Start a Digital Marketing Agency in 2022
Have you been considering if it’s time to start a digital marketing agency, and begin building your own success business? Have you been working as a digital marketer, say under an employer or as a freelancer, but know the benefits and profits you would get by starting your own company and building your own client base.
In this 2022 guide on how to start a digital marketing agency we help you understand what it takes to launch and grow a successful online marketing agency that can generate you amazing income while helping others be successful as well!
So let’s dive into what it takes to start a digital marketing agency in 2022 (and increase your chances of success), and our Top 10 ways digital marketing agencies can attract new customers.
Start a Digital Marketing Agency in 2022!
Starting off, many agencies fail to put in as much effort for promoting their own business as they do for their clients. Just as many doctors don’t lead a healthy lifestyle, similarly, many digital marketers don’t bother to apply the right strategies for their own agency.
While you have been working hard to make your clients’ websites rank higher on the SERPs, you may not give the same efforts to boost the rankings of your own digital marketing agency portal.
With the rising popularity of digital marketing agencies, it’s necessary that you invest some time in yourself to stand out. Attracting new clients might seem a hectic task, especially if you are one of those digital marketers who think they are not able to justify their service fees.
Digital marketing is extremely essential for today’s digitized world when every consumer is shopping online. Statistics show that till now, 69% of Americans have done online shopping, and 25% do so at least once every month. eCommerce businesses are looking for more efficient digital marketing teams to boost their monthly sales.
However, some businesses fail to realize that the results are not seen overnight, which many expect. This is why many of your clients might ask for a proper justification of the fees you are demanding.
But it should not bring your morale down. You can persuade your clients better by implementing the right marketing strategies for your agency.
Start a Digital Marketing Agency
So, here are the top 10 ways digital marketing agencies can attract new customers, which you need to understand if you want to start a digital marketing agency in 2022!
1. Make Your USP Stand Out
Define your unique selling proposition and make it stand out. What is it that differentiates you from your competitors? Do you build custom tools? What is your niche? Do you have a unique company culture? Do you believe in diversity? Are you producing a higher ROI consistently compared to other agencies?
Even if your USP is already followed by your competitors, everybody is not mentioning or at least highlighting all their unique points. So feel free to mention yours. Also, try to give a unique personal touch to your business, which would attract new clients.
Make sure to say out your USP loud and bold, and mention it frequently. Include your unique points in every campaign you run to emphasis the value of your brand and your mission. Clients would love to invest in your services in exchange for that business value you are offering.
2. Establish Your Niche
You may feel confident in working with multiple clients and may have, in fact, tried that out well. it is easy to get tempted to generate as many leads as possible. However, doing so, you may face two problems:
- Trying to offer varied services, such as SEO, content creation, branding, web development, etc., to different clients from industries like healthcare, eCommerce, IT, etc., it might lose your overall credibility. After all, you don’t want to sound like a ‘jack of all trades’, an impression that your clients would definitely not go for!
- Next, providing a range of services and having a wide array of targeted clients would increase your work pressure. Keeping up pace with multiple workflows and resources would be quite challenging, which might further reduce your productivity. Moreover, you would find it extremely difficult to keep up with the changing demands and needs of your diverse clients.
It’s better to choose a single niche and work on that more efficiently. It will also help you to maintain the service quality and deliver finished projects on time. Besides, your clients will always want to work with an experienced professional who has been working in that particular industry, and hence can deliver more fruitful results. This way, you can enhance your brand name and develop strong relationships with your clients.
Other advantages of niche marketing include –
- Generating higher ROI
- Facing less competition
- Enhanced customer loyalty and developing better relationships
- Increased visibility
- Less resources required
- Becoming an expert in a specific area
3. Know What Your Clients Want
It’s tempting to pitch your clients your way and offer the services you have been providing others. Never make the mistake of giving generalized solutions because each client deserves special attention. The last thing your clients want to hear about is a list of the services you excel at.
So, stop talking and start listening! Learn what your clients want. Each of them have unique requirements for their business, which vary largely depending on their short and long-term goals, their business vision and mission, their company cultures, and the like.
Make a habit of treating each client differently to cater to their unique needs and interests. Having an in-depth understanding of what they are looking for is crucial to the success of your agency. The following tips might help you serve them better:
● Research Your Client’s Buyer Journey
Now that you have learned who your client is and what his/her typical needs are, you still need to know whether s/he will hire you. This is why you should learn about the buyer journey of your client.
There are various sages in a buyer journey, the three most significant of them include –
- Awareness Stage: This is where your client realizes that s/he is facing issues with the existing website and wants to do something about it to boost conversions.
- Consideration Stage: This is the stage when your client realizes that s/he needs to upgrade to a new website, and is looking for ways to do so.
- Decision Stage: In this stage, your client has already made the decision regarding the resources they would require to upgrade their website and is searching for professional marketers.
It is crucial to know at which stage of the buyer journey your client is standing. This will help you to identify your potential clients at every stage.
● Create Client Personas
To enhance the process of identifying the type of clients you want to work with and those you won’t, create several persona templates, such as by outlining your clients’ job roles and responsibilities, the industry they work in, their goals, strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and the like.
For instance, if you are providing web development services to startups and SMEs, you must gather essential details like –
- Your client’s industry type and business model
- The employee strength of your client
- The short and long term goals of your client (such as brand building, driving traffic, etc.)
- The keywords or keyphrases you client uses
- What specific solutions does your client need
- What are the challenges your client is often facing (like limited bandwidth or other resources, scalability, etc.)
- What are the social media platforms or forums that your client is active on (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Instagram, etc.)
In this manner, you can get better in-depth insights into the marketing communication channels of your client and objectives s/he is trying to achieve. Additionally, you can understand the issues your client is currently facing.
4. Know Your Industry Well
Before the planning stage or prior to implementing your strategies, do your own homework regarding the type of industry you are working in. Learn about your competitors’ techniques and activities, and think what you can do differently.
In this stage, you must also decide your service charges and try to provide competitive prices. However, always try to justify your services with your rates and make sure your clients realize that it is worth paying for your services.
Learn from your friends and close ones and gather as many ideas as possible. Check what industry leaders are suggesting and how they have been approaching their digital marketing practices. Read about success stories and the strategies they have taken in practice. Form strong networks within your community and learn industry-specific facts.
5. Treat Yourself As Your Own Client
While handling your client’s businesses, you might often take your own business for granted and fail to put in the efforts your agency needs to get new clients. To get the required motivation, you must start seeing yourself as your own client. In this way, you can start the procedures of marketing your agency and its services and work on attracting more clients.
The process also requires good time management skills on your part and you need to schedule your core tasks, while also working for other clients. If you don’t start today, you won’t be able to do it tomorrow either.
Make sure not to miss out on any step that you normally take while serving your clients. Do whatever it takes to develop your business portal, starting from creating a brand guide, collecting relevant data to making efficient data-driven marketing strategies.
After the planning stage, focus on implementing your strategies and involve as many resources as your need with other clients. Give exactly the same kind of attention and focus and never compromise on anything thinking that you have nobody to impress. You need to impress yourself and your new clients.
To develop a strong bond with your target audience, try taking storytelling approaches and don’t forget to give a personal touch. Further, never compromise with the quality because your website is also a sample work for your clients.
Interested business owners will definitely study your marketing techniques and see how well you have done it with your own brand. Hence, this is, in a way, the first step towards attracting new clients.
6. Blog About Digital Marketing
Most of the modern-day digital marketers are largely into blogging. This helps your clients know your strategies better and also learn about the value of your services.
You might already be telling your clients about a million things they should do to improve their SERP rankings. Why not deliver this valuable message in an open forum, such as through blogs? It will also enable you to learn to see things from a new perspective and identify your own mistakes that you might have been making.
For instance, you can talk about the importance of content marketing, or the latest trends in digital marketing. Because before investing their valuable money into any digital marketing service, your clients would first like to teach themselves first regarding the solutions that are best for them.
Many businesses, in fact, try to do their own marketing initially to cut down their costs. If you provide effective solutions which they find fruitful, they might even consider hiring you in the long run when responsibilities increase or when they find that implementing those strategies become difficult.
Further, your digital marketing blogs add credibility to your brand image, enabling you to get more SEO clients. So, blogging is a great way to find new clients in your niche. In fact, potential clients are keen on finding out whether you yourself is following all the tips you are mentioning in your articles.
Apart from putting up your own blogging sites or platforms, you can also do guest blogging for other websites. It would help you to explore new topics and aspects in digital marketing, thus improving your own marketing skills and strategies.
7. Email Marketing is a Must!
An effective way to connect with your clients is email marketing, because it is the easiest way to reach new clients. Even if your target people don’t have social media accounts, they will be available via email. Through emails, you can reach a wide number of people in your target group without spending almost nothing.
The best thing is email marketing campaigns notify your clients instantly and hence, carry a sense of immediacy. Further, you can even send personalized emails to each of them. According to another research, about 26% customers love it when the email addresses the recipient by his/her name.
For instance, you can send them special offers or discounts on their birthdays or anniversaries, sharing customized solutions to address their specific problems, or informing them about new product launches that might help them meet their unique business goals.
Through email marketing, you can save printing costs invested in flyers, brochures, etc. You can even run a subscription campaign by making your visitors sign in to your newsletter, which you can send them over to their email addresses. In this way, you can also get a list of your interested clients’ email ids, using which you can send them promotional or educational content as well.
Sending an email helps your clients receive your contact numbers, addresses, emails, and website and social media links, through which your clients can get back to you in times of need.
8. Be Active on Social Media
Create business accounts on all the major social media platforms to reach new clients. Studies made by Oberlo show that there are 3.5 billion social media users across the world, among which, Facebook is the most popular. You can check-out a great local NYC social media marketing agency we helped get ranked #1.
Also, interestingly, users spend around 3 hours every day on messaging and social networking. This is why social media targeting could be one of the most effective methods. Moreover, being active on social media increases your brand awareness and allows more people in your target group to know about you.
Further, social media is the best place to interact with your customers, such as by solving their issues and answering their queries. By letting your clients know that there is a concerned person behind your brand increases client engagement.
Besides, being on social media gives you a chance to follow your clients, their activities, their target audience, and their business goals. This further lets you understand them better and hence, plan your marketing strategies more efficiently.
The best way to boost customer experience is to ask them whether they need any help. Focus on humanizing your brand as much as possible and let your business have a voice that addresses the common issues clients often face. Share relevant content and keep posting regularly, which may vary from educational to promotional, keeping a balance between both.
9. Work in Partnerships
Try working with other businesses as much as possible, such as while getting testimonials or backlinks to your website. It allows you to explore new opportunities and marketing techniques, gain better access to new and advanced resources, reach new markets, and grab the attention of new clients.
Partnerships can be beneficial for both parties – be it you and your clients or the business you are working with. Further, if you are working with a business having good brand name and image in the market, it will improve your credibility and brand awareness. Getting featured on others’ websites also helps to expand your services.
We truly believe in great partnerships and this is why we created perhaps the best affiliate program online!
10. Get Customer Testimonials
These are positive reviews earned from your happy customers and you can feature them across several channels or platforms. Genuine customer testimonials attract new clients who base their buying decisions on these reviews.
In fact, according to Spiegel, around 95% of customers consider reading reviews and testimonials from real customers before making a purchase. Testimonials are a way to build trust and credibility among your new or potential clients.
Start a Digital Marketing Agency in 2022
After learning the above strategies, now it’s your turn to implement them in the best possible way and work on growing your digital marketing agency. As already said, treat your website as a sample work that can grab your visitors’ attention. And as always, if you need help getting started reach out to us now.
Take out the time from your busy work schedule and dedicate a significant portion of your day in building your business portal, which is your future!
