The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

I do a lot of work with inbound marketing agency owners on their own inbound marketing. We look at their messaging, their differentiation, their websites, their lead nurturing, their content offers and their social media. While most of it is pretty good, there are always recommendations to improve their results.

So the question becomes, how do you know if your own inbound marketing is missing something important? As agency owners you have to be able to evaluate and analyze your own inbound programs and the inbound programs of your clients to identify the weak spots and make the necessary upgrades.

Every business has magic numbers that help leaders gain insight into the performance of the organization. Inbound agencies are no different but they are unique in that there are very few existing models from which to benchmark your agency against other similar agencies.

Once you create a dashboard of KPIs (key performance indicators) you’re going to see your entire agency responding differently to those numbers. There are gobs of data that prove people do what you measure. So as you work your way up the inbound marketing agency growth tree you need to set numeric goals for your crew.

Here are some of the numbers you want to consider when setting up your KPI dashboard.

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.

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.