How to Market a Marketing Agency

Every creative agency will experience a point in time when their pipeline is low. It’s an inevitable occurrence. Naturally, leadership will be focusing on how to fill that pipeline again, and marketing strategy is a big piece of that equation. As a digital agency, you know that marketing is the lead generating engine of any business.

Despite having a killer marketing strategy, digital agencies may still see a decrease in leads generated. This is where an outside perspective can shed light on new strategies or tactics that are working for companies in the marketing industry.

That’s the purpose of this blog post. To give you a new perspective to boost your existing strategy and fill that pipeline once again. It’s no secret that around 35% of our customers are in the digital marketing agency space, and we have gained insights on what marketing strategies your peers are currently using to boost their pipeline metrics. I hope this sparks a productive brainstorming session for you.

Niching for Powerful Impact

Before we dive straight into marketing strategies, let’s cover an impactful business strategy: niching. If you’re finding that your pipeline struggles to remain full or that your clients aren’t referring industry peers, it may be time to explore a niche.

Having a niche can accelerate the impact of all your marketing strategies. Why? When you become known as an expert in a specific niche, clients are more likely to be wowed by your detailed insights and start talking about your company to others. This generates word-of-mouth referrals, but word starts to spread digitally, too.

You might begin to see that your inbound links skyrocket, tags on social media become a regular occurrence, your agency is mentioned in Facebook groups, testimonials and reviews increase, etc. In a nutshell, if you pick a specific niche you're really good at and serve that audience better than anyone in your industry, your agency could end up becoming a hot topic in your industry. The natural result? Your new clients pool will increase and fill your pipeline. 

I’d also like to mention that niching is a large part of why our target audience has become a loyal fan base of sorts. We hear time and time again how our content has impacted not only our clients, but marketing industry experts who aren’t quite clients, yet. We use our content and niche strategy to help our target audience and build relationships. 

Reinvest in Your Brand

Being in the creative industry, we probably don’t have to tell you how important branding is. However, with your newfound niche, it may be time to do a brand overhaul. Is your brand speaking directly to your target audience? Or are you posting generic content that doesn’t cater to a specific segment of customers?

A dental office will have different marketing needs than a clothing retailer. The way you would speak to either of those clients will naturally be different. Make sure that your brand is communicating that you’re a thought leader in the specific niche you’re marketing to. Brand colors, logos, brand voice, content platforms of choice, etc. should all attract your target audience. Now is the time to evaluate if a rebrand is in order. If you have a handful of clients in your niche of choice, ask their opinions on what they’d like to see from your brand.

Partnerships

Partnering with organizations that reach your target audience will increase the impact you can have on that niche. Not only are you reaching the contacts you have within your network, but you’re reaching the contacts of your new partner’s network.

Partnerships can sound daunting, but they don’t have to be. There are many ways to create a partnership. Let’s say you have a website design agency catering to dental practices. You could use good old-fashioned networking to find a content marketing agency that offers their services to dental practices, as well.

Once you’ve created a relationship with this other organization, you could guest blog on their website, hop on their podcast, or guest host on their webinar. It’s important to create a reciprocal relationship. So, make sure you have your new partner on your content platforms, as well.

You can also team up for speaking engagements hosted on topics related to the dental industry. It’s surprising the number of conferences nearly every industry has.

Once you have this relationship built, you may also find that you’re able to refer clients back and forth. You’ve just opened up your referral network!

Recycling Content

Once you’ve built a content library from the partnerships opportunities you’ve developed, you’re ready to recycle content. The reason we recommend recycling content is because it’s a low threshold-to-entry. You already have topics developed from the webinar slide decks you’ve developed or the podcast topics you’ve covered. They just need to be developed into other forms of content that allow you to maximize audience reach.

A speaking engagement, for example, can be clipped down to create short sound bites packed with thought leadership and knowledge that is shareable to social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. These soundbites can be turned into carousels that can be featured on LinkedIn. Speaking engagement recordings can also be turned into longer form content such as blog posts, articles posted on other websites, booklets, PPC ads, guides and much more.

This same process can be applied to podcasts and webinars. It is also worth mentioning that content from a speaking engagement can be turned into a podcast topic or webinar, and vice versa. There are people out there who would rather consume a podcast over a webinar, or a webinar over a speaking engagement, and so on. Making sure these topics are accessible to all “types” of content consumers not only meets the needs of individuals but also amplifies your reach.

Posting content on platforms other than your website can help you embed calls-to-action or links that lead back to your website. This increases traffic to your website, and therefore generates potential conversions which benefits your SEO and lead generation metrics.

Content that isn’t bound by time can be reshared later on. Pain points generally do not simply exist in one moment in time. It’s usually a persistent problem that your target audience will continue to face until you can ultimately solve the problem for them. For that reason, resharing content that helps alleviate these pain points will still be helpful in one or two years, not just today.

Employee Marketing

I’ve mentioned the power of expanding your audience. Partnerships are one way to do that. There’s also another way. Encouraging employees to share your marketing content can open your brand up to new audiences.

We use Clearview Social to suggest content for employees to share. To make this process even easier on our employees, we draft suggested captions. With just a few buttons, employees can post content that supports our brand.

There are other ways to get employees involved. Many companies run contests allowing employees who share content online to receive prizes and other incentives. It’s also worth mentioning that agencies with a positive company culture are more likely to receive social shares organically.

Employees who share company content not only boost marketing capacity for the company they work for but also improve their own personal brand. It may be worth educating employees on the power of a personal brand so they can see the value in sharing content online.

Hire Contractors

The strategies talked about in this article may feel overwhelming. But just like anything else, it’s important to delegate or outsource what you can and do what you have capacity for. The first step is to determine what you are able to do. Are you only able to write and post one blog post a week? Then, that’s a great starting point. That one blog post can still be reshared on a social platform or two of choice.

Let’s say you feel that you need to still be doing much more than that, but your individual capacity or that of your team doesn’t allow for more production to take place. This is where a contractor can help. Websites like Upwork and Fiverr can help you find talented individuals that can increase the capacity of your team.

Say you sign up for one speaking engagement a quarter. Contractors could take a speaking engagement recording and produce a blog post, repost the recording to YouTube, draft a webinar and podcast outline, and create short soundbites for Instagram and TikTok. That’s five forms of content from just one speaking engagement!

Let’s imagine another scenario where you may not have the funds to hire a contractor. In this case, I would suggest identifying the most effective and least time-consuming methods to repurpose one piece of content that you have. Then, duplicate this methodology using other pieces of content that you may have. Even a recording from a client meeting or a case study could help you develop a blog post or LinkedIn newsletter.

We’ve seen the struggle our agency clients have when it comes to investing in themselves. You have existing client work piling up but see your potential client pipeline beginning to dip down. This is your sign to give your team in charge of internal marketing efforts (even if that’s just you as the agency owner) permission to invest in marketing your company.

If you’d like to learn more about improving your pipeline or other financial metrics impacting your forecast, download our forecasting booklet.