The route to market strategies for your Digital Agency

We understand that starting, operating and growing a Digital Agency can appear to be daunting. One of the biggest concerns we hear from potential partners when they are evaluating our business opportunity centres on how to find clients.

Now, one of the most appealing aspects of launching a Digital Agency is the never-ending supply of clients that are potentially available. The landscape has changed for most businesses in the sense that all their customers are using technology more and more as part of their daily lives. As customers, we all expect the businesses we engage with to have a digital presence - whether that’s a website, social media accounts or indeed online reviews.

The fact that most businesses simply haven’t embraced technology to meet their customers’ expectations, let alone exceed those customer expectations, represents a great opportunity for anyone looking to launch a Digital Agency. However, while it is all well and good saying any business is a potential client, how do you actually reach out to local businesses and what are some of the best methods to secure leads?

Well, the focus of today’s blog is to highlight some common route to market strategies that you can embrace to fill your CRM system (Customer Relationship Management - we’ll talk more about this in a future blog post) with potential clients.

Starting with your website
In the era of technology, nothing quite represents your business like your own website. Think of your website as your digital shop window, highlighting exactly what you can offer your potential clients to make their lives easier. Aside from detailing your products and services, you should always have an enquiry form that makes it simple for potential clients to reach out to you.

Try to avoid capturing too much information within the enquiry form as research suggests asking for too much information significantly reduces the number of people that actually complete the form. Stick to the basics such as name, email address and telephone number as mandatory fields.

Once you have your enquiry form set up, you can actually start driving quality traffic to your website to prompt customers to engage with your business.

Driving traffic
There are a number of ways to drive traffic to your website, both paid and organic traffic, ranging from pay per click adverts (PPC) to improving the position of your website with search engines like Google through techniques known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

In short, paid advertising will be the quickest way for you to direct traffic back to your website so potential customers can find out more about what you actually offer. There are a number of advertising platforms you can use, ranging from Google Adwords to Facebook advertising. In our opinion, Facebook ads are a great way to get started with paid advertising as they offer so many different types of ads as well as interests/behaviours you can use to build your advertising audience.

The one caveat we should mention with paid advertising is you need to determine a budget as this will affect how many people your adverts are actually shown to. We recommend starting with a small budget to test different types of adverts and audiences before you start to scale your campaigns to direct a large volume of traffic back to your website.

In contrast to paid advertising, organic traffic is where your website is indexed or ranked by Google based on a number of different metrics including whether it is mobile responsive, how many customer reviews you have or if you blog regularly on your site. Organic traffic takes time to nurture so we always recommend this approach as part of a longer-term client acquisition strategy.

Using online search engines
One of the most effective ways to capture leads is to actually be proactive and think about local businesses that you have either visited or are familiar with. For example, you can search for businesses in a variety of industry sectors close to where you are based. You can then start to visit their website and build up a profile of that potential client. Focus your mind on areas that you can help them improve their business, whether that is managing their social media presence or creating a system to increase online reviews.

By figuring out which local businesses can actually benefit from your service offerings, you can focus your time on potential leads that have a higher chance of converting. It also allows you to build a local profile amongst your business community and can lead to referrals as invariably business owners know other business owners.

Business networking
There are also a number of offline techniques you can use to reach out to local businesses and these can often prove valuable as you build a personal connection.

One of the most effective route to market strategies is actually business networking events where you have the opportunity to meet other business owners/decision-makers. This presents you with a soft introduction to the key personnel within a potential clients business without having to negotiate through gatekeepers.

Always remember to take lots of business cards and brochures with you to networking events that are held up and down the country. It is also worth preparing a 30-second pitch that covers exactly what you do and how you can help your clients.

The key to making business networking work for you is to be consistent and attend regularly to build connections. Then always look to follow up with new contacts and try to add value to their business through your knowledge, connections and solutions.

Promotional packs
A final route to market strategy we wanted to highlight was sending promotional packs to potential clients and then following up over the phone or face to face. A promotional pack can consist of any type of marketing literature but usually includes an introductory letter, brochure and business card that helps to nurture your prospect.

We then recommend reaching out to the business owner to set up a face to face meeting or online meeting to help demonstrate your solutions in more detail. This method works really well if you do have a limited advertising budget but will require a greater time investment.

Closing thoughts
As you have seen throughout this week's blog, there are actually a number of methods you can adopt to start securing new leads for your business. While this is not an exhaustive list of route to market strategies, it provides a framework for creating your own outreach programme.

When a Partner joins our Network, as part of their 2 days of live training with us, we cover lots of route to market strategies to minimise the trial and error normally associated with starting a Digital Agency.

To find out more about how you can reach more potential clients and indeed become a business owner, contact our team today.

Until next time, take care.