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.

Even if you have long-term clients, you can't predict market fluctuations and their impact on your agency. Therefore, to sustain your business and keep it afloat, you need new clients and fresh revenue streams.

But finding qualified leads and the right clients is no cakewalk. You have to build trust for your agency among people unfamiliar with your brand.

In this blog, we discuss how you can get more clients in the short term. We focus on ten proven strategies that have worked wonderfully for several businesses. If used effectively, these can help agency owners stand out and thrive.

1. Get Positive Customer Reviews and Awards

Customer testimonials, reviews, awards, and certifications are indicators of your reputation as a business. Reviews aren't common among web design companies and digital marketing agencies. Therefore, even a few reviews on Google, Yelp, or Clutch will help your company stand out and build trust.

Rewards and certifications are crowd pullers. When you establish yourself as a company that provides high-quality services, businesses line up to work with you. Certifications help win local and state-level projects and avoid relentless bidding on jobs to get new clients.

Similarly, potential clients also look for customer reviews before they call you for a quote. 90% of customers read online reviews before they decide to buy a product. So, getting positive reviews is the best way to generate new clients.

2. Create Unique, Genuine Resources

Offering resources such as instant website builders and report generator software can help agencies with customer acquisition in a big way. By solving your customers' core issues, freeing them from the tedious day-to-day tasks, and enabling them to achieve more, you can easily attract their attention and build more transparent, trusting relationships.

For example, DashClicks allows you to use their white label InstaSites software to serve your clients. With this software, you can build a user-friendly, niche-specific custom website within seconds. It can transform your prospecting process and deliver high value with lightning speed. DashClicks InstaSites offer you the following three benefits:

A. Instant Websites

As a digital marketing agency, your ability to build an InstaSite within a matter of seconds can be a transformational experience. With the DashClicks InstaSites platform, all you need to do is fill out an online form and press the enter button. It will help you form an excellent first impression and increase your chances of winning a contract.

B. Niche-Specific Templates

You can revolutionize your prospecting process by allowing your clients to choose from a wide range of industry-specific templates to create an InstaSite. It will help you to work with multiple niches. For example, different niches such as an agency, business, and services, event, gardening, travel, fitness, legal and non-profit may have varied requirements from their websites. A restaurant might be looking for a different website template than a real estate company. When you offer your clients a wide range of niche-specific website templates, they stay.

C. Bulk Website Builder

DashClicks' single and bulk builders allow you to create hundreds of new websites with a single click, saving you time, effort, and money. With the help of DashClicks bulk InstaSites builder, all you need to do is upload your client information using a CSV file, and the bulk builder will create all the required websites with just one click. To know more about how it works, watch this YouTube video. After completing those websites, you can send them to your prospects for review. You don't need any coding or designing experience to make these sites.

3. Focus on Marketing and SEO

Marketing, blogging, and SEO are the most effective ways of prospecting. They help drive traffic to your website, thereby making people aware of your service quality. Working on various keywords and employing standard optimization techniques can help you discover more business opportunities. When researching keywords, make sure they express buyer intent.

It's also essential to follow the latest trends to create fresh content and tweak old content accordingly. It will increase your visibility on search engines, and users will start acknowledging your website for trending and niche-specific content.

4. Get Involved with the Local Community

Community outreach is one of the best ways of prospecting and business development. Find opportunities to tap into the local community ā attend local events and collaborate with regional organizations to promote your business. If you have the time and resources, try community outreach to find leaders and meet potential customers. This process is long and tedious, but it leads you to loyal customers who will stick around for a long time.

5. Run Paid Ads

According to Google, for every $1 spent on Google Adwords, businesses earn average revenue of $2. So, running paid ads can be the best way to generate new clients. Though most agencies do it, but to succeed, you need to set your budget and have a strong keyword strategy. Apart from running ads on Google, you can also use Facebook and LinkedIn to target specific audiences. Include a compelling offer or guarantee in your ads to increase their conversion rate. To know more about how you can achieve more success through paid ads, click here.

6. Try Custom Emails

Email marketing is still as relevant as ever. Since the open rate of most template-based emails is relatively low, try writing a custom email to your prospects through email management tools. It will boost the chances of conversion, especially if it provides value and gives an offer. You can use the power of personalization to make your emails even more effective.

7. Leverage Offline Events

Offline events are a great way to generate leads. Some events in your niche can be highly engaging and rewarding. For example, the auto industry looks forward to car racing events, car shows, and swap meetings to network, prospect, and get more clients. Try attending tech meetups, startup competitions, seminars, and panel discussions.

Such offline will allow you to reel in the foot traffic, network aggressively, and meet other attendees to create brand awareness and promote your products and services. Face-to-face conversations are often the best way to build long-term relationships without sounding too salesy.

8. Get Partnerships and Referrals

Partnerships and referrals work best as an acquisition strategy if you get them from agencies and businesses of a different vertical or price range. When marketing and promoting, you may come across many prospects who don't match your ideal buyer persona. However, if you find another business whose buyer persona complements yours, it's a good idea to work with it for mutual benefit.

9. Promote Your Accomplishments

Do an excellent job at customer service and quality, receive a testimonial from a happy customer, get yourself featured in a local or national journal or TV show, or win an award and then promote it aggressively. Talk about it in your marketing messages, social media posts, blog posts, paid ads, tweets, case studies, and everywhere else you can. You could even write articles about your achievements or awards, repurpose this content, use photos of the award ceremony, and develop a case study for broader publicity. It is a fantastic way to spread awareness about your business, build trust, and get more engagement.

10. Use Storytelling to Create Buzz

Storytelling is a great way to engage with your audiences and move them ahead in the sales funnel. You can do it on different platforms through website content, blog posts, paid ads, guest posts, retargeting, YouTube videos, podcasts, and SlideShare presentations.

Putting your point across through a compelling story is a more effective strategy than a monotonous discussion using data points and abstract ideas. We understand stories, learn from them, remember them, and hold on to them in times of crisis. Stories, when told well, can have a profound effect. Therefore, they are the best way to create marketing buzz. To know how to use storytelling to create awareness, click here.

Conclusion

Client acquisition is a never-ending process, so marketers never sit idle. Hopefully, the blueprint shared in this blog will help you to build a sales pipeline. All of these tips are easy to implement, provided you are ready to invest the needed time and effort. Do let us know your views on these strategies in the comments.