In today’s competitive local marketing landscape, growing your agency might not be as straightforward as you’d like.
There are several reasons why you might be struggling to get new leads or retain existing clients, and these barriers can keep you from achieving your business ambitions.
The following are five actions that you can take to enhance your efforts as you work towards growing your local marketing agency.
1. Reach Out to Local Businesses
As more and more people realize the benefits of local marketing, your pool of potential clients will continue to grow. Why wait for these business owners to find you when you can make the first move to introduce yourself to them?
You can easily use Google to find local businesses that could benefit from improved search visibility. Simply perform relevant searches in the industry you wish to target, and then visit the results on page two of the results and beyond.
Create a spreadsheet of all of the businesses you find so you can keep a record of their information, the details of your interactions with them, and the actions you’re going to take as a result.
Make sure to adequately research each business before you send a highly-personalized proposal. Within each proposal, demonstrate that you understand the business and highlight the benefit to them from working with you.
Reaching out to local businesses in this way can be quite time-consuming, but it could result in a number of new long-term clients coming on board.
2. Reassess Your Brand Strategy
It’s important not to overlook the power of your branding. The way your potential customers perceive your brand will go a long way to influencing their decision to work with you or not.
Having a distinctive style and message will help to ensure that your business is memorable. If you’re not presenting your agency in a unique and interesting way, then you’re not going to stand out from the crowd.
Reassessing your brand strategy, and potentially making huge changes, might seem like taking a step back, but doing so could truly help to drive your business forwards.
3. Focus on Specialist Services
With so many different aspects of local marketing to consider, it can be tempting to try and offer a wide range of services to your clients. If you have the time and the resources to do this well, then that’s great. However, it could be the case that this broad effort is actually holding you back.
When you hone your agency to focus on less, then you have greater potential to truly become an expert at what you do. This puts you in a much better position to grow your reputation and to establish yourself as a leader in the industry.
Popular services to focus on as a local marketing agency are:
- Search engine optimization
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing/management
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Mobile marketing
- Marketing automation
Making the transition to specializing in specific areas will likely mean revisiting the previous point of reassessing your brand strategy. Your expertise is something you’ll want to promote consistently in your own marketing efforts.
Anyone discovering your agency for the first time should be able to immediately understand what it is you do and why you’re the best at it.
4. Nurture Your Existing Relationships
As you strive to grow your local marketing agency, it’s essential that you don’t neglect your current client base.
Ensure your entire team provides exceptional customer service to everyone that they communicate with. If a client isn’t happy—for absolutely any reason—then it should always be a priority to resolve the situation.
Although you should nurture these relationships because they’re important to you, there’s also two big business benefits to doing so.
First of all, happy clients are more receptive to upselling. Pitching new ideas to existing clients for bigger and bolder projects—and at a bigger budget—will be much easier if they feel very positively about your relationship.
Secondly, happy clients are highly likely to recommend you to the people in their network, which will naturally include other local business owners.
You can also go one step further in setting up a client referral system. By offering your clients some kind of incentive to introduce you to new prospects, you can grow your business while also bolstering existing relationships.
5. Network, Network, and Network Some More
Networking is an obvious action to take when you’re looking to grow your local marketing agency, but many people still aren’t taking this simple step.
Networking isn’t for everyone, and there are many reasons why you might be put off making time for it. If conventional in-person networking events really aren’t your thing, then you’ll want to explore the vast world of online networking.
Business relationships can often be built much more efficiently online than in the offline world. This is largely because you can deliberately seek out the most relevant people to connect with and conveniently continue the conversation through online messaging.
LinkedIn has long been a fantastic place for professionals to network. There’s ample opportunity to reach new clients and collaborate with other agencies on this platform.
Remember, these relationships should be beneficial to all involved. Don’t expect to simply further your own interests, you should also be thinking about what you can give and how you can provide value to others.
Growing Your Local Marketing Agency
Implementing these five actions can give you the push you need to grow your agency in a sustainable way.
Got your own fantastic ideas for scaling your agency? Share them with everyone in the comments section below!
