Running a digital marketing agency is not easy. And if you want to find out how to scale your marketing agency, the truth is that you will really need to get your priorities in order.
This means getting rid of the difficult stuff, and prioritizing the stuff that makes your life easier. The good news is that once you set things up the right way, it can become easy and effortless to start scaling faster.
Outsource the most difficult part
Keeping up with the latest and best strategies in marketing takes time, but that’s only half of the battle. The fact is, in order to know what strategies to apply for which clients, you need to have worked with a lot of clients.
So it is a kind of a chicken-and-egg situation. In order to be able to get a higher volume of clients, you need to produce effective strategies. But in order to be able to easily produce these strategies, you need a high-volume of existing and previous clients.
The good news is that there is a way to break this catch-22 cycle, and in fact, this is why a lot of experienced marketers are choosing to work with us. The big secret? We work very closely with a ton of marketers in all sorts of industries so we get to see exactly what works to get results. And we have been doing this for 15 years.
A mindset shift, even mentors need their own mentors
It is generally a good idea to see yourself as a marketing guide or mentor with your clients. You’re trying to guide them towards more customers and marketing opportunities. In a sense, many of your clients hire you because they want to outsource the thinking and strategizing process.
But who’s there to help you and guide you? Most marketing agencies have never even considered this question. And this is to their detriment as it holds the biggest key to scaling faster.
When you become an Emercury agency partner you get your very own dedicated marketing specialist. This is someone who will be there to help you craft the strategies and direction you need to impress and wow your clients. With this, you get access to all the strategies and secrets we gain from working with so many high-level marketers across a variety of industries.
And notice that word “partner” right there, because that is a key about how Emercury does things. We see you as a partner, and it is in our best interest to help you scale your agency as fast as possible, as this will result in using more of our services, both for yourself, and your clients.
If you want to get a sense for this hyper-personalized and one-on-one attention, consider booking a free demo while I can still do those.
Reduce your lead response time
I know you probably know this, as do most marketers, but are you applying it? If you’re like most marketers, you’re probably too busy trying to juggle a dozen different responsibilities at the same time. And well, “things just fall through the cracks”.
You have a very tiny and unforgiving window of time to leave a great impression and start off a relationship the right way. And that window starts the second a person becomes your lead. Unless you act quickly enough, that lead goes stale pretty quickly. You might as well be removing zeros from your bottom-line profits when you do this.
The no-excuse way to handle new leads straight-away
If you are doing things correctly, you should be getting every single lead into your email list. Even if they are booking a phone consultation, or they are someone you met at a conference. This is because email is the only way that you can continue to automatically follow-up with them whatever else happens on these other channels.
And if you’re like most successful agencies, the bulk of your leads should be coming in the shape of people signing up for your email list anyway. This can be achieved because you give out free whitepapers, case studies or any other kind of a lead magnet to get those addresses.
In each case, the solution to quality response times is simple. You want to set up a welcome series autoresponder that triggers the moment you get them onto your email list. Obviously, you can tweak the series slightly based on why they gave your their email address.
You can accomplish this with our custom journey builder where you can introduce conditions that send different emails based on how they triggered the journey.
However, don’t let this give you an excuse to procrastinate. Even though personalization will give you the best results, a “generic” welcome series that you implement today will ensure you start scaling faster today. Even if you send the exact same generic welcome email series to every email address. You can always improve things and introduce more personalization over time.
Focus on Building and Improving Relationships
This is another one of those things that seem obvious. Yet, I see too many agencies procrastinating on building up relationships with both their leads and clients.
The fact is that in order for people to become a client, they need to trust you and respect you. But it doesn’t stop there, if you want to scale faster, you have to nurture everyone who becomes a client as well. This will allow you to get the maximum amount of return and repeat business.
However, if you’re like most people, you might fall under some wrong assumptions. You might believe that return and repeat business has to do with how good your results are. Unfortunately, this is not the case. If you get too obsessed with just delivering results to your clients, you might forget about the relationship side of things.
Most agencies will procrastinate on this “relationship building stuff” because they are “too busy”. Yes, I know it feels like you don’t have time left to nurture all of those leads as well as current and past clients. You are too busy managing invoices, delivering services for current projects and so forth.
But there is an easy solution to building and nurturing relationships on autopilot, and at scale. In fact, it has been around since digital marketing was invented. Yes, I am talking about email marketing.
And here is a secret you might not have heard about
You probably know that email marketing has the single highest return on investment out of all the channels and tools you will use as a digital marketer. But do you know why this is the case and how it happens?
The reason that email marketing delivers these results is because it allows you to automate relationship building. That’s it, this is the secret.
Emails feel intimate and are the closest thing you can get to personally communicating with people one-on-one, and yet, you can automate it and do it at scale. This is especially true if you employ a clever combination of automation and personalization.
I know I am being a bit vague here, but we will cover the number one way to build relationships in the very next point.
Also consider that we have a treasure trove of guides on just how to utilize email for relationship building. Just browse our blog. Or even better yet, book a free demo while I still have time for those. I can give you a lot more specific examples and ideas when I’m talking to you one-on-one.
Keep up the engagement, produce and share content
If there is one thing that works like magic to build relationships on autopilot, it has to be giving value to people. And when it comes to giving value at scale, there is nothing that works as efficiently as producing and sharing valuable content.
Now, in an ideal world your team could take time each week to sit down in a café with the management team for each of your prospective client businesses, and spend hours sharing experiences and useful tips. That would build a ton of trust and truly deepen that relationship.
Obviously however, this is not realistic or scalable, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of leads. I’m just painting a hypothetical scenario.
Fortunately, sharing content with them on autopilot can come pretty close to that hypothetical scenario. Especially if you employ personalization and segmentation to make sure you share the right content with the right people at the right time.
Remember, none of this works without consistency
The main issue that I find in email marketing is that most marketers tend to work in spurts. That is, they might have a “motivated” period where they send out a bunch of emails, offers, broadcasts and work their list quite a bit. But then, they might go for weeks or even months without sending anything.
And the scary part is that this is like the perfect formula to do as much damage to yourself as possible. It will destroy all of your efforts to build relationships, trust and even your reputation with the inbox providers.
There are plenty of both marketing and technical reputational reasons why this is so, but I won’t bother you with that at the moment. I’m just going to say that you need to create a pattern, and keep it up.
Easier said than done, right?
Now trust me, I get it, your work as an agency is unpredictable. One month your team can have a lot of extra time and just use it to produce content for your own needs. The next month you might be overwhelmed just trying to service every client and meet deadlines. So how would you be able to have the same output every week or every month?
The good news is that consistency is easier to achieve when you understand one thing. The secret is that consistency beats volume.
If you had to choose, it is better to send one regular newsletter once a month, than to do bursts of bombarding subscribers followed by complete silence.
This is true even if those are bursts with some of your most valuable absolutely-genius content and super high-value secrets. If they are followed-up by a period of silence on your part, they will do more harm than anything.
The fact that volume is less important than consistency is good news
This is because it offers us a solution to the problem. In fact, the solution is simple and involves two very simple tweaks which involve deciding on a smaller (but more consistent) volume as your goal.
The first tweak is realizing that you can “stockpile content”. You don’t need to produce the content right when you need something to share and meet a quota. The second tweak is finding an average between your periods and setting that as your goal.
If, for example, you get those bursts where your team can produce 10-15 pieces in a single month, followed by 3 months of no output, the solution is simple. It means that as a team you can easily produce 12 pieces for every 4-month period, and you just need to spread that evenly. In this case, that comes out to around 2 content pieces a month.
So, you would just set your goal at consistently sending 2 valuable pieces every single month. This should be your hard-set target every month, even if you produce way more than 2 pieces in any given month.
When you get a burst period and your team produces a ton of valuable content, pick just 2 pieces to send that month, and put the rest in your stockpile. Or simply save them as drafts in Emercury. I think you get the idea.
Adopt more automation, save time, boost results
Let’s get back to the main point of this guide – you want to scale your agency, and you want to do it quickly. Well, a huge secret to making this happen is making sure that you get more out of doing less. It means that your team only does what it has to do, and lets automation handle the rest.
And when I say this, I am talking about both your own internal processes as an agency, but also automating more of the marketing you set up for your clients. If you can do less work to get more results for your clients, this means more profit – it is that simple. And increasing your profit and turnaround time will allow you to hire more people and scale faster.
I know I have been sounding kind of vague up until this point, and you might be asking yourself, “well, what is that we automate then?”.
Now, because I’m not talking to you one-on-one, I am going to have to generalize a bit, and give some general categories of things to work on automating. I do hope however that you have booked that free demo, as I can get a lot more specific when I talk to you one-on-one.
With that said, there are several categories of work that you can do as a marketer, and most of them can be automated. Some very general categories would include:
– Gathering data about subscribers based on their actions and behavior
– Segmenting people out based on their actions and sending different content based on this differentiation
– Tracking the customer journey and then moving leads to your sales system based on warmth and interest
Ok, what is it that you do more specifically?
We’ve written a ton of dedicated guides on automation and we send them to our newsletter all the time. If you haven’t grabbed your forever-free-account, make sure to grab one now. Aside from securing a forever-free account while we still have them, we will send you all of the best guides as we release them.
With that said, let me give you a short summary of a very general implementation plan that I give to get people to make sure they get started in a very efficient way.
To start off, you will want to keep it simple and just reproduce your traditional autoresponders inside of our advanced automation builder. This means just building automations that represent a traditional drip sequence. It can be the welcome series, or any other timed series that you use.
Then, over time you want to start thinking about gathering more data automatically
On the one hand, you can start adding data-gathering modules to your sequences, based on actions inside of your emails. This means that if for example, a person opens a certain email, or clicks a certain link, you use this to assign data. For example you can have the automation assign a certain tag to that person or change some custom-field value.
On the other hand you will want to set up custom events with our advanced custom events system. This means that you can track every action or behavior that a subscriber performs on your web assets. With that you can really get very granular and precise information to better track the customer journey.
The first part is setting up the events, the second part is building automations that assign tags or values whenever such an event happens.
And again, when I’m sharing this with you, it applies to your own efforts to convert leads to agency clients. But it also applies to things that you can do for your own clients. They will be very impressed if you can implement this kind of stuff for them.
And remember, when you partner with Emercury, we can help you implement these things, to really wow your clients.
Use the data to automatically personalize the customer journey
The previous step is just the prerequisite to the really fun part, and that is having your automations personalize the customer journey.
Once you have done a good set-up and you have differentiation data flowing in automatically, you will want to use this. This is when you can get a bit more advanced inside of your automations and introduce even more conditionals.
These are things such as “if a person opens this email, and has this tag, but not that other tag, send this email”, or “move them to this other list”, or “add a tag that will switch them to a different journey” or anything you can imagine really. I’m keeping it short because automated personalization is its own topic and outside the scope of this guide here.
Again, if you have an agency, consider that if you partner with us, we can really get into this and help you implement it for both yourself and to wow your clients.
Automate and integrate tasks across the stack
And here is another thing that businesses might spend a lot of time on doing manually. If you run digital marketing, you will find that you need to move data from one tool to another.
For example, your marketing campaigns have successfully moved a person to a sales-qualified-lead, and now you want that information to be available to your sales team.
This is where automated integration comes into play. You can use incoming hooks, outgoing hooks as well as integrations to tie your platforms together. For example, here’s how you can automatically funnel leads to a Google sheet used by a sales team.
We really pride ourselves on all the work we have done to help make it possible to automate and integrate across your business stack. This includes developing native integrations like the Calendly integration we are releasing now to help you set up meetings, but also technologies like webhooks and full support for top integration platforms.
But the best part is that as an agency, we can guide you and help you set this stuff up when you partner with us. We love seeing you become more productive, save time and consequently scale faster.
Drastically boost results for both you and your clients using iteration
Let me give you one of our biggest secrets. This is actually one of the main reasons that a lot of marketers and businesses move to Emercury. It is because we make it easy to get clear, precise and easy to understand reports. Both for your own client-acquisition process, and to study the results you get for your clients.
And if you want to scale faster, nothing beats the iterative process of constant tweaking and improvement based on studying your results.
And again, when I say this, I’m talking about both sides. It does include the campaigns, strategies and processes you use to get clients for your agency. But it also includes how you craft and improve the strategies that you implement for your clients.
In both cases you want to have a well-established process of studying your results, reading the reports and devising improvement ideas. Keep repeating this and you will see your results improve by orders of magnitude.
Now, I know this one is obvious, however, if people applied this, then I wouldn’t have to talk about it. Like a lot of the other ideas in this guide, most marketers forget to implement this fundamental because they get stuck “in the weeds” of juggling too many things at once.
However, this one, just like consistency in sending emails is something that you must find time for. Studying your reports has to be hard-scheduled in your calendar, and you need to be clear about what metrics you are tracking.
If you want more specifics, you can check out some of the content we’ve written before, or even better yet, book a free demo with me and let’s talk about this stuff.
We would love to see your agency scale faster, let’s talk
There is a reason why we love working with agencies. It is the best kind of win-win situation for both-sides. On the one hand, our combined decades of experience in working with marketers allows us to guide you and help you into scaling your business.
On the other hand, your success is directly tied to how much we benefit from the partnership. The incentive is built right in, and that means we are driven to help see you scale faster, which will result in your agency using more of our services, for both you and your clients.
And don’t be surprised if you see us implementing features especially for you or because your agency needs to solve a certain pain point. Most of our development comes from solving real-world problems for clients.
If you have never experienced what it’s like to work with someone who takes your agency success seriously, consider booking a free demo while I still have time for those.