It’s really not surprising a lot of the inbound marketing agencies look alike. You’re all saying the same thing about what you do and how you do it. The result is that you’re prospects are confused and they don’t know what makes one agency better or even different than the next.
In addition, HubSpot provided the Attract, Convert, Close and Delight methodology around inbound marketing and I see that on about 50% of the inbound agency websites. As inbound agency owners, you have to be marketers first and inbound experts second.
So physician heal thyself. Practice what you preach and work harder to make your agency differentiated enough for prospects to know exactly what makes you different from all the other agencies.
Here are some very specific action steps you can take to make your inbound marketing agency seem different to your potential clients.
Tell a More Inspiring and Differentiated Story
You’re going to be asking your prospects to do something they’ve never done before. That might be hiring an agency or that might be moving from traditional marketing tactics to inbound marketing tactics. Either way, it’s your job to inspire them. It’s very difficult to do that if you’re not telling them inspiring stories associated with your agency.
The fact that you deliver inbound marketing used to be different, now it’s table stakes. Do you do pay for performance? Do you guarantee results? Are you expert at a tactic that no one else provides? Do you report differently or have some transparency to your engagement? Get your prospects excited to work with you and they’ll line up at your door.
Offer Inbound Marketing and Inbound Sales Services
The business we work with need help with sales too. They’re asking us to help them close the leads we get for them from inbound marketing. So while there are a handful of agencies providing inbound sales services there’s still an opportunity for agencies to stand out by offering “click to close” solutions.
The ability to impact a client’s sales process and improve their close rates means you can put more money where your mouth is and enter into true revenue partnerships with clients. This is a much more compelling story for clients looking for an agency.
Provide Pay for Performance Agreements
I’ll let you in on a secret. Our industry is moving to pay for performance. It’s just a matter of time until our retainer engagements become partial retainer and partial pay per lead. If you agree, then you need to get comfortable with this type of engagement and you need to get very comfortable entering into engagements with a pay per lead element.
Providing this option (which by the way comes with an unlimited upside for you) means you have to be 100% comfortable with your ability to get your client leads. This confidence is huge in our industry. This confidence helps your prospects say "yes" and feel like you’re the right agency for them. But as you get better at using inbound tactics to get leads, start translating that into pay for performance agreements for your clients.
Invest In Your Team
Everything rests on your people. The smarter crew you hire and the better your team is at taking care of the clients, teaching them inbound and getting them results, the better and more differentiated your agency is going to be. Right now there are a lot of mediocre agencies. A lot of businesses are talking about how they expected more from their inbound marketing programs.
The better you are at getting clients results, the more referrals, the more references and the more people telling your story. To do that, invest in your team. Hire the best, even if it means spending more on people with the right experiences. Then train your team and invest heavily in helping them get better at everything they do.
Drive Results For Your Clients
It all comes down to this. Get clients results and they’ll love you. Fail to get them results and they’ll fire you. This means you have to get good at getting leads and like I mentioned above, today you also have to get good at helping them close those leads.
If you can build a team that knows how to get leads, create an engagement that includes all the tactics required to get a client leads and provide an engagement structure that allows your teams to do whatever they think they need to do to get a client leads—all without costing you more money than you planned—you’ll have a very special agency.
Outside perception is much more important than inside reality. No matter how good you are at what you do it makes no difference to prospects when they’re trying to decide who to talk to. Tell your story, tell it often and tell it in a compelling way.
Start Today Tip – It’s simple, apply the same exercise that you should be doing for your clients. What makes your agency remarkable? If you can’t answer this question then your tip today is to start working to make your agency remarkable. If you can answer that question then that’s what you need to tell your prospects. Be remarkable or be invisible.
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Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Go ALL IN On Inbound!
