I kid you not; it’s a great time to start a marketing agency!
According to CallRail’s survey, 99% of agencies expect revenue growth this year (2022).
Pretty sweet, huh?
Sadly, not all marketing agencies are created equal.
Some reach insurmountable success, while others die in just a few months or years.
We’ve put together this guide to help you create or maintain a successful marketing agency.
Let’s hop right in.
Contents
1. Invest in a project management software
Use reliable project management tools to improve your team’s productivity and make their work less complicated and toxic.
You could try using Skye and Google Drive (among other tools) to run your agency, but you only invite confusion and truckloads of firefighting.
These standalone tools aren’t designed to help companies complete projects like project management tools.
The best project management tools are packed with features that streamline your workflows and task handoffs.
Below are crucial features and functionalities you can find in project management tools.
- Project planning and scheduling
- Alert systems
- Client/internal reporting
- Communication
- Resource management
- Time tracking
- Project dashboards
- Permission levels
- Custom workflows
We’re just scratching the surface with the points above.
Some PM tools now have automation and AI features that help agencies simplify their workflows and increase the accuracy of their work.
Best practices for choosing project management tools:
1. Not all project management tools are created equal. Some are clunky, have poor user experience, difficult to navigate, and lack features. Some are brimming with features you don’t need but must pay for. Invest in shortlisting your prospective project management tools. Choose one that fits your agency’s workflow.
2. Don’t decide based on which tool is the cheapest. This lesson proves correct repeatedly, yet often neglected.
Create TikTok quotes out of your employee’s conversations.
This ought to amuse them. 🙂
For example, if you have an employee who hates pizzas with pineapple, you can publish a TikTok post that says…
An ancient wise man once said, “Don’t add pineapples on your pizza.”
— Add employee name here
Doing this is a great way to add humor to your posts, let alone showcase one of your employees in a fun and humorous manner.
Also, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of TikTok quotes you can copy online to empower or humor your team.
Seemingly insignificant or small gestures such as this can encourage or amuse your team, which also helps build cohesiveness.
The laughter or giggle they share is an excellent springboard to a more meaningful relationship between your teammates.
Best practices for engaging your team in social media:
1. Remember to be respectful. Being humorous is great, but there are lines you shouldn’t cross.
2. Instead of sharing humor, you can just feature an employee by posting about something extraordinary they accomplished or do.
3. Align your choice of words with your brand’s image. Even though your post is more internal-facing, remember that your clients (or prospective clients) can still see your posts.
3. Invest in training
If you aren’t investing in training, you aren’t proactive about growing your team’s skills and capabilities.
They could learn from their projects and tasks. But then, their learning would only be a side dish to doing their work.
Make learning the main course by setting up training sessions.
Take the time to measure the output of your team members to uncover the areas where they are weak and the things they’re doing great.
Invest in training them to improve their weaknesses and further polish their strengths.
Best practices when investing in training for your team:
1. Interview or run surveys to know which training your team should prioritize. There’s always room for improvement. However, training to improve the least impactful skillsets isn’t a commendable way of doing training. Consider the most significant gaps in your workflow that are doing serious harm to your business. Have your team train and learn to address those issues.
2. Gamify your traninig sessions. Gamifying makes the learning process more fun and easier to digest. This ultimately improves the retention and level of learning your team experiences.
4. Outsource
Instead of 4X-ing your team’s workload to accommodate a client requirement that you don’t offer natively as an agency, consider outsourcing.
Think of outsourcing as an extension of your team.
Let’s say your agency is all about social media marketing.
If your client suddenly wants to expand their reach by investing in SEO content, you can look for third-party providers to write your SEO content.
When you buy SEO articles from reliable third-party agencies who live and breathe SEO content writing, you procure SEO content with a higher level of polish than your team writing the content.
Because your team specializes in social media, the quality of SEO content they’ll produce will ultimately fall short compared to an agency specializing in SEO articles.
Also, you can leverage the industry knowledge, tools, and existing workflows of SEO content writing agencies when you work with them.
Outsourcing best practices:
1. Don’t slack off on your screening process. Outsourcing can be a huge boon to your agency or a huge curse. It all boils down to whether you’re working with a reliable agency that’s genuinely invested in your company’s success.
2. Have a clear line of communication. The third-party company you outsourced your work to has its workflows, standards, procedures, etc. You want them to align with your processes. You can’t pull that off without a clear line of communication.
5. Build out your systems and SOPs
Whether your marketing agency does small business SEO, social media marketing for TikTok influencers, or you target corporate clients, you need a handful of systems to succeed:
- Client Acquisition
- Order fulfillment
- Employee training
- Project collaboration
These are just some of the many systems you need to build out.
Creating your systems and aligning everyone to the workflows makes your team’s collaboration more polished and streamlined.
Your team will have a standard method of conducting content research, how they create their reports will become standardized, and their task handoffs will become consistent, among other things.
This increases the predictability of your processes and outputs.
When your team members know how to do things right and know what “right” looks like, they can work better.
This also prevents needless firefighting.
Best practices for building your systems and SOPs:
1. Involve your team in creating your systems and SOPs. Since they’re in the trenches, they have crucial insights on how best to accomplish their tasks quicker and better.
2. Make your SOPs accessible. Most project management platforms have document storing and sharing functionalities that allow centralization of document access.
What’s next?
The future looks bright for marketing agencies.
Since more and more businesses are seeing the importance of online presence due to the pandemic’s lockdown, the need for online marketing services will skyrocket.
Start your agency now. Consider the points above to grow your agency to greater heights.