Want to take your agency to the next level? These pro tips get you there.
Dav Nash
6 min read
A business looking to make an impact online in this day and age needs to be fully aware of all the weapons at its disposal. Turning the market in their favour means looking out for every percentage point it can gain ahead of the competition, and this is why so many businesses turn to digital agencies. A mastery of the tactics and tools that impact online performance is something people are prepared to pay for, and for you as a digital agency this represents a real and exciting opportunity.
It is not compulsory for a digital agency to offer every kind of digital service under the sun, but it is certainly useful if you can offer as many as possible. Expert digital services under the umbrella of a full digital agency mean that you can take a client account and not need to outsource the bits that are beyond your capabilities. This may be difficult for a business that is just getting started, but it is something to aim for in the long term, whether through hiring experts in each category or potentially by merging with an agency that offers the support you need.
The more you can offer to clients, the more clients you can land, so it is key to always be looking for the most effective way to offer the full digital agency slate of services. How you do this is up to you, but a smart beginning is to balance the prices you can charge for what you offer against the cost to you of delivering those services. Whether that is by outsourcing elements of your offer, merging with another agency or hiring the best people, always look for ways to augment your value.
There is a clear trade-off in the relationship between a client and a full digital agency. While the client could attempt to perform the digital work on an account themselves, and might even make a decent job of it, they pay for the expertise of an agency because you bring the ingenuity that turns their product into an in-demand thing. Everyone in their industry has something to bring to market; by delivering it with a flourish, you give them the chance to steal a march on their competitors.
Creativity is a key driver in engagement. Your ability to make someone else’s service stand out, and stick in the memory of potential customers, is what makes you unique and valuable to your potential clients. When hiring staff and deciding on creative decisions, it’s important to emphasise how you can deliver something your own competitors won’t.
Social media didn’t exist in any meaningful sense at the start of the century. In just a few decades it has gone on to be indispensable: not only do businesses rely on it for publicity, governments and media franchises would be lost without it. It’s naturally fundamental to any online presence a business wishes to build, and equally that means you need to have ideas for how you will harness it in your prospective client’s favour. It may be that you take responsibility for managing their social media side; if you do, you need to have a plan.
There are more questions than this to answer, but whether you manage the account yourself or advise them on how to do it, these need to be answered.
SEO is often what people are thinking about when they consider hiring a digital agency, and while a full digital agency will do a lot more than manage SEO, it will need to have a strategy for this side of things. Think of SEO as the glue that holds any digital engagement together. Without it, all the other elements are shaking around loose and might occasionally do some good, but for the most part they won’t be achieving much. It’s a bit much to expect a non-expert to react to the changing algorithms, so as well as being the glue you need to be the guide here. Look, you need to be a lot of things, metaphors aren’t perfect!
Pay-Per-Click is both important to get right and frequently poorly understood. Any PPC strategy should balance cost-effectiveness with high returns. Any agency aiming to curate a PPC strategy for its clients needs to be conducting A/B tests on its ads, regularly refining copy based on what works and what doesn’t, and leveraging insights gained from talking to customers. Focus on keyword research, finding both positive and negative keywords, and let the keywords lead the ad copy you write without stuffing. If it reads like a product description on a shady sales site, it’s overstuffed and you need to reduce the density.
Lead nurturing takes time, effort, and a range of different approaches, and one of the most effective of these is email marketing. As long as you stay on top of aspects such as personalisation, segmentation and automation, nudging things in the direction you need them to go when necessary, you can rely on good results from these campaigns. It’s a good idea to use platforms such as Mailchimp and HubSpot to simplify processes and to keep a close eye on metrics such as click-through rates and ROI to give clues as to where improvements can be made.
As we said earlier, social media is one of the key elements of a strong online presence. The only competitor to it in this regard is the website itself. As a full digital agency you need to stay conscious of mobile responsiveness, intuitive navigation and loading times. Customers have a choice, and they are always likely to go with a company that makes it easy for them to use the service. Updating websites on a regular basis to harness developments such as chatbot innovations, e-commerce software and secure payment systems allows a website to retain relevance when competitors may be slower to react to them.
Any full digital agency will require not only the skills to perform all of the above, but to monitor, respond to and communicate performance based on data, so expertise with tools such as SEMrush, Google Analytics and Tableau will stand you in good stead. Be comprehensive in reporting to clients exactly how things are shaping up; this builds trust and transparency and allows you to remain aligned on specific goals and how to achieve them. You can predict a lot about how a campaign will work, and can sell it to potential customers based on this, but some things can’t be foreseen, and how you respond to them is equally important.
In order to maximise the potential of your digital agency, nothing is more important than the ability to diversify your skillset as a collective, and to react to things promptly. Keep all of the above in mind and be communicative with your clients, and you’ll be well placed to achieve the results you’re after.
