Being in high demand is a great problem to have, but your workload shouldn’t keep you from creating and executing awesome strategies and tactics for your clients.
Once bandwidth becomes an issue, quality is usually the first thing to suffer, which is 100% guaranteed to damage existing relationships and send your agency’s reputation down the tubes.
And since many small agencies aren’t able to keep pace as they grow their businesses, they’re often forced to actually turn away lucrative prospects and projects.
This is the exact opposite of what should be happening. Growth is a good thing. It should be celebrated, not feared!
However, with the right technology to implement compelling marketing initiatives for your clients, you can scale with confidence while producing better work that produces better results.
Not only that, but the right vendor can partner with you to align the software with your strategy, making recommendations regarding best practices and innovative techniques along the way.
But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.
Instead, let’s see how marketing automation services can help grow your agency and add great value and efficiencies to your services and processes.
Move Beyond Basic Tactical Marketing
Executing marketing tactics is not the same as deploying a marketing strategy.
Marketing tactics are specific actions taken in the hopes of achieving an undefined result. When not reinforced by a carefully considered strategy developed by multiple stakeholders reaching across multiple departments, these one-off schemes invariably result in chaos, wasted spend, and poor results. Conversely, a marketing strategy is a well-formulated plan that designs and delicately orchestrates a series of related tactics in harmony with one another to align with and achieve your company’s larger goals.
Disorganized marketers place their attention on tactics and experience moderate success.
Modern marketers, on the other hand, focus their emphasis on strategy to develop growth marketing initiatives that achieve real and consistent results.
And while it’s certainly possible to take a strategic approach using manual processes, marketing automation helps both small agencies and established players make a far greater impact with far less effort and fewer resources.
Here’s how!
Lead Generation
Marketing automation platforms allow you to gate your clients’ content, promotions, and products behind adaptive forms on dedicated landing pages — all of which you can create and deploy within the tool.
For example, Act-On has an easy-to-use landing page builder where you can design and launch engaging landing pages that help tell your company’s story, provide your potential and current customers with real value, and drive high-intent conversions and great sales opportunities.
Further, you can create simple and intuitive forms on these pages that gradually gather more and more prospect and client information using progressive profiling. That is, you can continue to update form fields automatically with each subsequent conversion as you learn more about your users.
So while you might receive a first name and an email address upon the visitor’s first form fill, you can engineer the form to update automatically when the same visitor is on your site again. This time, you can ask for more relevant details — such as their age range, income, job title, or business objective
With these forms and landing pages complete, you can begin using SEO and paid search tactics to drive traffic to your desired destinations. The best part is that you can leverage your clients’ branding and messaging guidelines to create reusable templates for sustained success and maximum efficiency.
9 Marketing Automation Essentials to Grow Your Agency
Scoring and Segmentation
Your clients likely have diverse product and service lines, which means they likewise have a diverse set of ideal customers that they’re trying to reach. Typically, the wider the client base, the more difficult it is to hone in on targeted and relevant messaging. But by scoring and segmenting your leads into manageable marketing lists, you can deliver the right message to your ideal audience at the perfect time. And once each lead reaches your predetermined scoring threshold, you can either pass them to your sales team for a more account-based approach or send them additional product information that helps nurture a lead into a customer.
Accurately scoring and segmenting leads is basically impossible when done manually. Not only do even the best marketers inevitably make potentially damaging mistakes, but they put a ton of time and effort into these misguided efforts.
With marketing automation, however, marketers of all skill sets can easily score their leads based on demographics, firmographics, behavior, and engagement (or lack thereof). And for your clients with an especially wide range of consumers, you can use Act-On to develop multiple score sheets that correspond to specific personas.
You can then use all of this great data you’ve collected to group your clients’ prospects and customers into distinct segments and market to them accordingly through remarketing, social media targeting, and automated nurture campaigns.
Speaking of which…
Automated Nurture Campaigns
Once you’ve automated the lead generation process using dedicated landing pages with adaptive forms and then properly scored and segmented those leads, you can use marketing automation to create automated nurture campaigns to guide your clients’ potential buyers along a compelling customer journey.
The goal of a good nurture campaign is to inform and educate prospects about your clients’ products and services to elicit excitement about their offerings — eventually leading to a direct sale or sales opportunity. You want to position their wares as the absolute best choice and distance their brand and business from other competitors.
By creating email campaigns using conditional logic and dynamic content, you can guide your clients’ customers along a seamless buyer journey that is tailored specifically for them. And depending on the various actions they take (or don’t take), you can serve up engaging content and tailored messaging that addresses their pain points and meets their needs at regular intervals of your choosing.
Again, you can (and should) segment based on all sorts of different engagement types.
If a known visitor is browsing a specific product page on your website or “Likes” a certain Instagram post, segment them accordingly and enroll them in an automated program with top-, mid-, and bottom-of-funnel content and messaging. On the flip side of that coin, if a previous buyer hasn’t visited your eCommerce page in more than 30 days, you can create a re-engagement campaign to let them know about new products and promotions they might be interested in.
Manage All Marketing Operations From a Single Command Post
Marketing automation allows you to manage all of your clients’ marketing campaigns from a single consolidated platform. While all of their assets and initiatives reside separately within the software, every team member of your choosing can access everything they need in one simple tool.
This empowers your staff to easily manage content, campaigns, and reporting (more on that below) for every client while also providing your preferred level of transparency into processes and performance. It gives you a birds-eye view into how your team is working to achieve results for your clients and also how those clients are resonating with their target audience and existing customers.
Most importantly, while most of your clients probably aren’t very tech-savvy, many of them are interested in how their campaigns are being deployed. You can provide these curious clients guest access so they can hop into the platform and look around without breaking anything or using materials that rightfully belong to you and your organization.
Prove Your Agency’s Value
Give your small agency a big voice by keeping clients informed and your team focused with easy-to-understand dashboards and custom reports that detail key performance metrics. You can prove your worth and the value of your work by delivering regular ROI reports for each individual client — all from one customizable dashboard.
Traditionally, attempting to track multiple accounts would stretch an agency’s resources thin and fail to give them the insights they need for sustained success. With Act-On’s Agency Control Panel, however, marketers can easily manage, measure, and track progress across every account — vastly improving the accuracy of their data collection and saving major time and effort. And by joining our Managed Service Partner Program, you can reinforce your skills and strategy with a trusted and powerful marketing automation team that’s here to support you and your team in everything you do! Better serve your clients with confidence by joining our partner team today!
Act-On Marketing Automation is the Perfect Fit for Marketing Agencies of All Shapes, Sizes, and Industries
Whether you work for a small, independent agency or a large corporation with distributed marketing teams, Act-On can help you deliver awesome campaigns that are proven to generate great ROI while also growing your client roster and achieving fantastic retention rates.
If you’d like to learn more about how your marketing agency can use Act-On to deliver excellent work with fewer resources, you should download our free eBook 9 Marketing Automation Essentials to Grow Your Agency! It’s full of useful tips, tricks, and best practices to help you build a foundation of success that will help you provide your clients with real value and strengthen those critical relationships.
Or, if you’re ready to speak with one of our marketing automation experts, just click here! We’d love to spend 15 minutes showing you our platform in action!