Inbound 17 is behind us and we’re quickly coming to the end of 2017. Now is the time to make sure your inbound marketing agency finishes the year strong. What are you doing to make sure you finish 2017 as your best year yet?
One of the differences between inbound marketing agency owners I coach and owners I don’t is that agencies in my program are proactively working to change what’s not working at their shops. While others I talk to appear to be HOPING things change. Hope is not a strategy.
Instead of hoping things change, hoping clients sign, hoping your team gets better I’m suggesting you stop hoping and start working. I know most of you are heavily involved working IN your agencies instead of ON your agencies, but you have to find time to work ON the business and not IN the business.
Carving out this time for you to drive inbound marketing agency growth has to be your top priority. Never step on this time and never sacrifice it for anything or anyone.
Here’s a year end plan everyone can execute to ensure you finish the year strong.
Optimize All Your Sales Opportunities
When I say optimize, I mean put your absolute best foot forward, deliver the absolute best experience and do your very best to make your prospects feel safe so they sign. But I also mean stop chasing everyone who wants to talk to you. Being great at closing new clients is just as much about picking your battles and not working to close everyone. All prospects are NOT created equally.
If you’ve decided to strategically push up your average retainer from $5k to $8k, then when you get an opportunity to talk to a prospect who only wants to spend $1,000, you should pass. Don’t spend your precious time pursuing deals that are not aligned with your strategy. But when you do get those perfectly aligned chances, you must go all out. You must ask more questions, tell more stories, give them more success stories and personalize their recommendations to the point where they say, “We have to hire this company.” That should be your mantra, if they’re not saying that, you’re not doing enough.
Hire Ahead Of Sales Just Once
I know hiring is scary. It’s a long-term commitment to another person. It means an increase in costs and a decrease in potential profit. But it also means, if you’re hiring correctly, that you’re going to get help doing some of the stuff you don’t want to be doing or shouldn’t be doing. When you’re looking for time to strategically work on the company, hiring the right team member usually gives you the chance to make a big impact on the agency.
There are ways to be creative here too. Hire someone to start on a part-time basis. As you close another new client or two, you can ratchet up their hours until they’re full time. This also gives you a chance to “try before you buy.” If you’re continuously looking for new talent, as I’ve advised in the past, then you should be ready to add a new team member as soon as sales start to look promising. Just in time hiring can save you a good amount of money and still allow you to ramp up quickly as you get new clients.
Focus On One Or Two Efficiencies
Agency owners need to be good at identifying inefficiencies and then upgrading processes to build efficiencies into your agencies. I’m sure if you think about it you can find one or two inefficient processes going on right now. Pick one or two and start working on fixing those now so when 2018 comes, you’re already more profitable and more efficient then you are now.
Typically, efficiencies are found in areas that require a lot of resources. Places to look for efficiency gains include your content team, your website development team, project management and in the time your client facing team spends doing planning, project management or communicating with clients. Get your team involved in diagnosing where efficiencies might be happening and then let them work with you to prioritize them for your attention.
Get Your Own Marketing Set Up For 2018
Except for the bigger agencies, almost no mid-sized to small agency does enough to market their own agency. Now is the perfect time to fix that going into 2018. Start thinking about marketing tactics you’ve wanted to execute but haven’t had the time.
What upgrades do you need to make to help prospects feel better about hiring you? Look at your website. Does it look as good as the top agencies you know? If it doesn’t match up then you need to invest time and maybe money to get it up to snuff.
Want more visitors to your site? Blog more frequently. Want more leads? Publish more content on your site. Start working on a flexible and agile editorial calendar for the rest of this year and all of 2018. Integrate that content strategy with your social media, short term content (blogging) and more interactive content plans like webinars, quizzes, surveys and most importantly, rich, value-oriented bottom of the funnel offers. The standard Marketing Assessment offer is no longer enough to drive engagement.
Make Sure Your Agency Is Clearly Differentiated
This is the hardest to deliver, but the most important. How is your agency different than all the other agencies? What do you do differently? What do you do better? Why should someone hire you over my shop or any of the 3,500 other inbound marketing agencies? You have to know the answer to this question and you have to be constantly pushing your company to stay ahead of everyone else.
Over the next few months, you’re going to find some downtime, especially when we get closer to Thanksgiving and the holidays in December. This is the perfect time to put aside some strategy and planning time for the agency. If you want to get other team members involved, people typically crazy busy also find their time a little less spoken for around the holidays. Start looking at optimizing this time now. Schedule meetings, give your team some homework or prep work and start thinking about what you need to do today so next year is your best year yet.
Start Today Tip – The best advice I could give you that you can start using today is to schedule at least two hours a week to work ON your agency. Try to keep the time the same week over week. Every Tuesday at 4PM to 6PM you know you have time to work on strategic initiatives that will drive growth and impact your agency’s performance through the end of this year and into 2018. Make that time sacred. No one can step on it. No client, no team member, no family member. You need this time to do the hard work you rarely get a chance to do. Then make a list of everything you need to do to grow your agency. Prioritize the list based on what’s going to have the biggest impact and take the least amount of effort. Work on that stuff first. Before you know it, you’ll be seeing big results from big moves.
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