbound marketing.

Image Source: SuperOffice

Pro Tip: Most people search digital marketing agencies with keywords like top seo consultants, best digital marketing agencies near me, and best social media companies in Vancouver, etc. So, try to rank on SERPs with such keywords so that people can find you easily through organic search.

4. Focus on Service Quality

Provide quality services and achieve excellent results for your clients; happy clients will give you referrals. Successful agencies attract many clients as referrals from their existing or previous customers. Use your results to sell your services. You can use automation tools to do that. Soon, it will become autopilot. As a result, big agencies don't spend much on advertising. To catch big fish, they work on PR and brand building.

Image Source: SuperOffice

5. Tap Your Immediate Circle

As a newbie agency, tapping your existing circle is the key to finding social media clients. There can be many people in your friends, relatives and acquaintances who are running their own businesses or working as freelancers.

Get their contact details, make a list and tell them about your services. You can also send messages and emails to them. They can help spread the word about your agency if they haven't yet decided to hire social media marketing services for their businesses.

6. Try Social Networking

Try networking on social media sites and in local communities, clubs, and groups. While outreaching on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, ensure that you tap everyone in your niche, not just your potential customers. These people can help you refer the client and close the deals.

While interacting with them, avoid the casual hellos and emojis and spark meaningful conversations.

Flaunt your expertise in social media marketing subtly by sharing strategies and tools you love to use.

7. Spend Time Where Your Target Audience Does

To gear up and embrace social marketing, you should significantly increase your online presence, especially in the places where your target audience spends most of their time. Here are some of these places -

• Facebook groups
• Twitter chats
• Sites such as Reddit and Quora
• Communities such as Slack and Discord
• Forums such as Black Hat World, Digital Point and CPAElites

8. Offer Freebies

Freebies attract crowds and sell like hotcakes. It's a proven strategy to attract new clients. Here is a list of freebies you can try -

• Social Media Content Calendar
• Daily Planners or To-Do Lists
• Instagram posting templates
• Free consultation
• List of Blog Headlines
• List of Social Media Captions
• E-Books
• How-To Guides
• Email Newsletter Templates
• Mini Courses
• Cheat Sheets
• Checklists
• Starter Kits
• Audio Trainings

Post about your free service everywhere online, where people recognize you as an authority. Highlight your free service on your website to create buzz and use it like a lead magnet.

See how Neil Patel offers his free 7-week action plan on his website to increase traffic on your website.

9. Boost Your Expertise and Authority Using Your Website

Businesses use their websites to list their services and how they function. However, you can also use it to showcase your expertise and authority.

For that, you can do the following -

• Add your case studies and make them available in downloadable PDF files. Subtly, prove how you can help your prospects.
• Give social proof of your previous clients, and add their logos.
• Add reviews and testimonials from happy clients.
• Share the awards and certifications you have earned, conferences you have attended, and journals in which you or your agency are mentioned.
• Add video testimonials of your clients.

Here is an example of reviews from happy clients -

Image Source: FreshBooks

Note that these are verifiable reviews with the name and details of the clients. It builds trust compared to the first name most agencies use.

See how Omada posted a customer video testimonial from one of its clients that cleverly captures the essence of visual interest.

10. Focus On Getting More and More Referrals

As per a Convince & Convert study, 83% of Americans say that recommendations from family and friends encourage them to buy a product or service. So, it's clear that referrals are the most effective way to find more clients for your social media agency.

Here are a few tips to get referrals -

• Offer excellent customer experience
• Politely ask your happy clients to provide referrals
• Collaborate with people offering similar services such as SEO and PPC
• Introduce a referral plan and reward people who refer clients to you

Final Words

Finding clients for your social media agency requires effort. You can apply the mix of tactics discussed above and find networking opportunities everywhere. Also, update your website to showcase your authority and build trust by adding video testimonials, reviews, certificates and case studies.

Use automation tools to your advantage to minimize manual work. You can use the DashClicks' Inbound App to manage and nurture leads. Similarly, you can use DashClicks' Deals App, the sales pipeline management software, to automate leads and deals management. Our Contacts App, the CRM software, will simplify your sales outreach by recording all the communication with your clients in one place.

Google Ads is one of those breakthrough platforms that have dramatically contributed to the transformation of the marketing world in the past years. Today, these ads are regarded as one of the most effective and result-driven mediums of paid online advertising.

How do you define Google Ads?

These ads let businesses reach users searching for products, services, and information on Google.

If you correctly execute your Google Ads campaign, it holds the potential to make your company more successful. But in order to do this, you need to know about all the latest changes to these ads. In other words, you need to know about the latest Google Ads updates and trends to plan for 2023.

In this post, we discuss the same in detail. Without any further ado, let's begin:

1. Cost Per Lead Increased for 91% of Industries

An important change to Google Ads you need to know is that the cost per lead (CPL) has significantly increased for 91% of industries.

But what's the reason for such an increase?

Factors such as ads appearing for low commercial intent queries and higher prices due to inflation have resulted in reduced conversion rates, leading to increased cost per lead.

Note: The Travel, Furniture, and Arts/Entertainment industries saw whopping increases of 69%, 54%, and 134%, respectively.

The average overall increase is 19%.

The above data is as per Google Ads benchmark report by WordStream.

2. Expanded Text Ads Are Now Over

For more than two decades, advertisers have been manually writing and optimizing their PPC ads on Google. In these years, Google rolled out a number of new search ad formats. If you observe the past years, Google made the size of standard text ads twice with Expanded Text Ads. And then in 2018, it increased the size of Expanded Text Ads.

Fast forward to today, one of the most important changes to Google Ads you should be aware of for the year 2023 is ā Expanded Text Ads have finally met their end. Now, Google's new default ad type is the Responsive Search Ad (RSA). The not-so-great thing about this ad is that it limits the control brands have on the messages of their ads on the SERP.

What RSA actually does is that it allows advertisers to provide a number of different text assets for Google. Then, Google pieces these assets together and creates an ad that appears on the SERP for every search.

3. Specific Industries Now Have Several Unique Ad Formats

To assist certain industries in adjusting to today's dynamically changing needs, Google rolled out a number of unique ad formats for them. For instance, verticals such as finance, auto, and travel got new ad types.

One example of the new ad types is the Vehicle Listing Ads. Google rolled out this ad format to help car dealerships showcase their old and new cars. This ad is shown predominately at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). You will find a car's price, image, location, and condition on this ad.

Note: The Vehicle Listing ad bears similarity to the already existing Local Inventory Ad by Google. Essentially, the Vehicle Listing ads require an active inventory feed to be submitted on a regular basis, which needs approval via Google Merchant Centre.

4. Text-to-Speech Voice-Overs for YouTube Ads

One of the most crucial Google Ads updates for 2023 that advertisers will definitely benefit from is The addition of a text to speech voice over tool to the Google Ads platform. Google has added it within the asset library.

Why use this tool? It will help convert your written script into natural-sounding speech. And it does so with the help of AI.

As creating voice-overs is supremely time-consuming for brands, this update will definitely help advertisers save up on a lot of time and effort.

If you want to try the tool out, here are some simple steps you need to follow:

• Open your asset library.
• Choose the video ad you wish to add a voice-over to.
• Enter your script and select a voice style that matches your brand voice.

And that's it! Your voice-over will overlay onto your video ad.

5. Google is Automatically Upgrading Smart Shopping Campaigns to Performance Max

Performance max campaigns generated a lot of buzz last year. Now, the news is, this campaign type will be completely replacing Smart Shopping and Local campaigns. Google stated that it will start automatically updating Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max in July of this year.

Don't worry, you will receive a notification from Google 2-3 weeks before it makes the upgrade. Your campaign's historical data and settings will transfer over by default.

Tip: You can be proactive and make the switch yourself with the Performance Max self-upgrade tool. Switching as early as possible will arguably give you an edge over others who haven't. And the best thing is, the upgrade happens in just one click. Yes, it's that simple!

Image Source: Google Ads & Commerce Blog

6. You Will Now Get Diagnostic Insights for Performance Max Campaigns

Our list of changes to Google Ads will not be complete without talking about this update. In July, Google included a new diagnostic insights view to the Overview page and Insights page within the platform.

How will this help advertisers?

It lets you know if anything is slipping through the cracks in your Performance Max Campaigns. The tool assists you in recognizing issues related with:

• Billing
• Ad strength
• Budget
• Conversion tracking
• Strategy targets
• Policies
• Status

7. New Business Name and Logo Ad Assets

Verified advertisers are now getting some level of protection from Google with new business name and logo ad assets on the SERP. Take a look:

Image Source: Google Ads Help

Incorporating these new assets have also given businesses a chance to stand out on the already crowded SERP. These assets even work as a great visual addition to their ads that may help improve performance.

Note: To use these new features, advertisers need to complete the verification process with Google.

Partner With Reputed Google Ads Outsourcing Agency DashClicks

Are you a digital marketing agency struggling with this one question ā whether you should outsource Google Ads or not?

Outsourcing Google Ads will aid in the growth of your agency. Also, as the work is carried out by experts, the work of your clients will be in good hands.

So, you can always decide to outsource these ads.

In case you think about outsourcing, consider hiring white label Google Ads services by DashClicks.

Why?

DashClicks’ conversion-focused Google Ads campaigns help drive leads and sales for your clients. Here are a few important things you can expect when you decide to hire these services from DashClicks:

• The white label agency carries out maintenance and optimization for campaigns once a week at a minimum.
• The agency will also create outstanding ad copy variations so that a campaign reaches more leads.
• You receive a weekly optimization breakdown that you can share with your clients.
• The agency’s experts are certified and officially trained to create and manage Google Ads campaigns.

Tip: Here is a Google Ads optimization checklist that you can also refer to.

Wrapping It Up

From doing away with Expanded Text Ads to adding a text-to-speech voice-over tool to the Google ads platform, a plethora of updates have taken place this year that you should know of going into the new year.

Yes, we don't have certain features in Google Ads anymore. But, there also have been some great additions to our PPC campaigns this year.

Now that you are well aware of the latest Google Ad updates for 2023, you can start adapting your strategy accordingly. Now, get cracking!