‘The single most important factor to growing your agency is having a growth mindset’

A Walk in the Park

Let’s face it, starting a digital marketing agency is easy, but running one and making it a success takes skill, time, money, and perseverance.

Most agency owners will tell you in the early days they often felt like they were winging it. But over time, they hone their skills, gain momentum, and start to grow. Clients get won on recommendation, awards get entered, the pipeline is healthy, and there’s a team in place to manage the work.

But at some point, that upward trend takes a turn. They start to find that each month they’re barely breaking even due to the high staff costs and overheads. They may find they’re turning a small profit, which makes those late-night work sessions even more painful. In this blog, we look at how you can expand your business without compromising quality by choosing the right agency growth partner.

Ready, Aim, Fire

‘A business without a target is like a ship without a rudder.’

First things first, you need to set a target for your business. Start from where' you’re at and aim at where' you want to be. Make sure it’s in line with your current sales performance and not an unrealistic one that you’ve plucked out of thin air. Once you have set your sales target, make everyone in your team know what you want to achieve.

Bring in the Experts

More often than not, digital marketing agencies hire lower salary and less experienced staff to keep overheads down and increase profits. While this may sound like a good idea, low paid staff tend to lack the required experience, knowledge, and motivation to meet the clients’ expectations. This means that their campaigns are often poorly strategised, hurriedly set up, and inexpertly managed, resulting in low ROI, dissatisfied customers, and a bad reputation.

This raises the question; how do you keep overheads low but talent high? More and more often, businesses are finding that outsourcing to a quality White Label firm is the best solution.

Don’t Try to Do it All

‘Outsourcing to marketing experts can exponentially increase your talent pool and allow you to offer a fully integrated service.’

It’s probably the nature of all business owners to want to keep a tight hold on the reins and oversee everything personally. But as companies grow, it becomes impossible for the owners to do everything themselves and attempting to do so can end up hurting the business in the long term.

Using external resources allows you to be the expert agency in SEO, SEM, website development, online advertising, social media marketing etc. without having to invest in recruiting, HR, salaries, training, and time.

Outsourcing provides you access to a team of external resources that can help with creative, branding, and content and inventive ideas from unbiased experts.

Stay ahead of your competitors

‘Competition should motivate you to improve’

Just when you think you’re getting the hang of things, you realize that you may be lagging. Change is the defining feature and perhaps the one true constant of digital marketing. Every day there’s a new update, algorithm roll-out, or social platform. The digital realm is forever evolving. New competitors spring up daily, so it’s important to keep an eye on them and stay ahead of the game. By using external resources, you can supplement your current knowledge and utilise the skills of an agile team ready to take on the next wave of projects.

Increase Efficiency for Profit

‘Productivity and efficiency equal profit and growth’

If implemented correctly, outsourcing your marketing projects (entirely or in part) can help deliver significant gains for large and small businesses. How? By keeping fixed costs low and increasing the speed of deliverables.

Outsourcing ensures your internal team can focus on company core competencies, such as high-level brand development and internal marketing, while your external team takes care of rest. When properly managed, outsourcing offers flexibility and scalability and it is relatively easy and quick to implement. Having experts on tap when you need them means you are free to focus on your business growth and overall brand position, rather than time-consuming project management and recruitment.

Finally, you will benefit from fresh perspectives on that client project and equip your agency with an edge through access to the latest technology without paying costly subscription fees.

How to Get the Most out of Your Growth Partner

An agency growth partner is there to make your job easier, saving you time and money. But it isn’t simply a matter of dropping the whole job on one person and hoping for the best. They will need your involvement and guidance, especially in the early stages.

A good agency growth partner will have plenty of experience working with diverse clients and will be able to walk you through this process. Good communication is key. Depending on your requirements, you will probably be dealing regularly and directly with one or two people who manage a team, members of which you may also need to occasionally speak to nut out the details of a particular campaign or piece of content or nail the right tone of voice.

Over time, there will be less and less need for specific direction as the team comes to better understand your organization; its goals, needs, and expectations. Ideally, it should feel like your growth agency is an extension of your own team, not a separate entity. The bottom line is that you want to be working on your business, not in it.

Delegating any responsibility can be challenging for business owners, but a good agency growth partner can reduce your workload and boost the quality and quantity of your marketing. Once the relationship has been established and the content is rolling, you’ll probably find yourself wondering why you didn’t make the move earlier.