How to Generate Leads for Your Digital Marketing Agency
by Mike Khorev
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:
Awareness
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.
Interaction
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.
Interest
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 a purchase, your main goal here is to keep them interested until they develop a desire to buy.
Action
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 digital marketing strategy for startups, 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:
- Blogs:
Look along the lines of tips and tricks. Write engaging, timely, and industry-specific articles relevant to your clients.
- Social media:
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 workflow.
- Videos:
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.
- Infographics :
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 consultancy 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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Comments
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Thanks for this, Mike, I think it’s a simple but concise post, I’m not in the digital marketing agency business myself, but I think I can use some of these in my business.
I’d probably add that nowadays since many search queries on Google now result in rich snippets, we should also aim to get ranked in these rich snippet spots. Depending on your content and industry, there might be opportunities to generate leads from them.
Hi there Winda, thanks for visiting!
You’re right, more and more queries now have featured snippets in their SERPs, but even when we rank for these spots, most of the time they won’t bring any traffic to our sites since the user is already satisfied with the information included in the snippet (which is the intention of the featured snippet in the first place).
However, there are indeed cases where being ranked as a featured snippet can be a very effective source of leads, for example, if you are a local business, being ranked on Google Maps result (a type of featured snippet) is very effective in generating traffic, leads, and sales. Also, being featured as the answer to a very relevant question for your niche can generate a lot of organic traffic indirectly due to brand exposure.
Hope it helps, and thanks for the suggestion.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the cool article, enjoyed it. Yet, I’m a little bit unclear about the marketing funnel section. What actually is a marketing funnel? Is it some kind of software we put on our site, or?
Good question and you’re right, probably I can be more clear in explaining the concept of the marketing funnel, thanks, I’ll probably create a specific post for this, so stay tuned.
In a nutshell, marketing funnel—or sales funnel— is the ‘flow’ or ‘journey’ designed on your website, where a specific visitor should navigate from step a, b, c, and so on until they finally convert or leave your site. The steps should be designed according to the buyer journey’s stages, which I have discussed in the article: awareness, interaction, interest, and action.
For example, it can be something like this:
Awareness stage, step a: the site visitor stumbled upon your content or advertising and visit your site
Interaction stage, step b: we offer something valuable, for example, an ebook in exchange for the visitor’s contact information, mainly email address
Interest stage, step c: we promote other content pieces or offers that might interest them
Action stage, step D: we give this customer a limited-time offer to create a sense of urgency so they can finally convert
There can be more steps included and there can be many different ‘flows’ you can design. The main principle is that the fewer steps included in the funnel, the more people you can keep and convert.
This is just the basics of the marketing funnel, but hopefully, it’s clear enough to cover your needs. Again, stay tuned for our content covering this marketing funnel topic.
Hi Mike – Awesome article! Totally agree that creating great content is one of the best ways to get more inbound leads for agencies. To add to this topic, here’s an article we wrote about lead generation for agencies: https://www.leadfuze.com/automated-lead-generation/