How do most small marketing agencies start their day when they’re new? How do they learn to scale as a digital marketing agency?
Quite often, most agencies panic. They’re reacting to everything instead of being proactive. Stressed out from trying to find more clients. Frustrated with their current roster’s ever-changing requirements. Money rests on the mind of everyone in the agency because there still might not be enough money coming in to keep things afloat.
It’s extremely stressful and causes a lot of agencies with brilliant ideas to flame out early because they’re not noticed by leads, or let their clients push them around, or just not making enough money to make it. And the cost per lead is increasing all the time.
Does it have to be this way though?
Every business has growing pains, and the first step to getting past them starts with facing the challenges of new marketing agencies head-on. Once you’ve tackled these, you’ll be able to scale as a digital marketing agency.
Here are four critical barriers:
Getting More Leads
The first is getting more clients. No clients, no money. No money, no business. This means you need a steady stream of leads. Most established agencies get a lot of their new business through referrals or personal networks. That’s fantastic for them, but a new team just entering the field don’t have those resources. Hubspot says that finding new clients is the biggest pain point for marketing agencies.
But the market is so tough!
New competition enters the market all the time, and since it’s something that every company needs… it can feel like everybody’s trying their hand at digital marketing. If you’re new, establishing yourself as an SEO or social media expert in the face of those with more experience can feel impossible. And just try getting highly ranked for your top-value keywords! It’s all about trying to get noticed. Any potential lead has a glut of choices.
In order to get noticed, digital marketing agencies throw all kinds of noodles at the wall: content marketing, email marketing, link building, even pitching to people in person. Whatever it takes.
Chasing clients and being successful at it also has its drawbacks. There are some agencies that, when they became successful, forgot to market themselves. They forgot to keep the pipeline filled with suitable prospects. And, unfortunately, losing clients leaves an agency back at square one.
If you want to scale, the need for more high-value clients will always be there. It doesn’t go away. Fortunately, you can build a solution that makes it easy to keep the pipeline open without overwhelming your business or stretching your time too thin. We’ll talk about that in just a moment.
Keeping Up With The Industry
You never know when something will shake up the industry and turn conventional marketing wisdom on its head. Algorithm changes, new platforms, and new methods of marketing come out all the time.
To stay up to day requires constant education in the field. You need to see what’s just a fad and what’s actually making an impact. Clients love to impress you with what they know, and it’s up to you to guide them to the best solutions for their industry.
There’s little you can do beyond specializing in a particular niche and ignoring the rest of the changes going on in the space. If you are just focused on SEO, you don’t have to worry so much about what Facebook and Twitter are doing. Paring down your focus and catering to a specific kind of client can make it much easier to stay on top of trends.
Choose a marketing platform that’s rooted in a proven strategy, yet has room to grow. The right technology paired with the right strategy will buffer your business against the shocks of fads and algorithm changes.
Managing Existing Clients
We love clients because that’s where we get our money. But managing an existing client is easier said than done. Most clients are in love with their ideas and think that you’ve got some sort of magic access to the top channels to promote them far and wide. Or think that the designs they have in mind for their site are just the thing that will make clients fall in love with them. Or they’re obsessed with a particular line of copy that you know just will not fly.
And then there are the ones who think that their visitor numbers will explode as soon as they post a new piece of content. We get it. The client wants more traffic, and we want to give it to them! But these things take time. There’s no way around it, even with paid advertising.
This frustrates a lot of new agencies, especially if they’ve never worked in a client-contractor relationship before. Agencies have to be able to show some sort of result to their clients while also explaining that it may take months to see a change. And if their client has some harebrained idea, they need a way to prove to the client that it won’t work without damaging the relationship.
Handling clients will always be a person-to-person thing, but there are tools that can help you manage the workload, provide a paper trail of conversations, and show data to clients that prove whose ideas are best. Any digital marketing agency that reaches a certain size is going to need something like this to avoid missing deadlines.
Bringing In Money
Digital marketing agencies know that a lot of your pay goes straight into the coffers of someone else. Whether a PPC company, a writer for content, a web designer, or some other person, there is usually not a lot of cash left over after all of the business expenses have been paid.
It gets worse when every client feels they need something custom to stand out. Agencies could charge more, though that might drive away clients especially if you’re new. However, you don’t want to underbid yourself either. Underbidding might not give you enough cash to fulfill your client’s needs correctly. Building marketing funnels costs money and you shouldn’t be afraid to charge what is necessary to do the job right. The clients that fall away because your prices are “too high” are the ones that don’t see the value of good marketing.
That said, there are ways you can cut costs and still charge a premium rate. One way is to simplify and automate your custom marketing solutions so you don’t have to pay subcontractors or employees so much to fulfill your contracts.
Creating a positive cashflow depends on having everything in your organization working together as one. As you increase efficiency, you can draw in more clients and help existing ones faster. Established agencies often have a sophisticated toolchain that automates much of the drudge work so their staff can focus on creative projects.
A Potential Solution
Despite these challenges, we think that there is a tool that can solve all four of these problems in one go. If you want to scale as a digital marketing agency, you need to re-examine the humble landing page. Unlike so many of the other things that come and go in digital marketing, the idea of a landing page has been there, whether it was a link in an email or an old-school banner advertisement.
And why have they stuck around for so long? They work. Having a well-crafted landing page raises conversion rates. The average conversion rate for a landing page is 2.5%. According to AdWeek, that’s far higher than social media (0.71%) and organic search (1.95%), but less than email (3.19%). However, to do well in email marketing you have to build a solid list first. Landing pages are perfect for that.
According to Marketo, landing pages are used by 68% of B2B businesses to acquire leads. Landing pages are humble, but the platforms available for building, hosting, and tracking landing pages have continued to grow in sophistication. Video on landing pages is becoming popular. Wordstream believes that video on landing pages increases conversions by 86%!
Landing pages are Pagewiz’s bread and butter, and we believe that our landing page system is a solution for all four of the problems we’ve talked about in this piece. Here’s why:
- Our templating system has over 100 built-in templates that are proven to convert, giving you and your clients options. Plus, you’re free to build your own.
- It is dead simple to add more landing pages. In fact, companies that increase the number of landing pages they have from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in leads! Plus we offer an unlimited number of pages on any plan.
- Tons of integrations with services like Zapier or Webhooks to help you expand your capabilities or hook into your client’s existing marketing stack.
- Subscribers can white-label our platform so that your clients never know that we’re in your corner, plus we make it really easy to switch between accounts.
Finally, we’re much less expensive than shelling out $200 or more for each landing page. It’s only $29 a month for a basic plan and you still get unlimited A/B testing. Speaking of, good A/B tests show your more stubborn clients in clear data whose marketing ideas are superior.
If you’re ready to start converting more leads, raising your cashflow, and using a platform that can stretch with your needs, start creating your own landing pages today with Pagewiz.
Emily Hunter develops content and resources for businesses in all niches, ranging from computer security to retail. She has worked for both national marketing agencies and mom-and-pop stores, learning much about each of them. During the summer, Emily cheers on Carolina Crown and all of the great DCI corps.
