Learn sustainable ways to scale your marketing agency while maintaining quality service
Coming from a marketing agency, you already spend your days helping other businesses grow. But depending on your areas of specialization, you may still be wondering how to scale a marketing agency.
Every industry, specialization, and product or service requires a slightly unique approach. The good news is, your marketing knowledge means you’re halfway to where you need to be. And we’ve got some ideas to get you moving the needle.
Below we’ll cover 5 tips for scaling your marketing agency:
- Define your ICP
- Create a unique brand persona
- Test out different marketing efforts
- Implement AI into your lead generation process
- Add low-effort services
The difference between scaling and growing a business
The terms “scale” and “grow” are often used interchangeably. But growth simply refers to getting more clients or increasing revenue. Scaling, on the other hand, is about growing the company without sacrificing the quality of your service or efficiency of your operations.
If you focus on growth without scale, your business will get messy. You don’t want to be sacrificing the quality of your deliverables to clients, or working hours and hours of overtime.
Scaling requires having processes and resources that can manage increased capacity.
Define your ICP
If you’re used to targeting consumers, you may not know about ICPs, or ideal client profiles. The good news is, you probably are familiar with a similar concept—buyer personas.
An ICP is like a buyer persona for the type of business you’re selling to, rather than the buyer themselves. You want to think about what companies you can bring the most value to.
Some considerations for creating your ICP:
- Company size
- Industry
- Budget
- Location
- Business model
- Pain points
Ideally, you should create an ICP and buyer persona to focus your marketing and sales efforts.
Kulin, an e-commerce agency focused on performance marketing, actually highlights parts of their ICP right on their homepage.
Their cheeky approach is also a good example of a strong brand persona, discussed below.
Starting with an ICP helps you scale by keeping your marketing and sales efforts focused. You will be well-positioned to support the clients you reach, and you can create more effective messaging and targeting. But we didn’t need to tell you that…
Create a unique brand persona
If you’re a creative agency, you’re more than familiar with brand personas. But if you’ve historically been more focused on sales and data, you may have overlooked the need to create a persona.
Part of scaling your agency is shifting some of your sales focus to marketing efforts, so you’re not devoting hours and hours to lead generation.
Brand personas work by increasing affinity for your agency while making it memorable.
A good persona is unique from your competition and aligned with your target audience.
Beam Content does a great job of this by boldly calling out that their content isn’t like most (boring) content. The key to making it work? They walk the talk with unique approaches to content and writing, which you get from your first glance at their LinkedIn.
When developing a brand persona for your agency, consider:
- How your brand talks to customers
- What your brand looks like
- The types of topics and issues your brand covers
- Your brand values
Once you’ve established your persona, use it to guide content from your brand. If some content is unserious and forward, while content is more tame and corporate, your audience won’t form an attachment and memory to your brand that keeps you top-of-mind when they’re ready to convert.
Test out different marketing efforts
You know you need to scale your marketing agency with…well, marketing. But there can be an overwhelming number of avenues for where to market. Test out a few of the options below, and stick with the ones that yield results while staying in budget.
Social selling
Social selling, in the broadest sense, is any form of sales taking place on social platforms. For businesses selling to other businesses, LinkedIn social selling is the most common.
Your LinkedIn social selling strategy can (and should) include everything from posting content that adds value for your audience, to developing an efficient cold outreach strategy for lead generation.
Influencer marketing
The influencer world has grown to include more and more subject matter experts who use social media platforms like Tiktok, YouTube and Twitch to distribute informative content about their area of expertise.
Much like a food influencer is a great fit for meal delivery or a new restaurant opening, a marketing influencer is a great option to increase your brand’s reach.
YouTube influencers for marketing agencies can include your product in how-tos, demo videos, or more general promotions.
Depending on the terms you negotiate with an influencer, you may also be able to re-use clips from their content to create ads, LinkedIn content, and more.
Thought leadership
Another way to increase your reach and authority is to become an influencer yourself. Create thought leadership content around marketing on one or more platforms—LinkedIn, YouTube, a blog, TikTok—and post unique, valuable insights or thoughts that add value to current or potential clients.
Ramli John, for example, speaks on content marketing in his podcast and Youtube.
Thought leadership can be a great way to sell your clients on you and your expertise. If you’re constantly delivering useful tips and establishing yourself as a leader, it’s only natural that people will want to work with you.
Finding the right combination of marketing efforts may take some trial and error. Consider which options fit your financial budget, which social media platforms your demographic uses, and the time you can allot to marketing efforts.
Implement AI into your lead generation process
Lead generation can be a time-consuming part of scaling your agency. To our earlier point—you’ll need to find a way to make it efficient if you want to actually scale.
A less manual lead generation process means more time for building your brand (and actually doing client work). Luckily, there’s great tools marketing agencies can use on LinkedIn for lead generation.
From writing to creating logos, there’s an AI solution to make just about any task more efficient these days. And yes, that includes AI for LinkedIn lead generation.
With LinkedIn AI, you can better target leads that are actually a good fit for your agency, and have successful conversations that lead to more sales meetings.
Add low-effort services
Depending on what kind of marketing agency you are, you may consider offering new services that are low-effort for your agency, but increase revenue. White label services are a great way to increase your offerings, without increasing your output.
If you focus on certain aspects of creative, for example, you can find white label marketing agencies to help you add digital marketing to your offerings.
If you run a sales agency, you could consider a whitelabel LinkedIn lead generation solution like CoPilot AI. With a whitelabel approach, you maintain your own brand and logo for your clients, while benefiting from market-leading lead generation software.
White label services are not only a low-effort way to increase your offerings—they can help you secure more clients. Potential clients don’t want to piece together work from three different agencies if they can have it all from one.
Don’t just grow your agency, scale it
It’s not uncommon for agencies to approach scaling with increased lead generation efforts. But to truly scale, you need to focus on increasing revenue without overworking your resources. In other words, how can you do more—across the business—for less?
The answer is a combination of marketing strategies that strengthen your sales outreach, offering more services to your clients and working with technology to optimize your outreach processes.
Looking to take the first step towards growing at scale? Try CoPilot AI for help generating LinkedIn leads for your marketing agency, so you free up more time for marketing and client work.
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