Agency Lead-Driving Tactics That Work in 2025

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome in, Kevin and Peck. What's up, guys? We just answered a funny question. You can either hear it on the recording or we'll come back to it later in the, in the call. But basically, you know, Matt, I want to kind of turn back into what you were saying. You're, you're in hunting mode, you're in wolf mode. Are there any like strategies that you're using that are different than the end of last year? Like any new strategies that you're implementing because maybe you feel like you have more space? space and more time to explore different avenues, or is it doubling down on just one avenue of client acquisition, or what are you thinking about?

Yeah, I would say I'm just trying to, as a founder, carve out more time to do business development, right? I think a lot of times is that what happens is that I have a lot of great ideas and projects and I have the full list of things that you know, I feel like I have to do, um, and it just doesn't get done, you know, because I get pulled into, you know, administrative, legal, contract, uh, hiring, you know, HR, turning the year.

So it just also has to do with having the time.

Um, you know, a few things that I'm doing right now, um, I'm still doubling down on basically CRM outreach, Just reaching out to deals that didn't close last year, reaching out to former clients, people who already know me. I feel like, you know, 20/80 rule, 20% of actions for 80% results. If people already know you, they trust you, you know, getting in front of them is always a winner. Talking to current clients, you know, enticing referrals, enticing more work from current clients. That's always the top of my strategy. Second thing that I'm doing right now, I just had a call with this business development guy in Miami. You know, we have quite a few clients and some of them are larger and midsize and we don't have a client in Miami. So I'm like, okay, well, we should be more local. I think we are definitely one of the top agencies for SEO, for Google Ads in Miami. We have an office in downtown Miami and Yesterday I had a client visiting us from Pennsylvania to Miami, but like I don't have clients in Miami. So I was actually thinking about certain ways to tap into the local market, and I'm thinking about one of my team members to possibly, you know, buying him some membership so he can join some groups here. So I personally don't have to maybe go to a lot of networking events, but there are people on my team who can be incentivized to, you know, just want to go to these types of events and network, you know, like Chamber of Commerce, BNI. I don't know if anybody uses BNI.

I'm just—

I know that I would not want to—

you've used BNI, so maybe you can share some, you know, some insights. But, you know, sort of like the local market, I'm also looking to do a webinar. Last year I've delivered basically this AI and in the age of SEO, in the age of AI. So a lot of SEO work and how to use AI tools and prompting strategies and, you know, AI agents and a lot of the type of materials I have ready. So I want to do a webinar and I actually want to do a paid webinar. So I wanted to ask the group maybe a little bit later about If anybody has any sort of end-to-end solution for that. You know, my business development for years has been really centered around speaking at conferences and is, you know, some of these relationships, you know, they come and go, people change, and I know that I have to go out and sort of open new doors for that as well. You know, with the baby, I have a 2-year-old now at home, and sometimes the travel is not as straightforward as it used to be. So I'm looking for ways to maybe scale so I don't have to be in many places, whether it's empowering my team to do some, you know, business development sales type of work or it's, you know, more sort of webinars. I know that for Neil and Eric, webinars have worked well. So these are the top few things that I'm looking at. I was looking at platforms also like Clutch, platforms like AppCity, I think it's called. I don't know if And if any of you guys use them, my main problem is that, you know, even when, you know, we bought premium listings and stuff, but ultimately you have to have a lot of reviews on these platforms.

And I don't feel like reaching out to my clients and asking them to go to some kind of a platform and drop reviews there. Like, it's a lot to ask for.

So I think like if you don't have enough reviews, it's just even though you pay for ads and placements, You're just not gonna get the results intended. But I don't know, does anybody have any feedback using platforms like Clutch? And you, Jason?

With Clutch, they actually will call your clients and they'll do an audio interview and then they summarize it and they put it into buckets. I actually just reached out to them again today for more information on their process. And something I think is really important is to find out, which I'm gonna find out if you own that information, because when you get those Clutch reviews, they're taking a lot of time. 30 minutes, I think, is what the interview time is.

Running a digital marketing agency can be lonely and stressful, but it doesn't have to be. The key is to find mentors who have done it before and also join a peer group of other successful agency founders in the Agency Owner Association. As a result of the group's feedback, I launched a CRM campaign that led to 2 recurring clients for my agency in the first month. So if you are an agency owner, Looking to scale, join the Agency Owner Association.

And if you own that information, you can leverage that on your own testimony, your own case study page as well. But Clutch is nice because it's it is a phone call, whereas it's really hard to get your clients to sit down and type up a nice response. They can just verbalize it, and then Clutch will do it.

But you're yeah. So you know on Clutch you have first like the premium listing when you can. Just buy premium kind of listing where you can optimize the videos and whatnot. And then you have these ads where, you know, you pick a market, let's say Miami will be the market, and if somebody searches for SEO Miami, then I would get, you know, to some of these top placements. Which services do you use?

So people actually search SEO and then Clutch will be able to identify their location and then they'll show Miami. So mostly it's like metropolitan areas that you focus on, obviously, unless you're in a certain industry. Like if you're doing tech, maybe you're focused on Boston or SaaS, maybe it's Boston or something like that. But that, that it does, you need to make sure, and I'm sure you already do, you need to make sure that you have your LTV in place if you're going to spend money with Clutch, because it can go up real quick. Like real fast. So if you, if you know, if you can create a funnel and, and monitor and track leads that you convert in 6 months to 12 months, it'll pay itself back. But I found that it's not, you're gonna get a lot of like mid-level service. You're not getting, you're not getting a lot of people that are looking for expensive packages just because generally that's referral-based or it's, you know, deeper research-based. But it does come through, but I, this, I was just talking about this yesterday, like why it's so important now is because do a best of agency search in ChatGPT or Perplexity, and you're going to notice that they, that they're sourcing from Clutch and UpCity and those other ones as well. And so you have to, you have to show up there if you want to show up in generative AI at this point.

That's interesting. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Kevin, you had your hand up.

Yeah, um, let me lower my hand there. Um, I've just been recently— I can't remember, I talked to somebody else here on this, Matt. Um, but I, I have a relationship with a Clutch. I get a relationship with a Clutch rep. Uh, if that— if you're gonna do it with Clutch, talk to the reps. Now what they do is they'll do searches for you on Miami. Um, they'll do PPC, SEO, whatever services you offer, and then they'll kind of tell you the best one to start with? And then what rank are you gonna get too? Because it's based on the, the higher the rank, the more money you're gonna pay, right? Um, and so, um, I just went through this, um, I think November. Um, the rep reached out to me, I was talking to him.

LinkedIn ads are great, but let me give you the bad news first. The bad news is that you can't personalize the ads and you can't scale up the ads as quickly. The good news is if you're in the B2B space, you're doing account-based marketing, we have a solution for you called Karrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T. And the good news is that you can create a lot of these campaigns with the click of a button. You can personalize the ads, and there's a whole host of new things that are coming. If you want to get on the waitlist, just go to karrot.ai. Again, it's karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side.

It used to be that just they wanted you to get on there and they would do the call for you for your reviews. Now it's part of the paid service. There's like— they have a package, just like a membership package, where they'll call and get reviews for you. They'll do these things. I don't— they might do it if you're new. They might throw that in kind of thing, just, you know, when you're negotiating. Um, I've gotten 2 reviews that way, and the client was like, oh, that was a cool experience, you know, like, because they were— it was white glove. They did a really good job of Making sure to make sure the client, you know, was comfortable. And honestly, they kind of got a real review. You know, kind of they were. It's a third party. We've done UpCity. I believe listing in a sort list is another one.

Sort list.

Have your listing. They have free listings on all these. You should definitely. It's kind of like a. citation. You should be on all those. Um, I— you want to pick a service. You don't want to go like digital marketing.

He just—

that's going to be very expensive. Um, like we did web design because it was cheaper. And, um, then SEO, everybody wanted that for the city that we were going after. I— we looked at Cincinnati and he said it's not worth it, Kevin, to spend the money because I don't see enough leads coming there to— you'll come back to me and be mad at me. So I thought it was pretty— that was clutch. There's another one and I'm drawing a blank on it right now. I'm just going to look it up, actually.

I'm going to be taking a break.