Marketing is a vital tool to grow your business but can equally be a time and a money pit that returns little in the way of results. Understanding what type of marketing is best for your agency is vital to growing your business. Here are a few marketing tips to get you started:

Look for a niche

I spoke about the importance of identifying for your niche in a previous article (which can be found here), so for a full breakdown of the topic head over there. In short, niche marketing is about narrowing your focus to areas that fit your specialism, your interests, and your services so you ensnare the most likely clients to be interested in what you do.

You’ve probably seen big businesses throw out a wide marketing net. And for them, it works (although if you look carefully, they too have a clear niche(s). They have the funds and muscle to pull in a wide client base. But for SMEs who don’t have unlimited budgets and an instantly recognisable brand, wide net marketing is a massive waste of resources and seldom bring results. So be a specialist not a generalist.

But how do you find your niche and once you have, how do you ensure you maximise its potential? Here are a few tips to help you out:

Know your audience (customer avatar)

A customer avatar (or buying persona, as it is also often called) is a detailed picture of the ideal client who you would like to work with. You customer avatar will be the client most likely to want your products and services as well as being the easiest to work with.

Think hard about who you are trying to sell your products to. What do they look like? What are their needs and pains, and how do you meet them? Where do you find them and what type of marketing entices them? Developing a good picture of your ideal audience will make marketing to them a much easier proposition.

You can learn more about creating your ideal target customer (persona) in my FREE workbook.

One quick tip - You might be tempted to go after different groups and different audiences, but this may water down your marketing message. Resist the temptation to go big and focus marketing efforts on your niche.

Keeping the sand timer filled

I like this metaphor - humans are like sand timers and if you don’t engage with them before the sand timer runs out, they will forget about you and look for another agency to meet their needs. You could run an amazing engagement campaign but if you don’t follow it up clients will soon forget you (and by from your competitor!). This is why any marketing strategy you implement must keep potential client’s sand timers filled. One great way to do this is with a mailing list.

The power of your mailing list

If 100 people who fit your ideal client engaged with your marketing today how many do you think would buy from you?

In my experience, only one of them would.

So, the question is, how do you nurture the other 99 so when they are ready to buy they raise their hand reach out to you?

One of the best ways to pull clients to you (without harassing them) is through value-based content email marketing. Clever email marketing builds a relationship with your customers while allowing you to remind them that you’re still here for them. It’s a clever tactic and one that is proven to work. Recent statistics on Hubspot (article here) show that businesses who use email marketing effectively see a 760% increase in revenue. It’s no wonder that 80% of business now use the strategy as their main form of customer contact.

The most important part of any business is the revenue/profits it generates. And the only way to generate revenue is to make sales.

Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet solution to generating sales. The key is to do a few things and do them well. Don’t overstretch. Look at the areas of outreach that you are comfortable with, are best at doing and therefore can do consistently, and focus on those.

Make sure you qualify prospects carefully, so you invest your limited time in the hot prospects rather than the fact-finding time wasters.

You also need to understand the sales funnel (see image below) and its stages, especially the importance of building KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST with clients. The three phases can be described as follows:

· KNOW – potential clients see your products and services through your marketing, networking or via word of mouth. They haven’t yet formed an opinion about them but they know they exist.

· LIKE – As the client understands more about your products and services they form an opinion and begin to like what you do. They may even start to engage directly with you, but they don’t yet trust you enough to become a customer.

· TRUST – This is the part of the sales funnel where the revenue is generated. At this stage, clients trust you so they are willing to buy from you. They know your products are great and want more. Once a client reaches this stage they will return to you over and over… so long as you keep that trust in place.

Marketing will help you through the KNOW and LIKE phases, but you will have to work hard for them to TRUST you. To get TRUST you need to effectively keep your clients close through direct contact and more detailed communications. Let them know when you have a new service they might be interested in and provide them with free value-added content.

A word of advice: steer clear of cold email or cold LinkedIn outreach methods as they rarely work (Why? Well there is no effort to build KNOW-LIKE & TRUST!). Few people ever responded positively to being cold-called back in the day, and that is truer than ever today, whether it be by phone, email or social media!

Client retention is also something I’ve written about extensively previously (my Ultimate Guide to Client Retention can be found here), but it’s important to understand that retaining clients is a key factor of business growth.

No agency can afford to adopt a mobile phone approach to client retention where you focus all your energy on winning new clients, not the ones you already have. This leads to a revolving door of customers which can be more time consuming and, at the end of the day, far more costly for your business.

An article in Forbes magazine in 2018 put the cost of finding a new customer at five times that of retaining an existing one. Figures like that just aren’t sustainable over time. That’s why you need to implement strategies for keeping current customers happy as well as attracting new clients to your business.

Do some account development planning to future proof your client relationships and when you have your planning/strategy meetings with the client, go armed with new ideas for future campaigns.