Search marketing agencies are experts at generating leads, building brand awareness, and increasing sales. But why stop there, especially when you’ve got the expertise to expand your reach and improve results for your clients? The power of search marketing can be extended significantly if you can help your clients manage engagement and build lasting relationships after that initial click.
If you’re looking for a way to expand your agency offerings – without significant additional resources or investment – marketing automation is the key. Here are eight ways to expand your agency’s portfolio of services and win new business with marketing automation.
1. Use Search + Marketing Automation as Complementary Marketing Tools
The skills and strategy you’ve used to succeed in search marketing are very similar to what it takes to succeed with marketing automation, including the ability to:
- Attract certain types of leads with focused campaigns
- Create short, powerful content with focused calls to action
- Maximize conversions with relevant landing pages and targeted offers
And while they may be the same skills, the right technology solution can turbo-charge the outcomes. That’s because marketing automation gives you more influence over the behavior of your prospects – and the outcomes of every interaction – than search marketing can provide.
2. Go Beyond Conversions
Search marketing is all about attracting leads and getting them to make that first step – whether your conversion goal is a form submission or a visit to a specific page. But what happens after that? These days, the journey from first contact to final sale is getting longer and more complicated. The key to making sure that initial click becomes a lasting relationship is to develop a lead nurturing strategy. And one of the best ways to nurture lead efficiently and effectively is to use an automated email program, preferably as part of a marketing automation platform. With lead nurturing, you can go beyond driving web conversions to delivering more sales-ready prospects to your clients – and more revenue to your business.
3. Target Audiences and Segments
Most search marketing agencies spend a great deal of time working with clients to understand their target audiences and developing the best approach to achieve their goals. That’s an important part of the demand generation process. But with marketing automation, you can take it a step further by helping clients use those insights to build segments of like-minded prospects and then actually engaging those audiences with follow-up messaging and offers beyond the first-touch click.
4. Leverage Pay-Per-Click Copywriting Skills
If the writers in your agency are already good at developing pay-per-click (PPC) copy that’s pithy and compelling, you can use those same skills for creating compelling email and social campaigns. Just think how persuasive those short headlines and blurbs will be when they can appear before customers and prospects in a richer, more interactive environment such as a well-designed email, an animated Vine, a social media quiz, Pinterest pins, or anything else you create. Plus, with headlines that are longer than 25 characters, you might even have room for adjectives.
5. Take Full Advantage of Your Design Talent
In addition to giving writers more opportunities to expand their horizons, design opportunities abound when you have marketing automation to power your campaigns. Even though you may not be offering email design solutions today, a designer who creates successful banner and visual display ads can easily translate those skills into creating effective email designs. Plus, many marketing automation solutions include customizable email templates that make creating professional-looking messages a snap. Which means you can deliver a whole lot of great options for your clients with less work.
6. Get Better Results from Landing Pages
One of the biggest similarities between marketing automation and search marketing is that they both call for the development of compelling landing pages and calls to action. Optimizing those landing pages is an important part of the success of many types of other campaigns, too. Marketing automation enhances search marketing campaigns by making it easy to test, target, and adjust the conversion environment and then deploy what’s working across more channels. You can also get a better idea of how many qualified leads you’re capturing, and what other pages those prospects visit on a site. It’s a level of insight that can make it easier to drive additional target campaigns to each page visitor.
7. Take Advantage of Data
No doubt your team is already proficient at looking at numbers and searching for trends, patterns, and the valuable details to unlock hidden opportunities in search marketing. And so it goes with the data that’s available through marketing automation. Marketing automation makes it easier to effectively measure and analyze the data that’s available to you and to use that insight to drive more successful campaigns.
8. Remarket on a Whole New Level
In search marketing, all you know about a visitor is that key phrase that brought them to your landing page. With marketing automation, you can track individually identifiable visitors across your search data, website, email campaigns, and social content to gain a rich history of what they’ve done – and what they’re likely to want to see next. And you can test copy, buttons, images and more so you know what works.
So why not take advantage of the many similarities between search marketing and marketing automation to grow your agency? It’s a great opportunity to expand your business with no additional capital or human resources required. Read this eBook to find out what it takes to advance your search agency practice with marketing automation.