It isn’t difficult to start a digital marketing agency. Still, it is challenging to make a success of it and to take it to greater heights. You spend a lot of time helping your clients to grow and prosper, but how do you go about driving your own growth, boosting your brand and generating ever more good leads? Here are five tips to put your agency on an upward trajectory.
1. Make sure you have the right team
It’s the same in all businesses – your company is only as good as your team. The fact that digital agencies can outsource a lot of their work gives them a great deal of flexibility in picking and choosing the right people. It also brings a lot more variables into the mix. If you manage your talent procurement processes well, then you will be well on the way to sustaining a successful agency. From keyword research to social media management, outsource your critical tasks to the right people, or assign them to trusted in-house staff.
2. Simplify your processes and make them scalable
Establish a workable, repeatable and scalable process behind everything you do in your agency. It’s not about being formulaic; it is a case of ‘automating’ your processes and frameworks so that your team’s creativity can flourish. Create templates and tools wherever possible to streamline your work. Whatever systems you put in place should be scalable to facilitate future expansion.
3. Rank your target keywords
Since you’re always promising to boost your clients’ search engine rankings, you had better be able to put your money where your mouth is. If your agency doesn’t come up at the top of the rankings for relevant keywords, how can you convince clients that your team are SEO masters? Make sure that you rank in the top five. If you struggle to achieve that with competitive keywords such as ‘digital marketing agency’, narrow it down with a less competitive, long-tail keyword like ‘digital marketing agency in Sandton’ or something along those lines.
4. Optimize your website
Don’t make the mistake of neglecting your own website while you work on those of other companies. Make sure it is impeccably laid out and optimized, complete with useful content, good interlinks between the various pages and strategic external links. This will ensure that your site is helpful to customers and generates high-quality links, which will stand you in excellent stead in terms of building your own profile and reputation.
5. Master upselling and cross-selling
As a full-service agency, you can offer clients complete solutions for PPC, B2B marketing, online marketing and social media. Often, however, clients will probably only approach you for one of these services. If you simply carry out this one task, without letting them know what else you can do for them, you could miss the chance both to offer more value and to bring that client back for repeat business.
Say a client comes to you for blog writing. You can upsell with a social media solution to help them promote their content. You could also cross-sell by offering them a Google Ads package.
Unibit Solutions is a full-service digital marketing agency and a member of the global WSI family. For more information on digital marketing, to find out what we can do for your brand, or if you are interested in buying a digital marketing franchise, contact us.