The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has put digitalization on a fast track. In 2020, many small and mid-sized businesses, which were skeptical of digitalization, began to invest in various digital marketing channels. From content marketing to SEO, almost every discipline of digital marketing has witnessed increased demand.
In 2020, 79% of B2B marketers reported their organization has a content marketing strategy. The survey also stated that 31% of B2B marketers said their organization was extremely or very successful with content marketing in the last 12 months. As a digital marketing agency, you must have already experienced this change.
As the digital marketplace is growing by leaps and bounds, this is the right time to expand your digital marketing business. Here are a few tips that you can use to fast-track the growth of your digital marketing firm.
1. Focus On Specialization
Digital marketing is one of the fiercely competitive industries, with new competitors entering the market every month. In 2021, there were 5,585 digital advertising agencies in the US, an increase of 13.1% from 2020.
You can overcome this intense competition in many ways. One of the best ways is to focus on specialization. There is nothing wrong with offering a plethora of digital marketing services under one roof. But, the more diverse your offerings are, the more competition your business will face.
Besides, specialization will help you attract clients that exclusively need your services. So, they are more likely to continue doing business with you as long as you keep them happy. Another benefit of specialization is that you can carve out a niche of your own. Once you have established your agency as an expert in this niche, lead generation will be relatively smooth.
Specialization comes in many forms. One way is to focus on offering a specific digital marketing service. For example, you can focus on providing only content marketing services to businesses across industries. It will help you attract clients interested in only content marketing.
On the other hand, you can focus on a specific niche. For example, you can offer full-fledge digital marketing services to law firms or lawyers. As you have a high-specific target audience, you will face comparatively less competition.
2. Leverage Your in-House Talent for Brand Promotion
Constant brand promotion is a cardinal rule of running a digital marketing agency. You need fresh, relevant, and insightful content to keep your brand name in the limelight. That’s where your in-house talent can help.
You can leverage this in-house talent to promote your agency and also create fresh content. For example, if you are a B2B marketing agency, your focus is probably on LinkedIn. You may already be publishing blog posts, videos, and other content on this page.
Like most digital marketing companies, what you may not have thought about is using your employees’ LinkedIn profiles to promote your business. We are not talking about getting likes, comments, and shares from your employees on LinkedIn or other social media platforms. It is about encouraging your employees to share their opinion, thoughts, experience, and knowledge.
In fact, you can create a content strategy that involves your employees. For example, you can share a pillar post on B2B content marketing on your company’s LinkedIn page. You can ask your employees to share small posts on each topic covered in the main article.
Interlinking these posts can help increase your reach. As each article will offer unique insights from your employees, the content will be very engaging. This will bring in highly qualified leads.
All three stakeholders can benefit from this strategy.
- Your target audience gets valuable, informative, and fresh content.
- Your employees can build and improve their online credibility as industry experts.
- Your agency enjoys a higher reach and better sales conversions.
3. Start Your Own Podcast
For a digital marketing agency, podcasting is an excellent marketing channel. The most significant advantage of a podcast is that it appeals to big spenders such as millennials and Gen X.
In 2021, 41% of people in the US (aged 12+) listened to a podcast in the last month, up from 37% in 2020. On the other hand, 28% of Americans (aged 12+) did it in the past week, up from 24% in 2020. Starting your own podcast will allow you o tap into this growing target audience.
Podcasting is an excellent marketing tool because it offers several SEO advantages
- Optimizing your podcast titles and descriptions on publishing platforms like iTunes can help you improve your local search result rankings.
- You can also publish a transcript of each episode on your blog, which will boost your SEO.
- Podcasting also allows you to interact with industry experts, influencers, and your peers. They will promote your podcast (and indirectly your agency) on their online turf.
You can also encourage your employees to share their knowledge and insights on the podcast. - Podcasting will position your digital marketing agency as an industry expert in no time. That, in turn, will help you build a loyal customer base.
- To increase your reach, you can also share podcast episodes on social media.
Although blogging offers similar benefits, a podcast is much more interactive. As a result, it can help increase your online visibility significantly and in a relatively shorter time.
Many businesses still haven’t realized the true potential of podcasting as a marketing tool. In other words, the sooner you get on the podcasting wagon, the quicker you can get ahead of your competitors.
4. Master the Art of Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
It is necessary to get new leads and convert them into your customers to grow your digital marketing business. However, onboarding a new client is more time-consuming and expensive than cross-selling or up-selling to an existing client. If the customer is already satisfied with your service, you can up-sell or cross-sell a new service or product smoothly.
However, you do need to keep the following things in mind
- First, you need to identify existing happy customers. A simple monthly consumer satisfaction survey can help you find them.
- You must never cross upsell to an unhappy or angry customer. It can quickly escalate into bad word-of-mouth for your business.
- Focus on explaining to the customer how they will benefit from a particular service or product. Make sure to demonstrate the potential benefits with a customized presentation.
- Another crucial point to remember is you should only cross-sell or up-sell the services or products your clients need. For example, if a client is happy with your web design service, pitching them a content marketing service to improve their on-site blog and on-site content is a good idea.
- Never cross-sell or up-sell more than 25%. You don’t want to put excessive financial pressure on your clients.
- Your sales tactics will also depend on the current industry trends. For example, the current COVID-19 pandemic has increased the consumption of digital content. So, pitching content marketing packages to your existing clientele makes more sense.
Make sure not to put pressure on your customers when up-selling or cross-selling. They will make the purchase when they are ready. Be patient and keep following up periodically.
Parting Words
Expanding your digital marketing business is easier said than done. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. As a result, you will need to keep innovating and upgrading your marketing strategies continuously. Feel free to use these four tips to ramp up your business’s growth. We want to take this conversation forward. Do tell us which tactic you want to try first. Give us a call today at 919-944-8999.
