Are you trying to figure out how to scale your digital marketing agency?
While digital marketing agencies are usually pros at drumming up new clients (since that’s kind of their entire business), scaling a company is a totally different skill set.
You can have the best talent or product in the world, but if you don’t set systems in place for growth, you’ll be setting yourself up for failure.
That’s why, today, we’ll share actionable strategies that you can use to scale your digital marketing agency. As you begin to get new clients, you can put these tips into action to grow your business and reduce your headaches.
Ready to get started? Let’s dive into the list!
How to Sale Your Digital Marketing Agency
1. Automate Your Reports
We’ll start with my personal favorite: automating your reports.
If you’re like most companies, you probably started off doing all your client reporting manually. Again, most small agencies do. And that works at first, tedious as it may be.
But then your agency starts to grow. And suddenly manual reporting simply isn’t cutting it any longer.
When you just have one or two clients, pulling together metrics from all their different marketing platforms isn’t too much of a headache. But every new client you add to your books needs regular reports, too. And it quickly becomes a task that eats up more and more hours from each month.
If you want to scale your digital marketing agency, you need to work smarter, not harder. Wasting hours compiling client reports manually isn’t an efficient use of your time. Plus, it’s hard for people to maintain the accuracy and regularity that an automated reporting tool like Metrics Watch can.
Start Your Risk-Free Metrics Watch Account Today!Late or inaccurate reports make you look unprofessional. And your team’s time could be better spent elsewhere. So, free up their time and upgrade the service you offer to your clients by automating your reports.
2. Put Efficient Systems in Place
A team of one or two people can get away with inefficient workflows. In the early days, you’ll understandably be more focused on your clients than your admin.
But sloppy ways of working don’t scale well.
Something that took longer than necessary when you had just a handful of clients takes significantly longer once your agency begins to grow. As you start to bring in more people, you need systems in place so that everyone is on the same page.
Developing efficient workflows makes everything run more smoothly. Your whole team knows what these processes are and how to follow them. That means your time isn’t wasted unnecessarily.
Everything from hiring new talent to invoicing clients on delivery should have an agreed procedure behind it that is optimized for efficiency.
3. Hire the Right People
As your digital marketing agency grows, you’ll reach the point when you need to bring on new people. It’s an exciting moment, seeing your team grow and increasing your capacity.
But each hire makes a huge difference as you begin to scale. Small teams rely on everyone pulling their weight, working well together, and taking ownership of their responsibilities.
Tempting though it might be to just bring in friends and existing contacts, putting good hiring practices in place from the start will help you find the right people and give you something that can scale with you as you grow.
Clear role descriptions, well-documented shortlisting and interview processes, and marketing your vacancies in the right places can all help attract excellent new hires.
4. Outsource Where Needed
When you first started your marketing agency, you were probably wearing every hat there is. Finance, HR, sales, marketing, client relations – owners of small agencies end up doing every task.
As you begin to grow, your time becomes even more valuable. As well as doing your own client work, you are the boss. You’ll need to be available to support your team, set strategies, and lead your agency to further success.
Some responsibilities really do rest on your shoulders alone. But many don’t. Identify what you can delegate and do so. That includes outsourcing where needed. Finance, HR, and recruitment can all be capably handled by a consultant, often for less cost than employing someone directly.
5. Remember Your Own Marketing
There’s an old saying that the shoemaker’s children go barefoot. Well, the digital marketing agency’s marketing can go the same way.
Although you have plenty of expertise on your team, it is mostly dedicated to boosting your clients’ brands. Your own digital presence can end up slipping down the agenda.
As you work to scale your agency, block time to spend on marketing your own business. Once your budget allows, you should make this a dedicated role within your agency. Having someone whose main responsibility is attracting new clients ensures that this doesn’t drop off the priority list.
6. Add New Services
At first, you may only be able to offer a limited list of services to clients. But, as you bring on new people, you increase your capacity and the range of expertise in your team.
This means you can start to offer new services, which is an excellent way to scale your agency. You can upsell your new offerings to existing clients, as well as widening your potential client base.
Before adding new services, do some research into what companies in your niche are looking for. Offer those that are in demand, fit with your existing offer, and command a decent price. If the talent you need to provide the new service well doesn’t already exist in your team, make sure you hire new staff with those skills in mind.
7. Invest in the Right Tools
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to do a job without the right tools. The good news is that there are plenty of options out there to make the lives of digital marketing experts easier.
Of course, those tools cost money. But investing in the right software can make a significant difference to your ability to scale your agency.
This includes both tools that make marketing itself easier, such as SEO, automated reporting, and social media management, and those that make your workflows simpler, such as accounting, project management, and CRM software.
These tools save you time and assist your team in doing the best job they can for your clients.
8. Foster a Culture of Learning
When you’re trying to build your agency, it can be tempting to concentrate all your resources on attracting and serving clients.
Time spent away from those tasks won’t generate income and might feel like it’s going to waste. But the long-term success of your agency depends on recruiting and retaining expert staff members. And there is no better way to increase the expertise available within your team than to make learning and professional development a priority.
Make sure your employees have both the time and the budget available to learn new skills, keep up with industry trends, and increase their expertise. Make curiosity a part of your workplace culture.
Your team will reward your investment in their career aims with their loyalty. And you will also end up generating more income in the long run, as your team’s knowledge and experience are constantly growing.
9. Track, Evaluate, Respond
How do you know if your marketing efforts are reaching your clients’ goals? You track the results, gather valuable insights from the data, and use that learning to continuously optimize their campaigns.
Well, that same evidence-driven approach will be invaluable as you scale your digital marketing agency.
As well as tracking your clients’ marketing campaigns, keep a close eye on every aspect of your brand’s performance. Not only marketing KPIs but finances, customer retention, staff satisfaction – anything that can tell you whether you are on the right track and where there is room for improvement.
Use this information to help you define your strategy and approach for the upcoming year, identify where there is space for further growth, and uncover new opportunities.
How to Create & Automate Internal and Client Reports
Our first and last tip revolved around the same basic idea: it’s important to create marketing reports for your team and clients.
Internally, these reports keep everyone on the same page and keep you on track as you scale your company.
For your clients, these marketing reports are invaluable for retaining your existing customers, improving your referral marketing, and justifying your agency’s worth.
In short, client reports are just too important not to prioritize.
That’s why I always recommend people create and automate their reports with a tool like Metrics Watch:
Metrics Watch is hands down one of the best report building tools on the market. It allows anyone to quickly and easily create professional marketing reports in a matter of minutes.
Metrics Watch also allows you to create cross-channel reports, pulling from your favorite platforms like:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- AdWords
- Facebook (organic and paid)
- Instagram (organic and paid)
- LinkedIn (organic and paid)
- And much more...
And since it has a drag and drop builder, it doesn’t require any coding or “tech skills” to build stunning reports in minutes.
Then you can determine who needs to receive these reports and send them automagically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Finally, the thing that really makes Metrics Watch stand out is how frictionless the report sharing process is.
Most report builders send reports via PDF or 3rd-party user dashboards. Both require a ton of organization on your part and add friction to the client-side of things.
That’s why Metrics Watch sends these reports directly to your recipient’s inbox. That means you get the right data to the right people and in a format they already know.
It doesn’t get easier than that! Click below to start your 100% risk-free Metrics Watch trial today (no credit card required):
Start Your Risk-Free Metrics Watch Account Today!And that’s all for now. We hope you enjoyed these tips on how to scale your digital marketing agency.
If you did, you might also want to check out the following resources:
These articles will have everything you need to create better marketing reports to grow your digital marketing agency.