Digital marketing agencies are in a hot seat…
Every brand wants to grow. To do that today, they need an online presence and an ability to engage their customers in a way that feels authentic. This ensures conversion happens almost on instinct as opposed to prospective buyers feeling like they’re being hit with a hard-sell.
Naturally, brands look to digital agencies when seeking to improve the results they get from digital marketing. Digital agencies are expected to understand audience targeting across multiple verticals, are equipped with the latest insights on how each platform algorithm works and specialize in creating effective user journeys.
With more brands vying for a strong digital presence, how can digital agencies devote enough time to growing and scaling their own business?
Here’s our roundup of recommendations to do just that:
Don’t be afraid to delegate
Most likely, you would’ve juggled an overwhelming amount of responsibilities during the early days of your digital agency. Growing everything – from creative, content, finance, HR, your martech to client relations – would’ve glared at you from your dinner plate.
As you take on more clients and start to generate increased revenue, your time becomes a premium asset. This forces you to reflect on your strengths, why you started a digital agency in the first place and to assess where your talents and time are best suited.
Don’t be afraid to delegate responsibilities that sit outside of your core focus to employees who specialize in those areas. Play to people’s strengths!
Visit the Digivizer Academy for more videos to help you harness the power of digital marketing performance insights.
Focus on a niche
Your digital agency doesn’t need to take on every project nor specialize in every marketing discipline. Pick a niche so you can hone your skills in a concentrated area. When you’re more targeted in your market positioning and client acquisition, you can truly specialize and drive greater outcomes.
Not being spread too thin across multiple brands, industries, disciplines, and projects ensures your team is equipped to unlock bigger opportunities for you (e.g. creating groundbreaking strategies and speaking at industry-specific conferences).
Evaluate workflow processes
Streamlined workflow processes are key to being able to scale. When evaluating workflow processes, a good place to start is to look at the latest collaboration tools available and ask (usually through a survey) your employees where they feel changes need to be made to make their jobs more effective and efficient. Perhaps, toolstacks need to be upgraded, an additional role needs to be created or briefing processes need to be made clearer.
Empower employees
How do you arm your employees to give their best? It’s what they need to make astute decisions, build trusted partnerships and deliver unmatched results for their customers.
One of the challenges that digital agencies face when seeking to grow is attracting and maintaining quality talent amid competition. In light of the great resignation that’s rapidly altering the business landscape, employees regularly assess their options based on where they can acquire the most generous salary package, work-life-balance and career growth.
This puts pressure on digital agencies to consider the employee experience and assess whether their company setup is enough to set them apart from the competition. For instance, they may want to consider implementing routine training days, flexible work options, mental health programs and/or outside work perks (e.g. paid Friday lunch).
The strongest agencies are those that empower their employees to be the best version of themselves, where they’re focused on the higher-value, rewarding work.
Make client relationships a priority
The reason digital agencies exist is to help businesses actualize better outcomes through digital strategies that help improve their market positioning. With lots of digital agencies available, what makes clients want to keep using your service?
The level of trust and quality of relationship that the client has with you is critical in determining whether you have continued business. Displaying a willingness to understand their needs as well as a commitment to helping them achieve the results they seek is what keeps the wheels turning. Afterall, the best marketing is a happy client.
Trust also builds when you create a transparent environment to share genuine performance and learnings along the way.
Strengthen your digital presence
Apply the strategies you use with your clients on your own brand as a digital agency. Some of the best practices for strengthening digital presence include:
- Blog – your agency can gain increased visibility across search engines by ranking on high-volume search terms (e.g. digital marketing agency your city)
- Build case-studies from successful clients
- Create a lead magnet for your website (e.g. newsletter sign up, ebook download, content sign up, etc)
- Guest blog – build quality backlinks to your website and position yourself as an expert in your field
- Initiate a hashtag campaign to accelerate user traction
- Post client testimonials, videos, BTS content, thought leadership, blogs and case-studies across your social media channels – stay active!
- Test the user experience of your website – check load times, ease of navigation, etc
- Use case-studies as lead magnets on your website, part of an email campaign or sales asset for your team members to close more deals
Ensure you’re continuously testing and learning – taking a data-driven approach to understand each marketing lever so you know what’s working will help you improve each conversion metric
Save time on reporting
Showing the value your agency brings ensures your clients are invested in the results being delivered. Even if results aren’t optimal, being transparent with the client involves them in the process. They place trust in you and feel motivated to explore alternative approaches to achieve desired growth.
But diving into each native platform to retrieve digital performance data is awfully time-consuming and isn’t the most productive use of your agency talent and resources. As you scale your digital agency, you need to work smarter – not harder.
Digital agencies can save valuable time on reporting by connecting all their clients’ accounts into the Digivizer platform. Once connected, agencies can see digital performance insights across all their client campaigns and content – across social, search and web – in one place as soon as they need it.
If you would like to learn more about how Digivizer supports agencies so you can better optimize your time and resources, book a session today. We want to make it easy for you to grow and scale.
