August 23, 2017

3 Ways Agencies Are Missing Out on Helping Clients

Reading time about 6 min

As an agency, clients depend on your expertise to move their business forward.

This means it’s important that you find and act on every possible area of opportunity.

But, this is often easier said than done. Marketing is a vast field with almost unlimited opportunities (and mistakes).

When in doubt — it’s best to prioritize on your client’s objectives rather than specific deliverables. In doing this, you are guaranteed to achieve positive results for your clients and keep them coming back for more.

In this article, I will discuss 3 commonly overlooked marketing objectives that give agencies the opportunity to add a ton of value for clients:

1. Converting unknown visitors into known prospects

One of the biggest challenges of doing any sort of business online is turning anonymous web traffic into real business leads or even customers.

For business owners with a lack of digital marketing experience, this problem can often seem insurmountable. So, this gives you the opportunity to save the day.

But, how exactly do you do this?

Build a lead-generating website design

If you want to collect online leads for your client, you need to start at the source: the website.

Optimizing your client’s website for lead generation from the outset will make it much easier to see results down the line.

To do this, you should focus on the following:

Optin strategy – Whether it’s getting newsletter subscribers or leads through gated content, your client needs to have a good optin strategy.
Calls to action – Test various calls to action and see which tactics perform the best. These should include gated content, general newsletter, discount promotions, etc.
Content strategy – Help your client figure out what types of content is going to bring in new leads and encourage them to sign up.

The strategy behind the design of the website is extremely important to lead generation. Clients need agency help in this area if they truly want to see success straight out of the gate.

2. Maintaining brand consistency in communications

One of the main goals in marketing is to create awareness and trust with your business among current and potential customers.

The best way to achieve this is to maintain brand consistency across all channels of communication and build a positive reputation for your business. This sets customer expectations and builds confidence in a business.

As your client’s resident marketing expert, it’s your job to make sure that their messaging is always on point, and here’s how to do it:

Audit your client’s marketing communications

The first step is to actually take a look at what your clients are sending out. This audit should include all marketing communication channels, including:

Email communications
Social media posts and responses
Advertisements

Start off by making sure that the brand message is consistent across all communications on these platforms.

Email, in particular, is important because there are many different types of email (welcome messages, promotional emails, newsletters, etc.) and the branding should always be recognizable and consistent.

Once you know how well your client has maintained brand consistency, you should analyze the engagement that they’ve seen across channels.

If the responses are largely negative, it might be a good idea to change up your client’s brand messaging.

Create a framework for future communications

Now that you have knowledge on what’s working for your client in terms of brand communication, help them scale the solution.

Create email templates – Look at the different types of emails your client is sending and make consistently branded email templates to match their needs. Tools like Sendinblue’s responsive email design builder make this a walk in the park.
Monitor social media – Using a social media tool like Mention makes it incredibly easy to help your clients monitor any mentions of their brand.
Prepare some boilerplate language – Part of monitoring social media means responding to negative customer mentions. Having some boilerplate language that is brand consistent will make these interactions much more painless for your client.

With your help building out these tactics, your client will be able to easily manage on-brand communications at scale.

3. Expanding the reach of their business

After helping clients identify prospects and refining the communication process, the only question left is how to reach even more prospects.

Of course, this is the question all marketers ask themselves. But, agencies often serve as their clients marketing “brain.” So, it’s up to you to figure out how your client can reach more prospects and extend the reach of their business.

Start with the content marketing strategy

As I mentioned in the post above, content is great at bringing anonymous traffic to your client’s site for lead generation.

But, it does a LOT more than that.

Content marketing is the front lines of building trust with customers as well as credibility for search engine rankings.

But, in order to help, the content has to be relevant and high-quality. You can do a few things to help clients figure out what to write about:

Use social listening to see what competitors and customers are posting about on social media.
Map out the purchase process for a customer and find topics that fill in knowledge gaps and help move the process along.
Have clients follow industry influencers and try to write articles that take new angles on industry concepts to become a thought leader and informational resource for prospects.
Show clients how to do a keyword research to expand on related ideas that address what people are looking for on Google.

Plan out content promotion

After building a system to identify topics for content production, it’s time to promote those articles.

First stop: email marketing.

Including your client’s articles in an email newsletter is great because you can build your audience and track their engagement. Readers can also forward your newsletters to friends if they find it helpful.

Follow through with social media

Sharing articles on social media provides an easy way for your followers to amplify your reach through their own engagement.

Use feedback to iteratively improve

Tools like Sendinblue for email and Mention for social listening have powerful analytics.

With this real-time feedback on engagement, your clients can keep improving their content and promotion strategy to be better tailored to their audience.