12 Ways You Can Help Your Agency's Revenue Grow
Building your agency and generating revenue requires time and effort. Here are few tips that you can implement to surpass the million dollar revenue mark.
Whether it is about reaching a one-million-dollar revenue target or achieving a sustained revenue model, you should continue to invest your marketing dollars in promoting your agency.
Even if we talk about an economic slowdown, businesses that restructured their spending with a progressive outlook even during a downturn and continued pumping money into marketing and promotion outpaced their competitors who hadn't. You can try Google Ads, paid advertising on social media, and influencer marketing to get immediate results.
During tough times such as the one we are experiencing right now during the Covid-19 crisis worldwide, it's crucial not to take a safe route or freeze all your marketing activities. It may lead to negative consequences once the downturn ends. However, apart from investing in marketing and sales, there are many ways you can grow your agency's revenue during both good and bad times.
Here are 12 Helpful Tips to Help your Agency's Revenue Grow
1. Specialize and focus on quality
In this age of increasing competition and rapid evolution, specialization is our weapon to survive. Specialization becomes inevitable to provide valuable services. It answers many challenges that agencies and startups face, such as heavy disruption caused by new technology, changing viewpoints and consumer behavior, and rapidly changing economic factors.
The marketplace has proved crucial to cut the fluff and offer only the services that impart value to your customers. It helps in client retention and getting out of the price war. Focusing on quality will ensure the longevity and organic growth of your agency. Many agencies fail in the first three years because they focus too much on adding clients and volumes and forget entirely about quality. While adding clients is necessary to ensure the required cash flow, it can be suicidal if done at the cost of quality.
You might need to redesign your website for it, but it will increase traffic and improve your sales numbers.
2. Understand your clients' stories
"In this information-saturated age, nobody is going to listen to you if you don't know how to tell stories," says Nick Morgan, the founder of Public Words. Stating facts and figures might be suitable for corporate meetings, but the human mind does not work that way. If you want your message to be remembered and taken seriously by your audience, you should infuse emotions to things that happen.
Remember the following points for a compelling storytelling:
-
Figure out the core moral you want to implant in your audience and then convert it into a powerful single statement.
-
Use your own life experience to carefully craft the statement you want to illustrate or the message you want people to believe in.
-
Everybody wants to reinstate their self-esteem, so don't try to act like a hero and never boast about your achievements.
-
Find interesting emotional entry points to a story and explain how your failures led you to achieve the biggest successes in your life.
-
Struggles, bad times, challenges, and antagonists are essential elements of a story. If there are no conflicts, your story is not interesting.
-
Not every story you tell has to be surprising or epic. Simple and straightforward stories are also super successful.
-
Understand your audiences and figure out the best things that will resonate with them.
3. Create a solid sales process
A solid sales process that is replicable is essential for the success of an agency. Create a sales funnel, test the sales process over and over again and tweak it repeatedly to ensure a higher rate of success. Once you are satisfied with this process, try to replicate it aggressively.
4. Invest in sales and marketing
Put your marketing dollars back into marketing if you want your agency to survive, especially in its initial years. You are in the marketing business, and if you don't invest in marketing and sales in this competitive space, you may soon be out of business. Furthermore, it takes time to become a brand, and the more clients you get in the beginning, the most secure you would become financially.
5. Recruit the best people and optimize your utilization rate
Employees can be the game-changer for your business. So, make sure that you invest in the best talent from the beginning. It would also help if you also needed to optimize your utilization rate, which determines how productive your employees are and their actual contribution to your agency's functioning. To find out the utilization rate, check the time spent on billable work.
To optimize your utilization rate, you can install time-tracking software on the machines of your employees. Even though a time tracking software program isn't the best solution to measure productivity, it can give you a rough idea of what your employees are doing at a particular time.
6. Follow trends and spot opportunities
Digital marketing is a fast-paced industry, and it's crucial to follow trends to stay abreast and continue getting results from your campaigns. So, if an algorithm update happens, you must be aware of its consequences and how to overcome its adverse effects.
It would help if you continued learning and experimenting to identify the latest trends and developments in this industry and change your strategy accordingly. You can use many learning resources such as popular blogs, podcasts, educational videos, webinars, ebooks, forum discussions, and seminars. In addition, you get real exposure to digital marketing by interacting with your clients.
7. Be outcome driven
While many agencies focus on the "output," the winning agencies are focused on the "outcome" for the clients. This is because most clients are interested in achieving their targets and objectives, and they are happy as long as you are helping them achieve that.
Therefore, an outcome-driven agency becomes popular very quickly compared to the agencies, which usually give lengthy and complicated reports every week with few tangible results. That is the reason successful agencies are always performance-driven and not necessarily driven by efficiency and eye-catching reports.
8. Collaborate with people and agencies with complementary skills
In digital marketing, it is crucial to leverage complementary skills. A combination of great thinkers and action-oriented people is an ideal mix that can produce astonishing results. If you can think strategically, you need to look for doers to successfully implement your beautiful ideas and planning.
If your team has exceptional execution skills, look for people who can think beyond what is visible. Always remember, hiring people smarter than you is the key to success in any business. So, a combination of people with complementary skills is an ideal mix for success.
9. Reduce your lead response time
According to a study, "sales conversions are 391% higher when inbound leads are contacted within the same minute of requesting a demo." The survey also reveals that if your response to a lead inquiry is delayed by more than five minutes, there is an 80% decrease in lead qualification. Needless to say, that leads have a very short lifespan. Yet, around 55% of businesses responded in more than five days, according to the same study. Therefore, you should respond to the sales leads within five minutes of receiving them.
10. Offer more value
Most agencies follow the herd mentality, and when it comes to offering value to their clients, they repeat the same old practices that businesses have been doing for ages. For example, agencies share their case studies and reports from previous projects loaded with data to impress their clients while prospecting.
However, it would be much better if they personalized their offer and convinced their prospects about the real value they could offer along with custom data projections. It is going to be far more impactful than simply sharing your previous achievements. It shows your commitment and concern for your customers and also what you can do for them.
While few agencies practice it, it brings tremendous rewards. Avoid conducting meetings and consultations that offer little value and aren't planned for your clients’ needs. Also, avoid sending emails with general proposals.
Agencies should try to make a good first impression while prospecting their clients. If you want your clients to pay top dollars for your services, you should aim to provide more value from the beginning. The key is to convince them that you can help them improve and deliver value for the money you charge for the services.
11. Target the businesses that need the services you specialize in
Buzzfeed drives 80% of its traffic from social media, according to a 2016 INMA report. If you are a company specializing in SEO or paid advertising, you shouldn't approach companies like Buzzfeed as your clients.
You can talk with them only when you have a seasoned social media marketing team on your rolls so that you can provide value to your target audience. For example, you should target businesses in fitness, fashion, and food domains if you specialize in Instagram marketing. These businesses benefit from Instagram's audience comprising fitness lovers and foodies to generate revenue.
Therefore, you need to know the kind of businesses you are going to target. Your most loyal and long-term clients are those who desperately need your services.
12. Position yourself as an authority
In today's market, it's better to position yourself as an authority if you want to grab high-paying clients. It also helps you to minimize your marketing expenditure. People turn to big names and trusted authorities when it comes to hiring services.
It also allows you to charge premium prices for your services and avoid the price war of the mediocre market. Investing in your blog, video blog, or podcast can be a good idea to establish your authority. You can also invite other industry leaders to write for your blogs. It helps you position yourself as part of the elite club of the service providers in your domain.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a sustainable and scalable business model for your agency, you should strive for learning and innovation rather than focusing on revenues. With the right processes in place, revenues and profits will follow.
Sometimes you may need to compromise your revenues to boost growth as Facebook did a few years ago. However, earning revenues is extremely important for your business's survival and growth, and the steps discussed above can be a game-changer.