How to Quickly & Efficiently Scale Your Marketing Agency

Agencies thrive on expansion. Either you succeed or you fail. Sadly, it appears that much digital marketing and creative organizations have done the latter in the last 24 months. Most marketing agencies don’t know how to scale effectively, which is why they fail. They may develop, but it is usually little and gradual. To put it another way, a 10% rise in revenue is frequently accompanied by a 7-10% increase in costs. As a result, despite higher top-line sales, net profit remains stable. The goal must be scalable expansion. To put it another way, you need to figure out how to grow your agency quickly and profitably.

Are These Factors Limiting Your Marketing Agency’s Growth?

Before we get too deep in the weeds of scaling your marketing agency, let’s take a look at some of the factors that may be limiting your growth.

• Interchangeability. If someone lands on your website, reads one of your emails, or visits one of your social media pages, is it, undeniably, 100 percent unique? Or could they visit the website of any other random agency online and find the same stuff? If your online presence is interchangeable, you’ll never grow at the rate you desire. You must be unique.
• No discretion. Do you take on any new client who is interested in your services? This might be fine in the early stages of starting an agency, but poor discretion with new clients is one of the biggest limiting factors in growth.
• Poor UX. How is your online user experience(UX)? If it’s full of friction, good luck convincing top clients to work with you. They’re judging your ability to help them based on your online presence. If it doesn’t pass the smell test, they’re gone.
• Financial mismanagement. A lack of proper financial management behind the scenes can wreak havoc on your business and prevent you from ever achieving the sort of growth numbers you’re searching for. One big example of this is the failure to have an emergency fund (which is caused by pulling all of your profits out of the business each month).
• Client creeps. One of the tricky parts about running an agency is that you’re responsible for so many different aspects of your client’s businesses. Unfortunately, lines can get blurred and you can end up working on things that you really shouldn’t be spending your time on in the first place. This is called “client creep.”
• DIY mentality. Do you have a DIY mentality where you feel as if you have to do everything on your own? Once again, this stifles growth. You must learn how to outsource, delegate, and take a step back (so that you can work on your business and not in it.) Chances are, at least one of these factors is at play in your agency (and it’s preventing you from achieving the sort of growth you want and need). Start by identifying what these factor(s) are. Then move on to the next section to learn how to scale your agency with ease.

5 Tips for Scaling Your Marketing Agency

Okay, now that we’ve discussed some of the factors that inhibit agency growth, let’s take a look at a few of my favorite strategies for scaling an agency.

1) Develop a Niche & USP

If you’re a generalist, good luck scaling your agency. Nobody wants to work with a general agency these days. You need to niche down and build your agency on a very specific and unique message. Options for niching down include geography (businesses in New York), industry (financial services), company size (500 to 2,000 employees), or even business model (Software as a Service). Once you have a niche identified, it’s time to develop a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to communicate exactly what sets you apart from the competition. You can create a USP using any number of different formulas, but here’s a very simple and effective one: “We help [NICHE] achieve [BIGGEST DESIRE] without [PAIN POINT].” For example, “We help lawyers add 20 new clients per month without having to run radio ads or obnoxious TV commercials.” It’s also helpful if you can create a name for the system or process you use. (This is often referred to as a “unique mechanism.”) You don’t have to change anything about the way you do business – you just need to give your process a name. Here are some examples:

• The Exposure Blueprint
• Online Growth System
• Digital Catalyst Process

You can include your unique mechanism within your USP. Using the example above, it would look like this: “Lawyers use our ‘Digital Catalyst Process’ to add 20 new clients per month without having to run radio ads or obnoxious TV commercials.” Do you see how much more powerful your message would be if you were to niche down, name your unique mechanism, and create a distinct USP?

2) Improve Onboarding

You can save yourself a lot of time (and cut down on client creep) by improving your onboarding process. More specifically, you should take this time to gather the right information and set proper expectations. When a client agrees to work with you, they should be required to fill out very specific forms that give you all of the pertinent information you need to help them grow. This includes things like logos, color hex codes, mission statements, value propositions, all digital assets, company history, logins and passwords for social accounts, etc. At the same time, you need to go through exactly what is included in your services and what’s not. Make it very clear that anything not included in your services has an additional monthly charge.

3) Outsource Time-Consuming Lines of Business

There are certain elements of your client packages that are simply not time-efficient for you. In other words, they take way more time than they’re worth (or they’re outside of your area of expertise). Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great example. Unless you have a background in SEO, it probably doesn’t come naturally to you. The good news is that you can still offer these services to your clients – you just have to outsource them. With white label SEO, you’re able to partner with an experienced SEO company on the backend and offer branded and personalized SEO services to your clients on the front end.

4) Have Freelancers on Speed Dial

Part of scaling an agency is being ready for anything. While it would be nice if your business called in a very predictable way, this isn’t always the case. One month you might add one client and the next you might add 11. You have to be ready for both scenarios. Because it’s not practical (or smart) to hire more employees than you need at the moment, the best option is to have a list of reliable freelancers on speed dial who can take on contract work to help you temporarily fill gaps.

5) Create SOPs for Everything

The first time you do something is always going to be the most time-consuming and expensive. But if you learn how to document and repeat these processes in the future, you can save time and money down the road. Want an easy way to organize your business and make it to where tasks can be handed off to new hires with minimal training? The secret is to develop Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). These are documents that explain how a task is handled in a series of simple steps. Whenever an employee is promoted or leaves, all you have to do is hand SOPs to the replacement and they can take over from there.

Execution in Scaling Your Marketing Agency

I simply provided you with a wealth of knowledge and suggestions. And, with that in mind, don’t try to implement them all this week (or even this month). Instead, choose one tip and put it into action right away. Move on to the next one once you’ve perfected the first. This methodical strategy will eventually bear fruit. It may take some time, but your agency will be in much better shape in six to twelve months.