🤔 Do you want to learn 13 practical agency growth tactics we’ve implemented to grow our agency?
👌 For a small, young agency, we’ve worked with some pretty cool brands including FIFA, Eurotunnel Le Shuttle, Boston Consulting Group, Nestlé and more.
👇 To get to this point, it’s taken a lot of hard work. In this blog, I want to open up and share the specific things we’ve done to get to where we are today.
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There Is No Silver Bullet
I recently spoke at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego and had the opportunity to create a video with Dylan Hey and the guys at Promo Republic which is a social media management platform.
Before getting on camera, Dylan asked me to share one quick tip focused on how agencies and freelancers can grow their agency.
I instantly thought, there has never been ‘one quick tip’ we’ve implemented that has helped us get to where we are. We’ve implemented a variety of tactics and strategies consistently over time.
The video has just gone live and it’s inspired me to actually think about all of the things we have done consistently over the years, hence this blog. I hope you find this useful.
13 Agency Growth Tactics We’ve Implemented
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #1[/highlight] Social Media Marketing
I want to begin with social media marketing as this is really how our whole business started. I remember reading this article by Matthew Barby, implementing the tips he shared and starting to build an audience on Twitter. That was where this all started.
Over the years, we’ve really focused on consistently learning and testing new social media strategies with our own creative twist to see what works.
A good place to start out with social media is to learn how to create a social media marketing strategy from scratch. From there, you can start consuming educational resources and start putting what you learn into practice.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”] Agency Growth Tactic #2[/highlight] Public Speaking
Public speaking really helped build up my influence up in the industry. I remember seeing Zoe Cairns speak at her event in Kent about 5 years ago and I was amazed at how everyone was so interested in everything she had to say.
I knew I needed to be where she was, so I arranged a coffee to ask for advice and she helped me land my first small speaking gig for the Kent Chamber of Commerce. I was bricking it. It went terribly as I was a nervous wreck.
Since then I’ve now spoken to audiences across the world and I love it.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #3[/highlight] Relationship Building
Looking back at the first ‘networking’ event I went to; I would have been hilarious to watch. My Dad knew a lady that was part of a networking group called Thanet Premier Business Group. I went to the group as a guest with no idea as to how these things worked, I just handed my business cards out like flyers.
I soon realised that no matter how good I thought I was, I needed to actually build trust before someone would become a customer.
A few months down the line and 3 people in the group booked onto a training day. I’d never done this before, and I was shitting myself. It was a disaster.
It took me about a month to prepare for and there was enough content for a week long training session. It was content overload and it was bloody awful. But I learnt a lot.
This was my first experience of ‘building relationships’ and it taught me a lot.
Here are some of the events that we love going to build relationships at currently;
🎯 Social Media Marketing World
🎯 Atomicon
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #4[/highlight] Influencer Marketing
We haven’t run any paid influencer marketing campaigns and it’s not something we specialise in (that’s what Goat Agency are for), but we’ve always consciously tried to build authentic relationships with influential people.
For example, in the early days there were certain people in Thanet District Council and Kent County Council that I’d make an extra effort to chat to whilst at networking events.
We eventually ended up delivering training for both councils, largely based to the trust we’d built with key decision makers.
It’s really important to build real, authentic relationships. Just doing something to try and take advantage of someone else’s audience will not work. You need to be genuine.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #5[/highlight] Blogging
Blogging has been something that we’ve almost stuck to doing every week for the past 4.5 years. Writing educational tutorials is where we started out and we continue to write them.
This has had a big impact on us being found in search and we now rank for some pretty decent keywords. It also helps us demonstrate our knowledge and expertise, especially when it comes to ‘consideration’ based content.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #6[/highlight] Live Shows
Being a guest on different live shows is another strategy we’ve implemented to help reach new audiences and demonstrate our knowledge and expertise in the industry.
Being honest, I’ve never pitched to be on a live show, they’ve all asked me, but I’d highly recommend pitching to relevant live shows if you’re just starting out, rather than just waiting around for them like me.
Below is a recent example of me on The Social Media Marketing Talk Show.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #7[/highlight] Podcasts
Similar to live shows, podcasts have been a great way to reach new audiences. Again, I’ve only ever waited to be invited on podcasts as a guest, but this isn’t something I’d recommend doing.
We’re in the process of coming up with an outreach process to pitch to be on podcasts and I’d recommend you do the same.
Being on the Youpreneur podcast with Chris Ducker was probably my first big break in terms of being on a well-known podcast.
One of my favourites was being on Mike Stelzner’s Podcast.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #8[/highlight] Conferences
Going to conferences is something else we consciously do to build relationships and learn the latest industry insights. I’ve already mentioned some of my favourites above.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #9[/highlight] Guest Blogging
Writing for Social Media Examiner was our first big break that really helped us build my influence and be names as the #12 Most Influential Digital Marketer on Twitter in 2016 by Onalytica.
High-authority Twitter users sharing my articles and tagging me helped build up my influence on the platform.
I then started writing for Content Marketing Institute which built my influence up further to a completely new audience. Also, the high-authority backlinks to our website really helped drive our SEO amongst other things.
I didn’t actually write that many articles but the few I did write had a huge impact on my perceived influence in the industry which opened a lot of doors.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #10[/highlight] Collaborative Video Content
I’ve featured in lots of other companies’, creators’ and entrepreneurs’ videos and it’s helped us reach lots of new audiences. How often are you actively seeking these opportunities out?
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #11[/highlight] Sales Process Management
When Lloyd and I started using HubSpot’s free CRM and Sales software to create and manage our sales process it had a huge impact on our business. We actually created a HubSpot Tutorial (below) you should check out.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #12[/highlight] Be A Practitioner
Getting our hands dirty and actually doing the work we talk so much about really helps us demonstrate our knowledge and expertise on stage, in our videos, when speaking to people etc.
We’re still creating our own content, running our own ads, writing our blogs and this gives us the ability to understand and demonstrate we know the finer details about how to effectively use online platforms to sell products and services.
If you’re trying to sell, make sure you truly understand what you are selling.
[highlight background=”#FFFBCC” color=”#ed1d2b”]Agency Growth Tactic #13[/highlight] Invest In Learing
This doesn’t have to be money; it can be time. The only real money we invest in learning is going to conferences, we’ve never paid for any online courses or consultancy etc.
I’m not saying this is the right path to go down for you, but for us almost all of our learning has come from consuming free online resources and putting what we learn into practice.
Discover the channels that help you learn in the most effective way and put a plan in place to consistently utilise them.
Over To You
I’m sure I’ve missed a ton of stuff out, but these are the things that really come to mind when we look back at how we’ve grown our agency so far. We’ve still got a long way to go.
If you have any questions about anything I’ve said feel free to comment below and I’ll get right back to you.
