If you have a digital agency, securing new clients is one of the biggest challenges you are probably facing. With the pandemic causing the business world to become more cautious about spending money, many agencies are having a tougher time consistently landing new clients and sustaining growth.
But while the challenges of finding new clients are always going to be there, having a comprehensive strategy for how to grow and scale your agency can help you avoid stagnation and ensure that you can not just find new clients but also have the systems in place to provide them with excellent service.
With that in mind, let’s look at a few effective strategies you can use to scale your digital marketing agency and ensure sustained growth over the long-term future.
Maintain Professionalism
One of the biggest factors that will decide how successful your company can be as it scales is keeping your new clients happy. And unfortunately, many agencies end up struggling with the added workload as they scale, which often results in poor performance, disappointed clients, and even a permanently-damaged reputation.
To avoid that, you need to be proactive in preparing the company to tackle challenges and deal with clients. You need to know precisely how to provide clients with a good experience from the very first contact until the end of your relationship, establishing proven processes and standards that help you deliver timely assistance and maintain top-level professionalism.
For instance, you should use a marketing proposal template to develop a consistent way to share information at the beginning of the relationship with a new client. Instead of creating a proposal from scratch each time, your team should have a standardized process that’s easier to follow, ensures that everything necessary is included, and allows your team to deliver relevant and consistent results for the clients.
You should also have a clear process for onboarding clients, including listening to feedback, making adjustments, and establishing goals that can be changed as you become better at recognizing the potential results.
Focus on Quality Standards
Quality is a key part of success when running a digital marketing agency. Your clients will be evaluating every aspect of your services, so even if you deliver good results, you might get a bad reputation for something as simple as poor grammar skills and mistakes in the content you write.
Therefore, you should create rules and guidelines for how your team should take on various tasks, establishing control processes that prevent employees with less experience from making mistakes that would not be caught by more senior team members.
Sometimes, even something as simple as mandating spell checks and using a plagiarism checker can be a good starting point that establishes more consistent processes and helps avoid costly mistakes.
Work with your team to ensure that each team member understands the best practices of performing various assignments. You don’t want inconsistencies between the work of team members, so creating a unified system with a knowledge base and a training plan will help your team avoid mistakes and work more productively.
Streamline Communications
Working on client projects involves many people and countless moving parts. Therefore, having a communications system designed to make things as simple and easy as possible is crucial for making the most of the time you have and putting your team in a position to succeed.
The good news is that today, various digital tools can make the process much easier.
For instance, even something as seemingly simple as switching to an email client that allows your team to quickly access multiple email accounts from one place can make a big difference. Email remains a crucial part of communication, so making sure that your team uses it most effectively is a good starting point when setting up communications.
Another crucial part of streamlining communications is eliminating the need for some of them to take place in the first place. Countless hours are wasted by team members going back and forth regarding details about a project, which could be avoided altogether if you had a system for storing and sharing information that didn’t require so much back and forth.
For instance, you could develop a knowledge base with documentation about the key processes and common questions your team might need to understand. Then, instead of going to their superiors or other team members, people could search for a topic they need to learn about and read up on it on their own.
The same could be said about tracking projects. Using an effective project management system can ensure your team always knows who is responsible for different tasks, what progress has been made, and what others think about a particular situation.
Finally, you should also have a quick and easy way for team members to chat in groups or individually. Solutions like Slack are perfect because they are not only very easy to use but also seamlessly integrate with other software, allowing you to connect different types of communication and ensure that nothing gets lost.
Plan for Making New Hires
When scaling your digital agency, you will inevitably need more people to handle the influx of clients. And if you don’t have a process for ensuring that the new positions are filled quickly, your team will struggle to keep up with the increased workload, making it almost impossible to succeed in the long term.
To prevent that, you should consider hiring a recruitment agency that can help you fill new roles faster and establish a more consistent set of requirements for new candidates based on your agency’s culture, needs, and work practices.
In fact, it might even make sense to create a system for quickly onboarding new entry-level hires or freelancers that come in based on the current demand.
Bottom Line
If you feel like it’s time to scale your digital marketing agency, you need to carefully evaluate not just the potential to bring in new clients and the revenue increase it would result in but also the stress the increased capacity would put on your team.
The good news is that with the steps above, you can minimize some of the risks that come with scaling an agency and take more control of the entire process.
