As the digital marketing industry continues to take shape with new trends and emerging technologies enter the marketplace, marketers need to embrace these changes quickly to maximize their profits. In this blog post, we will share top digital marketing tips to maximize your agency profit in 2020.
Nowadays, the demand for digital services is increasing and many agencies are offering new services to attract prospective clients and retain their client base. Project margins are dropping, but the clients are expecting their digital agencies to offer expert-level services.
Brands are looking for ways to strengthen their relationships with digital agencies and the agencies are struggling to attract and retain top talents. This means that every dollar and every hour they spend are really important.
Establishing a digital agency can be easy, but retaining and turning it into a profitable business is the hardest part.
In this digital era, you have every advantage to achieve your goals and boost your sales. Embracing digitalization and understanding your clients’ main priorities and their customers’ changing demands are equally crucial for digital agencies’ growth and sustainability.
With these useful digital marketing tips you can turn your agency into a profitable business:
Make the on-boarding process easy
Clients are the key to success for digital agencies. You can establish strong and long-lasting relationships with the straightforward on-boarding process.
If you want to leave a good impression on your clients and turn them into long-term partners, you need to show them that you have everything they want. To seal the deal you can send them satisfaction surveys, and inform them about the areas you are still improving.
Optimize your website
Improving your client’s website is important, but you may not overlook the strengthening and maintaining the SEO of your own website. Having a quality website and providing valuable information to your customers is equally significant, especially during their decision-making process.
You can make monthly checks to make sure your SEO is on track. In order to attract traffic and boost sales, you can create targeted keywords and utilize them in your content.
Choose right tools and benefit from data
Technology is a vital investment helping agencies to reach useful tools and key data points. Your agency should look for the perfectly integrated system and technology to make things easier for the clients. Using some of the best digital marketing products can be a great start for it.
For SEO Rank Checking you can use Google Search Console or SEMrush. To make SEO Keyword Analysis you can use Google Adwords, Google Trends, SEMrush and Spyfu.
Invest in your team members
One of our digital marketing tips is investing in your employees. Keep that in mind: your valuable assets and biggest financial investments are your team. Optimizing the time spent percentage or in short, the utilization rate of your workers will provide you to have more productive team members.
If you especially do project-based works, it’ll impact your profits. You can consider using time tracking tools like Time Doctor, Timely, Everhour or Scoro to measure the efficiency of your project profitability and your team.
Attract entry-level talents
Invest in recruiting entry-level talents and developing their skills. There is no direct correlation between the amount of someone get paid and the quality of their work or value they can provide.
The more qualified entry-level talent means, the greater value they will bring your agency and your clients. Thus, you can achieve a greater amount of profit.
Fill the gaps between talent, strategy and technology
Clients give tremendous value in services they don’t have the knowledge or resources, which they can’t deliver internally. So, you should spare no expense to fill the gap between talent, technology, and strategy.
If your digital agency has rare capabilities and high demand, then you can position your agency high priced. You can train your team, evolve your services and tools with agency partner programs.
Keep the balance between budget and service
Over-servicing and losing the balance between project and the budget are profitability destroyers for the agencies. Identifying project risks at the first step is important because the agencies already have small profit margins. You can keep track of the balance between the project and the budget with project management tools such as Basecamp or FunctionPoint.
This kind of tools will also help to reduce the stress on your employees caused by overworking and make them more productive and efficient. If you encounter a risk, you can change the scope of the project or delivery method and contact with your client to make necessary explanations in advance.
Qualify your clients
The primary job of any marketer is to drive leads and convert them into sales. Writing proposals to new potential clients can cause you a waste of time and profitability if you don’t qualify your clients.
When you qualify your clients, you can reduce the time spent on uncommitted prospects. It also can help you to ensure about the clients’ interests or needs. You should track their behaviors and learn their interest through the content they read and the answers to your questions on your website.
Get paid for strategic planning
Strategic planning is one of your most valued services. Instead of charging more for it in value-based pricing, the agencies often choose to give strategic plan away for free to win clients.
If your prospective clients want these plans for free, they will never truly value your agency’s knowledge or services. It’s the primary reason why the request for proposals is impacting the agency-client relations.
Focus on performance
Having a direct and measurable impact on your clients’ bottom lines is the best way to control pricing and demand higher rates. If you determine the cost based on new leads you can increase your revenue.
If you’re not sure which KPIs matter the most, Databox can help you to visualize data and automate reporting with dozens of integrations with one customizable dashboard. You can also use Tableau as an alternative to Databox.
Build a reputable brand
Do you want to charge more from your clients? Then your brand needs to be stronger. You should invest your agency’s own marketing resources and leadership in order to be more recognizable.
Also pay attention to content creation, social media, and traditional networking. You can invest to reposition your agency and have a chance to drive leads and traffic to your website.
Improve pricing
Value-based pricing isn’t easy to implement but you can determine what services should be cost-based, and price by value. Your agency’s brand and success record can improve the client’s perception of the value of the services.
Use analytics to show how your agency creates value for a client. With value-based pricing, you can get paid proportionally for those services regardless of the amount of time spent.
Focus on campaign-based works
As the account teams become company experts, who are efficiently navigating the complexities of the industry and client diversity, campaign-based works are more profitable than stand-alone projects.
The implementation process or the strategy can be completed faster if you have well-equipped team members on their field.
Create different revenue streams
If you want to stabilize cash flow, you might consider building additional revenue sources by using the resources you already have in-house. For instance, you can launch a product or sell design templates.
You can reach people outside of your target by applying your skills to different business models. To create a valuable commercial product or tool you can use your skills and knowledge.
Learn when to say “no”
You need to learn when to say “no” to new clients when they are not sharing the same culture and values that your agency has or interesting a service you offer.
Remember, not all business is good business.
New clients can cause you to waste you time and resource drain. You should focus on improving and growing your existing accounts to keep the profit balanced instead of welcoming all the business.
