Marketing Agency Leaders Share Their Growth Tips
As a marketing agency leader, whether you’re new in business or a little more established, finding new strategies to grow your business, team, and client list is probably your top concern. Encouraging business growth can be challenging, especially considering that over 50% of digital marketing agencies have ten or fewer team members. With such limited resources, every growth strategy you take must count.
There are hundreds of marketing agencies out there and more popping up each day. So, it’s important to spend time doing tasks that will aid your business’ growth and help you stand out. To help you out, we asked marketing agency leaders to share their best tips for growth— and our top three responses may surprise you.
Grow Your Team by Hiring Remotely
A major hurdle facing marketing agency leaders is finding the right people at an affordable price. Finding great talent is highly competitive. Some of the best people are already working for other companies, and convincing them to join yours instead is no easy feat. If you’re looking to attract and retain more people to your team, you might want to rethink your strategy. And one of the best strategies for attracting and retaining clients is switching to staffing remotely.
The reason why going remote works so well with marketing agencies is that a lot of digital marketing activities can be done independently. For example, employees can write blogs, do SEO audits, and edit videos without having to be in an office. Other activities like social media updates and planning, email campaigns, and link building can also be done remotely as well. When workers get to stay at home, you save on the cost of workers’ compensation insurance, cleaners, office supplies, and furniture.
Not only does remote help you save money that would normally be spent on overhead costs associated with maintaining an office, but it can also help you diversify your team. Rahul Vij, CEO of WebSpero Solutions, explains, “By recruiting candidates from all over the country, we can boost diversity and culture in the workplace. This will add a mixed bag of skills, creativity, and enthusiasm, which according to us, is a great way to spike organizational efficiency.”
Vij experienced other benefits since switching to remote work. He continues, “Other reasons behind shifting to remote working post-pandemic are fewer distractions, less commute stress, and more flexible benefits for employees. All this will provide them enough time to indulge their efforts in essential tasks in a productive way. Above all, it is a sure-shot cost-effective solution for both employees and the company. By hiring a proportion of remote workers, we can enjoy the advantage of reduced overhead. The money saved thus can be used to recover the financial loss done by the COVID-19 crisis in these two years. Over and all, remote staffing is our ultimate way to stay competitive post-pandemic.”
Focus on New Lines of Business
Your clients’ attitudes and needs may have changed over the previous year. Many of the changes can be boiled down to more restricted budgets. The pandemic has caused many companies to pivot or focus on other aspects of the business.
The good news for marketing agencies is that many businesses are experiencing a renewed focus on digital marketing. With more people working from home, there are more people online for longer periods of time. As a result, many businesses are turning to online advertising to generate more leads. Even in the post-pandemic, ‘new normal’, many businesses can no longer rely solely on trade shows or product demonstrations to garner more interest. As a result, many of your clients will be looking to content marketing to produce more educational material for their audience.
Your ability to innovate will determine your success or failure during this time. Look at what others in your industry are doing. What can your agency do to better meet the needs of your clients?
Sean Chaudhary, CEO of Alchemy Leads, explained how his marketing agency successfully pivoted this way:
We adapted by growing our services and changing our messaging to reach people who had been affected by the pandemic and were on the lookout for the help we could provide. We knew that COVID-19 was going to open up the world to the work we were doing, so we jumped at the chance. We […] positioned ourselves as the answer to the problems everyone else was having. The result: we found new types of businesses we had never worked with before and opened up ourselves to a whole new market.
Encourage Your Team’s Creativity
Our final marketing agency growth tip comes from Stefan Schulz, COO, and Partner at Orpical Group, who experienced increased productivity, improved client satisfaction and increased revenue after encouraging his remote team’s creativity.
Schulz explains, “We are 100% remote right now, and we don’t have any plans to go back into an office environment. We’ve found that the overall morale, productivity, and creative energy of our employees has gone up. As such, client demand and satisfaction are higher, as shown by revenue growth.”
Most marketing agency leaders believe that creativity can only happen with in-person brainstorming sessions. The reality is that in-person brainstorming sessions often don’t work. That’s because in in-person group sessions, the idea expressed first or by the most senior person in the room often dominates. On the other hand, remote work allows your employees to be self-starters and leaders in their own right. Every team member can share their ideas without being crowded out by more senior members of your team. Additionally, without the pressure of constant supervision, remote workers have more freedom to creatively solve business problems.
What you can do: cultivate an office culture that rewards creative risk-taking. As much as possible, make it clear to your team that your organization values creativity—and understands its importance. You can do this best by being receptive to new ideas and recognizing your most creative employees for the impact they’ve made.
Final Thoughts
That wraps up our list of growth strategies for marketing agency leaders. With these three tips—building a remote team, focusing on new lines of business, and encouraging your team’s creativity—you can start to experience business growth. Of course, adapting some of these ideas may mean changing the way you conduct business, but the long-term successes you experience will make up for any short-term adjustments you’ll have to make.
Growing your marketing agency can be difficult to manage, let us help. Our marketing assistants can help you with social media monitoring, content distribution, and much more. We help you go remote-first by finding the best workers at affordable prices so that you can focus on the aspects that grow your business. Are you interested in finding out more? Read more about our services and what we can do to help your business go remote-first, while saving you time and money. Ask us a question.
