The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

Growing Your Inbound Marketing Agency

If you’re working hard growing your inbound marketing agency, then you’re probably looking for changes you can make today to impact that growth tomorrow. Good news, here are 11.5 ways to propel your agency up and to the right.

But there’s better news, you can attend a live, in-person session with me at Inbound 2015, where I’ll talk about each of these items, answer your questions and provide personal guidance to anyone with questions related to inbound agency growth. If you want to attend you can use code HSBLOG for 25% off the All-Access Pass.

Here we go.

You’re working hard to get your inbound marketing agency all squared away. You’re tweaking your sales process, you’re hiring new people, you’re adjusting your tactics and now you're seeing clients get better results.

You’re tight with a handful of other agency owners and you talk from time to time about how you’re doing. This is great but be careful about the advice you get from other agencies and be even more careful about comparing your inbound agency numbers to their numbers.

Inbound agencies are like people. They’re all different. Some agency owners are running lifestyle businesses, others are trying to grow aggressively, while still others are just trying to get by. When you compare notes and inbound marketing agency numbers you have to keep that in mind.

Inbound marketing and inbound sales for that matter are 100% metrics driven. While we have creative inputs, strategy conversations, and a lot of content to create this is the first time in my marketing career you can actually see, exactly how your marketing and sales programs are performing in real-time.

This provides you with tremendous power. Stan Lee wrote, with great power also comes great responsibility. So the question we’re going to answer today is what can you do with all this data and how do we empower our teams to use these numbers to get clients better results and help the inbound marketing agency make more money.

Forbes published an article on corporate dashboards that clearly illustrates why you want one for your inbound marketing agency and how they help executives run profitable and highly successful businesses. Click here to read the Forbes article.

In the same article, one of the biggest obstacles to executives creating and using dashboards is figuring out what metrics to include in your inbound marketing agency dashboards and how to use these dashboards to effectively manage your businesses.

It’s very difficult managing any business if you don’t know your numbers. Now take an inbound marketing agency where you’re involved in complex and highly creative projects day in and day out. In this case it’s even more important.

The best way to remedy this situation is to start with a handful of KPIs, get extremely comfortable with those numbers and then expand your tracking efforts over time. This gives you the opportunity to start slow and get good at making adjustments that drive your numbers up and to the right.

As much as we all love marketing and love helping businesses with inbound marketing, we run an inbound marketing agency to makes a profit. However, if you’re not careful you’ll find a portfolio of unprofitable client engagements that might put the long term prospects of your agency on a slippery slope.

Agencies that have experienced unprofitable engagements have one thing in common. They charge more, they price effectively and they know exactly what services need to be provided to drive results for their clients.

It is…by far the most challenging aspect of inbound marketing—pricing inbound engagements and explaining to your clients and prospective clients why they need to consider investing $10,000 to $20,000 a month if they want to see real results in a reasonable time frame. 

Challenging or not, you have to be able to do it if you want to grow your agency and get your clients results.

One of the best ways to start this conversation is to connect the investment requirements directly to their business goals.

After sales process the ins and outs of pricing is one of the most popular questions from inbound marketing agency owners.

How do we price our inbound marketing engagements? There are a number of tricky elements around the answer to that question.

The first is you need a level of investment that your prospect is willing to pay and next you need a level of investment that delivers a profitable engagement for your agency.

So maybe the real question is not how to price, but how to balance those two seemingly conflicting objectives.

When it comes right down to it an inbound agency is only as good as the people you hire.

Eventually you won’t be able to sell every new client, you won’t be able to onboard every new client, you won’t be able to service every client, talk to every client weekly and be accountable for every client’s results.

The more you add solid people to your team, the easier it’s going to be for you to focus your time on running, growing and strategically making sure your efforts show inbound agency growth. Freeing you up to work ON the business instead of IN the business is VERY important.

Your strategy is locked down, you created compelling messaging, built a new inbound website and have a steady stream of educational content flowing out to the target market—now what?

What you do after all the planning and foundational work is done makes the difference between missing and exceeding your lead goals. It’s the key to inbound marketing success and it requires a ton of experience.

So today, I’m going to share a few of the tricks and tips we’ve learned over the past 10 years of doing inbound marketing optimization for clients in a variety of industries.