What are the reasons you cite to your clients as to why they need a digital presence?
They apply to you too. Your presence across social media platforms and search engines creates a first impression for your clients. It shows you “walk the talk” in building a successful digital presence, making businesses more inclined to enlist your digital marketing agency to help grow theirs.
Digital marketing is a highly competitive industry. If you can’t readily show the value you can bring, other digital marketing agencies will likely sit higher on a prospective client’s consideration list.
While paid advertising may be your first thought, we have outlined these seven proven tips to promote your digital marketing agency:
Choose a niche
Digital marketing agencies have a better chance of scaling when they focus on a chosen client base and type of services offered (e.g. construction or healthcare and “B2B” or “B2C” – digital campaigns, lead generation or influencer engagement).
Because they’re regularly delivering marketing solutions to the same audience, they can better understand what that audience is looking for, and readily streamline their creative, messaging and internal processes. This makes for developing deep domain expertise and an efficient service-delivery model which is great for client satisfaction and retention.
When you focus on a market and service set, you’re able to engineer more successful strategies and content for clients as your expertise and resources are concentrated. This also makes it easier to keep an eye on industry trends as well as customer competition and influencers within the market
Share thought leadership content
As well as creating a distinct company voice, those of your employees are important to leverage. Each individual can act as an additional distribution channel when they share original thought leadership.
Encouraging employees to share thought leadership is a win-win both ways.
In terms of the employee, it gives them an opportunity to be creative and consolidate their unique perspectives. Sharing this then allows them to expand their professional influence and build credibility among their peers. It’s especially important for the CEO and department leaders to develop a voice in thought leadership. Your customers want to know and assess who they are doing business with. They want to ensure their values align and if they’re interested in engaging your digital services.
In terms of the agency itself, having thought leaders helps humanize the brand and make it more recognizable to people. When people engage with your thought leaders, they’re more likely to be intrigued about your business and what you can offer. After all, business is done people to people!
Choose the right social channels
Unless you have enough resources, there’s little value in spreading yourself thin across all social channels. Based on where your target clients are likely to be, choose where they are mostly found, and do those channels well.
Here’s a quick run-down of some of the most popular social channels
This is the number one platform for sharing thought leadership and connecting with B2B audiences. According to Statista, most LinkedIn users are aged 25-34. This age group accounts for 59.1% of the platform user base. Meanwhile, the second highest age group on LinkedIn are users aged 18-24, who make up 20.4% of the platform user base.
On LinkedIn, there are lots of professionals who actively network, search for jobs, recruit talent for positions, and build their personal brands. Digital marketing agencies need to be on this platform to increase their sense of proximity to prospective clients and ensure they’re well-positioned to accrue leads.
A visual-first platform, Instagram is great for showcasing artistic prowess. This is especially important for digital marketing agencies that provide visual content creation services. It also provides opportunities to develop the unique look and feel of your brand, a key component to being memorable.
When promoting your digital marketing agency on Instagram, avoid content that’s prosaic or technical. Instagram lends itself well to top-of-funnel (TOFU) storytelling, and so content needs to be entertaining and easy-to-understand.
From a creator perspective, Instagram is a lot of fun. The platform regularly releases new content formats and gives account owners ample opportunity to flex their creative muscles.
Content formats that are currently available include:
- Carousels (upload up to 10 slides to tell a story through visual means)
- Still images (post photos and illustrations that permanently live on your profile grid – unless you delete them)
- Reels (make a video of up to 90 seconds in length)
- Stories (share photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours)
X (Twitter)
Twitter is a microblogging platform. With a character count of 280 per tweet, Twitter is a great place to be if you want to be a part of fast-moving conversations within your industry.
Facebook is one of the largest social platforms, with 2.60 billion monthly active users and 1.73 billion daily visitors. This is a great place to build brand awareness as you can join social media communities that allow you to connect with people with shared interests (who can potentially recommend your services!). Facebook’s ad inventory also enables you to seize precise targeting via paid social efforts.
TikTok
TikTok is no longer exclusive to lip-syncing teenages. It’s now a key platform to leverage to stay on top of industry trends and conversations. Not to mention, creating videos for TikTok gives you material you can repurpose for Instagram Reels. TikTok can marry in nicely with other platforms and give digital marketing agencies an opportunity to rule over short-form video, the centerpiece of social media today.
No matter which social channels you choose to promote your digital marketing agency, monitoring earned media and social media analytics are essential pieces in any social content strategy.
Earned media involves any content where other people talk about you (e.g. PR, reviews of your product and business, and mentions on social media). Being aware of earned media enables you to understand who your most engaged users are, the hashtags used around your brand or around a unique hashtag you have created. This unveils the depth of your influence and reach as well as how high your digital marketing agency is regarded.
Meanwhile, social media analytics measure the success of your social media campaigns with data (e.g. audience growth rate, engagements, click-throughs, etc). Not every social media initiative delivers desired results immediately, but studying social media analytics enables you to learn what content to focus on and what to avoid. This ultimately helps you channel those insights into increased growth for your business.
Seize an omnichannel approach
Everyone who works in a digital marketing agency knows that digital marketing encompasses more than just social media. As you would for your clients, ensure you leverage other digital marketing avenues when promoting your digital marketing agency.
Depending on the stage in the digital sales funnel you want to focus on, there are a variety of digital marketing tactics that can be employed. For each stage – awareness, consideration, conversion and nurturing – here are some tactics that could apply:
Awareness
- blog posts
- sponsorships
- info-training videos
- in-person events (e.g. trade shows)
Consideration
- case studies
- ebooks/guides
- video marketing
Conversion
- webinars/online events
- lead forms
- Consultation sessions
Nurturing
- email newsletters
- tips, tricks and specialty know-how
No matter which combination of tactics you use, they should all unite to achieve the goal of influencing, engaging and winning as many suitable clients in the most efficient way possible. It’s all about working smart, not hard.
Make your website a lead generator
Your website is one of the first places prospective clients look to decide whether they want to engage your services. When they locate your website through your organic, SEO, social and paid activities , prospective clients need to understand the value you offer.
Including lead magnets on your website (such as a free audit or a newsletter sign up) allows you to gain permission to further engage, and helps endorse the expertise within your digital marketing agency and prove to prospective clients that you’re well-positioned to deliver what you promise.
A lead magnet is one of the most effective ways at generating leads, especially in B2B marketing. For each lead magnet, consider placing the asset on a separate landing page that has an email gate which captures lead information. Once you have their details, you have a lead you can follow up on and nurture throughout the digital sales process.
Employ local SEO tactics
When expanding your client base, one of the easiest ways is to build a strong SEO strategy. Designing your site to win on relevant search volume helps with discoverability. Further, by taking a localized view, you can also consider how to rank for target keywords in your city (e.g. Digital Marketing Agency New York).
Create separate service pages for each city or region you service to ensure you appear in the search results of businesses using those keywords. You will also need a Google My Business page to help those around you with discoverability. There are many additional ways you can optimize your Google My Business Page, including encouraging customer testimonials that will ensure highest organic search results.
Leverage non-competitive partnerships
Referrals are a powerful gateway to opportunity. Because it’s well understood that people place a lot of trust in recommendations they receive from people they know, building relationships with people in and around your field of business is essential for boosting your promotion efforts.
Non-competitive partnerships that are worth developing include:
- freelancers
- influencers
- vendors and sales executives
- former employees
Encourage these individuals for references and/or testimonials. It will provide the justification you need to inspire new business channels.
These seven proven ways of promoting your digital marketing agency will help increase your visibility in the market and align you with compelling business opportunities.
But when you’re constantly moving between different projects and responsibilities, it can be difficult to determine whether your promotion efforts are paying off.
Say goodbye to this struggle by connecting all your accounts into the Digivizer platform. Everything from all your social posts across all channels, all those talking about you, your paid campaigns to website pages to social media performance can be tracked in one place. In a single view, you can see how all the digital marketing jig-saw pieces compare and fit together.
Book a session today to manage the promotion of your digital marketing agency the smart way.
