In our line of work, I hear from new business owners all the time who want to know how they can accelerate their business success. Fortunately, digital marketers have endless opportunities to forge ahead in an ever-expanding industry.
Whether you plan to work with just a few clients or set the stage for a larger company, you need to know the areas to prioritize. Some of them may seem familiar to you, while others may require you to learn new skills or to outsource major tasks.
If you’re considering what best next steps to take, I’ve compiled a list of seven strategic moves you can make to rapidly improve your business ventures.
7 Steps to Take Your Agency to the Next Level
Try the following tips as a part of your future growth strategy:
1. Prioritize Your Branding
Your branding gives the public a specific picture of your company. It represents the story you want to tell and the style in which you do business.
If you haven’t established your brand yet, consider the goals and values of your company. What story do you want to tell? How do you want customers and potential customers to view you? What’s your mission? Your brand should encapsulate the main points, keeping in mind the needs of the customer.
Once you have a strategy set for your brand, work on improving the structure. Don’t get overwhelmed – you don’t have to do it all at once. Build up the branded content on your social media platforms. Add to your website’s content, including blog posts. Make your style and messaging stand out by representing your unique brand, and you’ll attract customers.
2. Focus Your Efforts On Purchasing Prospects
By zeroing in on the pursuit of those customers most likely to purchase what you sell, you increase your efficiency. Digital marketing gives you the chance to identify an audience and target their specific interests. Once that’s narrowed down, you send personalized messages to them by way of marketing emails, messages, social media, or your website.
Social media now has brilliant features for business owners to target audiences. Ad targeting includes variables like location, interests, age, gender, and behaviors. This gives you an easy way to get personal with audience members that follow you on various platforms. You can use pay-per-click (PPC) to get ads in front of users who’ve shown interest in products or services similar to yours. The same goes for getting ads to users who’ve searched for keywords related to your company or market. Keep this narrow focus when it comes to the SEO strategies you use across all your platforms and media outlets.
3. Make Your Specialization a Selling Point
What do you do that’s different from others in your industry? Take your unique offering and turn it into a selling point that makes you stand out from other competitors. Get a thorough understanding of your unique selling point. Some people write down a few versions in a document that they share on their website or work into their messaging.
Your specific expertise will help you gain leads because it increases your distinctness among others in the industry. This improves your branding, too, as customers recognize your specialty.
4. Find and Optimize Your Website’s Keywords
What keywords come to mind when you think of topics associated with your company? The most common searches will include the title of your industry, the identity of your target audience, and services and products businesses like yours have to offer. Someone who wants to hire a digital marketing company might look for a “digital marketing agency,” “analytics,” or “social media marketing.”
It may take time, but work on incorporating keywords into your SEO throughout your website’s content. You may even want to consider the addition of negative keywords to tell search engines when not to show your content and ads. All of this work gives you a better probability of higher ranks in search engines because they comb your website for language before listing them in results for users.
5. Plan Your Upselling Process
When you check out at a store and the seller asks you if you’d like to add one more specific item to your purchase, that’s upselling. It adds a little more to each transaction, and it makes an impact over time.
Upselling works best when the customer understands why their current purchase agreement will be enhanced by further product. When your second offer adds value and benefits to what they already want to buy, they’ll often give a resounding, “Yes!”
So, how can you solve some of their biggest pain points? Offer it as an add-on to their purchase and gain more revenue while you benefit your clients.
6. Develop an Expansion Strategy
The process you have for attracting new clients should scale with your company. This often comes down to how much delegation the owner does, and how many tasks get automated.
Does time management turn into a problem for you or your employees? Is the workload appropriate and manageable? Work to find these or other specific areas to improve and move toward company objectives. If you find yourself buried under tasks, start trusting others to handle them for you. Additionally, if you find yourself spending too much time on repetitive activities, find ways to streamline and automate them.
7. Leverage Client Referrals
This strategy works so well because it gives satisfied customers an incentive to recommend a business to other potential customers. Those potential customers often fit the mold of your target audience. What kind of offers can you provide to current clients and customers that will incentivize them to participate in your program?
For example, in my agency, we sometimes give free items or discounted services to those who refer us to their network.
Follow these 7 tips, and you’ll grow your digital marketing agency much faster. Plus, you’ll have a competitive edge over others in your market.
If you want to learn how to build a recession-proof, automated business, check out our FREE, 15-minute training and start generating at least $8k per month in weeks.