Scale your Digital Agency: 3 Mindsets to Adopt

There’s a moment in every business’ life… you know the moment I’m talking about: the one where you realize you’re coasting and things are going… okay. Now you’re wondering what you need to do to get just a bit more of an edge.

All digital marketing agencies will go through the same thing: teams are always busy, so sure, things are going smoothly, but the business itself is kinda stalling.

You’d probably like to scale your digital agency and grow the business (who wouldn’t?!), but you’re short on ideas on how to do it. Maybe you’re wondering if you’re missing some way to generate more profit with the infrastructure you already have.

It’s gotta be possible, right?

Yes. Yes, it is.

It’s all in your head. In a good way.

Mindset #1: Focus on Retention

It might sound counter-intuitive to say that retention, and not acquisition, is the key to agency growth, but let me explain.

In a typical service business, clients come and go: some stay for a few projects, others drop by for one project and then move on as quickly as they arrived.

Think about the energy it takes for you to get a new client: researching the client, putting a sales pitch together, meeting the client, convincing them that you’re the right agency for the job, creating wicked campaigns or sites for them… And then, after all that, you have to do it all over again.

But if you could instead go through the client acquisition process just once, and then KEEP that client for months or even years… that’s the dream, right? In terms of the bottom line, you get to bill for multiple campaigns, and multiple projects without having to spend the time acquiring a new client for each.

Retention is key because it allows you to generate recurring revenue from existing clients (almost as if on cruise control), so that energy that you used to spend just keeping up the same type of profit can instead be used to upsell your services to your clients (and okay, maybe sometimes acquire more clients too).

Get it? Retaining your existing clients makes sure that your “bottom line” isn’t anywhere near the “bottom”… ever.

So how do you go about ensuring that your clients stick around for a long time? Well, it’s all about the little things:

• First off, make sure you ask for feedback on a regular basis (this can be a simple NPS survey, or more elaborate multi-question survey). Either way, you want to know what clients like about you (and what they don’t).
• You also want to recognize your clients’ milestones and make them feel special. This can be anything from a handwritten note or a cupcake delivery when they’ve been with you a year, or a personal phone-call to let them know that their last campaign has been ultra-successful, or anything in between.
• Loyalty is a two-way street. If you want your clients to be loyal to you, you need to show that you’re also equally supportive of what they do. So follow their social media pages. Share their accomplishments on Facebook. Tweet them when it’s their business’ anniversary. Take the time to share your support whenever you can.
• While it’s always unfortunate when it happens, it’s inevitable that some clients will leave you at some point. However, this comes with an opportunity: to ask them why they’re leaving. What made them leave and what could you have done to keep it from happening. When you get some feedback, don’t just leave it at that: ACTIVELY improve those aspects of your work to keep a client from ever leaving for the same reasons.

These regular discussions with your clients have one thing in common: they are all communications that DON’T involve you trying to upsell them something.

Sure, they know that ultimately you want their business (read: money); but these communications show them that more than that, you want a real relationship with them. You want to know them, and for them to know you. You want to grow together with them.

And THAT, is what’s going to set you apart from your competition.

Mindset #2: Work With Clients, Not For Them

Yeah, I know, your clients hire you, you perform a service, they pay you, end of story.

Except, not really.

Like I mentioned above, you need to stop thinking of your client projects as simple transactions where you input their needs, output your project, thank-you-goodbye.

You have the knowledge and capabilities to create brilliant campaigns and incredibly results, so the value you bring to the team is pretty self-evident. But your clients – they know their own business better than you ever will. Both of you need each other to create the most optimal results.

You can’t just input their needs and think you’ll be done with it. You have to work together, communicate regularly, pitch ideas, elaborate storyboards, and think way waaay outside the box sometimes. Whether this is a new client, or an existing one, conversations should include a lot of questions on your part:

• Who are we talking to?
• What problem are you trying to solve?
• What expertise are you trying to relay here?

These are questions that will help you develop the best strategies possible, and they’re questions that only your client can answer. They’re also questions that you should be asking every time you’re working on a new project, not just once. Anything you can think of that can give you a better feeling for who your client is and what their brand is trying to do… those are the questions you need to be asking.

It might sound more time consuming than you might like, but if your goal is really to scale up your business, and retain your clients long-term, it’s a time-investment that’s well worth it. Because clients evolve, and the more you know about your client and his/her business, the more efficient you will be at creating perfect campaigns that suit their brand perfectly.

And the more efficient you are in creating your campaigns, the better that is for your revenue stream.

Think about it this way:

When you’re more efficient, you waste less time.

When you waste less time, you can create more value and work on bigger projects than you used to be able to do in the same number of hours.

And less time + more value = more revenue.

I’m not a math person, but that’s an equation I can get behind.

Mindset #3: Remember to Prove Your Worth

We’ve already established that you want to build long-term relationships with each of your clients, and you want to do this, in part, by getting to know them and working with them as a team on a consistent basis.

But on the flipside, how are they going to know that you’re really “in it for the long haul” and worth their time (and let’s face it, money)? Apart from your good humour and general friendliness (which I have no doubt that you’re bringing to them in spades), your client is going to want to see hard numbers.

Prove what you’re doing. Why you’re doing it. And why it’s worth it to them to let you keep doing it.

You’re damn good at what you do. Show them.

That’s how you get them to open their wallet.

And now this is where you’re going to need some hard numbers.

I know reporting is the bane of your existence (and trust me, you’re not alone… every agency has a deep-seated disdain for it).

But by reporting your work to your clients, they’ll get to see where every penny of their investment in you goes. And, more importantly, allllll the pennies they’re getting in return.

Because as we discussed in the first point, scaling isn’t just a matter of more and more clients… it’s also a matter of upselling your existing clients to bring you more and more business!

Remembering your worth, and proving it with awesome, consistent and clear reports, is your way of keeping the fire alive between you and your client, month after month!

A Little Note About Reports:

Speaking of those reports that you need to be making on a regular basis… I know us marketers tend to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with numbers sometimes, don’t we?

Data is the foundation on which we build our entire campaigns, but oh.my.god. can it be boring to go through.

That’s why you need some magical way of compiling all the data you need in one single dashboard, without having to actually do anything.

What you need is an automated reporting system: one that integrates with the digital tools you already use, gathers data at the touch of a button, doesn’t require you to know any coding language, and with which you can create different types of dashboards depending on your or your client’s needs.

Whether you’re optimizing a website and need an SEO dashboard, are running multiple display ad campaigns and need to see how they’re doing, or want to get an overview of the entire digital presence of your client’s brand – you need a system that can give you all of that.

You also need a system that can send out those reports automatically, to whomever you want.

Oh, and you want those reports to be beautiful, concise, and easy-to-understand for your clients.

You’d also like it if their creation magically took up the least amount of energy from you as possible; you have better things to do, like thinking up kick-ass campaign ideas for your clients.

Well, consider DashThis your new magic wand.

Rinse and Repeat

We’ve gone through the main mindsets you have to put yourself in to grow your business from the inside out: focus on retaining your existing clients for the long term, work as a team with them to foster real working relationships, and consistently prove to them that your work matters to them.

There’s nothing more to say other than it’s your turn to make it happen.

Share these principles with your colleagues:

• Remind each other the next time you’re pitching to yet another new prospect, that maybe you should also spend a little bit of time taking care of an existing client too.
• Remember to take the time to really listen to your client when you’re exchanging ideas for a new campaign. You aren’t just there to present an idea, you’re there to collaborate.
• Remember to carefully create a performance report for your client so that (s)he knows that what you’re doing is awesomeee!

And maybe, give DashThis a try.

So you can focus your time on the first two of these ideas. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the third one!