Agency Growth: Mastering Sales & Client Acquisition

This is the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. Discover the strategies and techniques to grow a highly successful and profitable digital marketing agency with your host, Joshua Nelson. Today we're gonna dive into a strategy that is a must-listen for digital marketing agencies that are looking to grow and scale, which is the ultimate guide to sales strategies and client acquisition for your digital marketing agency. So, if you want to land more clients, you want to have accelerated growth, you're going to want to watch this video. When it comes to growing and scaling your digital marketing agency, regardless of if you're at 7 figures, multiple 7 figures, or just trying to land your first couple of clients, one area that you've got to constantly be working on, you got to constantly be refining, you got to constantly be focused on is how you land clients and how you grow your client base. And so I want to walk you through the key strategies that we found worked best for us at Plumbing and HVAC SEO, as well as what we found have worked for hundreds of agencies that we work with as part of the Seven Figure Agency. So this pyramid in my mind hits the key strategies and the key techniques you want to make sure that you're implementing in order to grow your agency. And first and foremost is is cold outreach. And cold outreach is getting a list of prospects and shaking the bushes and making connections and making introductions so that you can get some appointments and you can get some sales. This is where most of us start, and there's, I think there's a right way and a wrong way to do cold outreach. I think if you're thinking, I'm just gonna get a, scrape a list with D7 Lead Finder in a niche I'm gonna load it up into Instantly or some cold outreach platform, and I'm gonna send several thousand emails, and magically people are gonna reply, they're gonna schedule in, and business is gonna be booming, you're gonna be up for a rude awakening. What we found with cold outreach in the digital marketing agency space, even if you're niched into a very specific market, even if you've got proven results, you have to take this further, right? You need to make sure that you get a solid list, ideally join the National Association, and develop a specific list of right-fit prospects, and when you reach out, you're not just doing one email blast, you're not just doing a sequence of follow-ups that don't really add any value. What I find with cold outreach, you have to go multi-channel, and you have to go multi-touch, and it has to be customized to the person you're reaching out to. So, multichannel means we're not just gonna email, right? We're gonna email, we're gonna call, we're gonna use social messenger, we're gonna comment on their social posts, we're gonna drop something in the mail. When you go multichannel, you have a much higher probability of getting the attention of the prospect and actually having a meaningful impact. We're gonna go multitouch, which means we can't just send one email, we can't just send one message. We've gotta send a lot of messages in a variety of different ways, and we have to customize that outreach. Don't just copy and paste a template. Think about the prospect and their specific needs. Connect with them and say something specific about their business, about their background, or about how you've connected with them through the industry or through somebody they do business with. If you go cold outreach in that way, you can absolutely get appointments. You can actually build your authority, and ultimately you can develop your list so that you can do more marketing via other channels. So I've got this down at the base because first of all, it's where most of us start, but also, if you don't have a list to work off, none of the other marketing strategies you might employ will work, right? If you're gonna try and do Facebook ads, you need a list that you can use for your custom audience. If you're going to put on webinars and inbound content, you need a list that you can invite, right? And so make sure that you've got a solid approach to get that list data and to have a warm on-ramp with those prospects. Number 2, and in my mind is one of my favorite marketing strategies, is inbound marketing. And inbound marketing, really what we're doing is putting great content into the universe that adds value to our very specific vertical and gets people to be exposed to our value in advance and come to us prepositioned to buy, entering the top of our funnel. Inbound marketing is interesting in that Once you've got it up and running, and you've got people finding you on YouTube, and you've got people listening to your podcast, and you've got people engaging with you in a variety of ways, they come to you very pre-positioned, right? And the sales resistance is very low. But there's also a long gestation period here. You're not just gonna do webinars and create video content and put this stuff online and automatically have a slew of people coming into your world, right? You have to do that over time, you have to be methodical with it, and it's something that builds up. Over time. It's also quite a bit more effective when you've got a list that you're sending all of that content that you create for inbound marketing purposes to. So inbound marketing. From there you've got marketed lead generation, which is eating our own dog food as agencies, um, running Facebook ads, running Google ads, actually marketing ourselves with retargeting to get in front of our ideal customers. And marketed lead generation in a niche-focused agency is extremely effective if you do it right. Running Facebook ads, running Google Ads specifically, can really be the key to fill your funnel and to get lots of clients coming in. The, the challenge with marketing lead generation is you have to have some money to invest. Your average cost to acquire a customer obviously is going to be higher, but I really believe when you combine it with cold outreach, and inbound marketing, your Facebook and Instagram and Google Ads become more effective, right? 'Cause they're seeing you in other places, and ideally once they opt in, even if they don't schedule, even if they don't become a client, you've gotta nurture process to warm them up and get them to become clients long-term. Now, moving up the hierarchy, what most digital marketing agencies don't do is tap into associations and speaking opportunities. Cold outreach, usually you're buying a list and then— or you're scraping a list and you're starting to reach out to them via whatever mechanism you have. In any niche that you choose to focus on— plumbing, roofing, chiropractor, whatever niche you happen to dial and focus on— there's an association that is gathering across the country on a quarterly basis, on an annual basis, in major cities across the country. What you want to do is you want to connect with that association, you want to gain access to their list so that you can market to them, so that you can make them a custom audience, but then you also want to find out when their events are happening so that you can be there as an exhibitor, so that you can potentially be there as a speaker. One of the most powerful things you can do to position yourself as an expert is to find opportunities to speak in front of your ideal customers. And so, you Don't sleep on joining that association, getting out from behind your desk and in the city where your clients are actually getting together for continuing education, for masterminding, and be there. Spend the time, be in the sessions, be at your booth, have those conversations, meet other industry association exhibitors, and look for enough ways to add value by supporting the event, maybe even promoting the event, by offering to help in some way so that the presenter or the group, the committee that runs it says, "You know what? We should have you come speak to this group. We should have you come speak at the next event." Right? And when you get those speaking opportunities combined with your exhibiting, wow, it's off to the races in terms of new client growth at that point. And then at the top of this hierarchy, we've got joint ventures, right? Finding people that are doing business with the clients you want to do business with. There's a famous quote by Jay Abraham that says, "You're just one joint venture away from a million-dollar business." And reality speaking, you're just one joint venture away from a 7-figure agency. And we found this to be true with a number of our members. One great example of this is Jimmy Nichols from Jimmy Marketing. He worked in the orthodontic space. He aligned with one of the top coaches in the orthodontic industry. That person brought him to his events, like, started referring him to all his clients. His agency grew to multiple 7 figures. He went on to sell that business, and it was predominantly that one joint venture that drove the opportunity. And so this video is all around client acquisition and the complete guide to the key strategies you can implement to grow your business. And what I found is that these really do have a synergistic effect. Like, if you just did any of these in a vacuum, they would be somewhat effective. But when you do them all together in an effective way, there's a compounding effect where 1 1 doesn't just equal 2. Somehow or another, when you're— when you've got synergy going, 1 1 somehow equals 5, right? And so, you know, as you're building your list and you're sending your outreach, you start to become known. And then you start to do inbound marketing. You put out content, you do webinars, you do podcasts, and the people on that cold outreach start to have some affinity with you. They start to feel like you're a person of value. And then you start running ads, retargeted and specifically targeting the people within your space, and people are more likely to opt in, they're more likely to schedule in, and then you start to show up at the events within the industry, you start to be a speaker, and all of it starts to have a compounding effect. Now, because you're a person of authority, because you put out great content, because you're at the events, because you're a speaker, because you're at those events meeting the other providers and the other people, the joint venture opportunities start to present themselves. Right? And so this really has a building effect and will absolutely help you grow and scale your digital marketing agency. Now, to make this more practical, we have what's called the, the Agency Growth System that kind of breaks it down by the things you want to be doing daily, the things you want to be doing weekly, and the things you want to be doing monthly in order to land clients on a very specific— on a very consistent basis. I've got another video in and if you search the Agency Growth System, that walks you through this entire process. But today I wanted to focus on these key strategies that you wanna be putting in place within your digital marketing agency. So, if you'd like to get more details on how to grow and how to scale and how to take your digital marketing agency to the next level, I've got a great training that's completely free called the Seven Figure Agency Roadmap Implementation Program that walks you through our exact model. And how to choose your niche, position yourself as the expert, go out and land clients on a consistent basis, deliver world-class results, and scale your operation so you don't have to do it yourself. If you'd like to access that training, you can go to 7figureagency.com/roadmap. Again, it is free. Go check it out. Let me know in the comments, what of these strategies are you implementing in your agency? What's worked best for you? If you got value, Be sure to press the like button, hit the subscribe button. We're loading up new videos every Monday at 10:30 AM. So hit the subscribe button, hit the bell notification so you'll be notified as new videos come out. And that's it for today. Thanks so much for watching, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.