Digital marketing is nothing new. In fact, it is an inevitability brought on by the need for businesses to realize steady growth amid increasing competition within their markets.
The increasing sophistication of digital tools has encouraged companies to refine their client acquisition strategies. Such strategies require insights into the needed formulas and skills that guarantee the best possible results.
At most, the best they can do is to hire someone else to run their marketing for them. With the rise of “startup culture,” the market for outsourced digital marketing services has been flooded by a high surplus of skills.
The rise of digital marketing agencies has also met considerable challenges as companies aim to outdo one another in a race to get a larger share of their respective markets.
Newcomers, in particular, will find it impossible to build an initial client pool, let alone position their brands in the best possible manner.
Then again, it is only a matter of using the right strategies to enable digital marketing agencies to gain a great deal of leverage.
Here are a few important ideas that will help boost your digital marketing agency’s lead acquisition campaign.
1. Formulate a realistic action plan
We all know what SMART stands for, but does it really hold up for digital marketing agencies that are out to acquire more clients and secure more conversions?
It takes a lot more than drawing up a simple mission and vision statement to know about building a business that’s sustainable and highly engaging.
You can’t risk making estimates and expect things to go your way. For example, your agency has to be firmly planted in the reality that it’s impossible for startups to survive in an over-saturated market.
It is these types of realities that should help shape the way you build your business strategy. Make sure to get real-world insights and examine possible action plans for implementation.
Analysis is essential for building your strategy, but don’t forget to keep your ear to the ground. Pay attention to buzz on current market trends.
Between these two approaches, you should have a clear idea of what you’re going to do once you start to roll out your strategy.
2. Monitor the competition
Coming up with a lead generation strategy should come with knowing who your competitors are. This is crucial because you want to build a campaign that produces results that can impact the bottom line and make it easier for you to position your brand better.
Knowing what your competitors are doing is as basic an activity as it comes, but it’s not so easy in practice. In fact, it will take you weeks or even months to prepare a comprehensive report on your closest rivals.
You need to know certain information about your competitors, including:
Their products and services: What do they offer that you don’t? What are the potential factors that would influence people to buy their products?
Their current position: How do they rank in terms of searchability? Do they command a large following across different locations and demographic segments?
Their image and reputation: Do they suffer from too much negative publicity in the form of comments and reviews? How well do they connect with their audience?
Their presence across all channels: Where do they usually get a lot of engagement? In what channels are they strong?
These questions should help you compare your competitors and see if there are gaps you can fill in. In other words, you might want to work on the propositions and messages they weren’t able to deliver before.
Competitor analysis should form the basis of all your marketing endeavors and it makes perfect sense to replicate what works for your audience and to try and improve it.
3. Build your marketing funnel
Once you have laid down the foundation of your lead generation campaign, it’s time to build the process that leads prospects from point A to point B, which is a sales conversion.
This means creating a sales funnel that is guaranteed to acquire leads, nurture them, and convert them into sales.
Easier said than done! Tracking the journey of potential buyers takes into account a few important dynamics, much of which involves knowing how to keep leads from dropping out.
This will all depend on how you build effective sales processes that address your main goals of growing revenue. These include the following principles:
You want people to recognize your brand and let them know that you’re in the business of selling social media marketing services or content creation services. Since this is the first tier of the funnel, prospects are not that likely to purchase a product. Your goal here is to attract them with what you’re offering and lead them down the funnel.
At this level, the prospect wants to know further details about your digital marketing agency. You might want to publish relevant blog posts that lead them toward signing up for a newsletter. That way, you can handle follow ups that keep your audience within the pipeline.
By the time your client becomes familiar with your services through blog posts and email campaigns, it’s time to provide a high-level sales call where you can make your pitch. Whether or not the prospect agrees to make purchase, your main goal here is to keep them interested until they develop a desire to buy.
This is the culmination of all your efforts in trying to reach out to your audience and get them to buy something from you. The quality of your pitch will determine whether the client decides to hire you or not.
The main point of having a funnel is to have an effective reference for what you need to do and deliver to potential clients.
However, you might still need to ensure that your campaign is properly equipped to produce the results you need for propelling your digital marketing agency forward.
Using the right platforms, you can create sales funnels that allow you to track deals and determine whether your prospects are ready for a sales pitch or not. But aside from using the right lead databases, you still have to consider the best possible channels to use in your lead generation campaign.
4. Gather all your resources and platforms
Let’s face it, you can’t reel in new business and convert leads into sales without content. After all, content is the lifeblood of any marketing strategy, so it makes sense that you use the right channels for marketing your digital marketing agency.
You will need to have a good mix of digital content to be able to drive the results you want.
These would include:
Look along the lines of tips and tricks. Write engaging, timely, and industry-specific articles relevant to your clients.
What are the best practices for creating content on Facebook or LinkedIn? Discuss them at length so as to prove you have industry knowledge. Also, you can use different social media marketing tools to help ease your work flow.
In terms of conversions, it’s high-quality videos that attract high-value clients. You just have to know how to make videos that strike a balance between informational and entertaining.
If you want to explain difficult concepts in digital marketing, you might as well create infographics that simplify such things as “personalized content” and using cloud computing for data backup.
All these items are typical of any digital marketing arsenal, but these are just a part of the larger dimension that your website maintains.
5. Develop a highly engaging website that’s searchable
Your website has to be your main driver and leads conversion source. Its success in achieving the numbers you are aiming for will depend mostly on how well you design and maintain your website.
That being said, make sure you follow these important principles when building a website for generating, nurturing, and converting interested prospects:
Design: Make your website user-friendly. In other words, make it less of a hassle for users to navigate from one web page to another and find what they need.
Mobile responsiveness: A majority of users accessing websites use mobile devices. This is a good reason to optimize your site for phone and tablet screens.
Keyword research: Keywords make your website searchable, so you might want to spend time and money on building a list of high-value keywords that your competitors might also want to rank for.
Readable content: It’s not enough that you create content that includes all the relevant information that’s bound to make your audience want to take a better look. To keep them interested, you need to write blog posts that are also easy to read.
Building a digital marketing agency from scratch is one thing, and building an initial client base is another. For this reason, your lead generation strategy should be carefully crafted.
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Mike Khorev is an SEO expert and digital marketing consultant who helps small and mid-size businesses generate more leads, sales and grow revenue online. He offers expert advice on marketing your company the right way through performance-based SEO digital marketing, web design, social media, search engine marketing and many other online practices. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter
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With 9 years of marketing experience in planning and executing performance-based digital marketing strategies I helped small and medium size companies grow their revenue, acquire new customers, drive more leads and improve marketing ROI.
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