In this video, Joshua Nelson—owner of a $6 M/year marketing agency and founder of the 7 Figure Agency training program—presents a repeatable "Agency Growth System" designed to help small‑to‑mid‑size agencies acquire more clients than they can handle. He begins by stating the core problem agencies under $20k/month face: inconsistent client acquisition. He then outlines five high‑level acquisition channels: (1) cold outreach (list building via industry associations or tools like Coldlytics, followed by multi‑channel outreach), (2) inbound marketing (webinars, podcasts, ebooks, blogs that pre‑position prospects), (3) marketed lead generation (self‑run Google, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube ads and retargeting using custom audiences), (4) association involvement and speaking (exhibiting, sponsoring, and presenting at industry events such as the National Plumbing Association), and (5) joint‑venture partnerships (leveraging complementary service providers to receive referrals). He then translates these channels into a cadence of actions: daily cold outreach, daily ad management, and daily social content; monthly live webinars and podcasts; quarterly in‑person association events and a documented client case study. He argues that consistently executing this cadence creates momentum, authority, and a pipeline that can be scaled to 7‑figure revenue. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action to download a free "7‑Figure Agency Roadmap Implementation Course" that expands on client acquisition, retention, service delivery, and systems. Key takeaways: a systematic, multi‑channel prospecting approach; the importance of industry‑specific list building; using paid ads to amplify owned content; positioning yourself as an authority through speaking and case studies; and leveraging joint ventures for exponential growth.
Chapters
The most common question I get from agencies under $20,000 a month is, how do I get more clients? The answer usually lies in finding a system that can help you attract and convert clients on a predictable and consistent basis. So in this video, I'm gonna go over the exact strategies you can use to get more marketing agency clients than you can handle. No matter if you're doing SEO, website design, Google Ads, funnels, or any other marketing service, this system's proven to work. And here's why. My name is Joshua Nelson. I run a marketing agency doing $6 million per year. I also run a training company, 7 Figure Agency, where we've helped over 100 agencies scale to 7-figure and beyond. So trust me when I say this method I'm going to be showing you is battle-tested and it works. So if your goal is to get more agency clients, this video will help you. All right, so let's get into it. When it comes to landing clients for your digital marketing agency and really filling the funnel, first things first, typically we've got to start with cold outreach. When I say cold outreach, I'm not just talking about cold calling, I'm not just talking about cold emailing, I'm talking about getting a list of prospects in your niche, whatever niche you're, you're happening to go after. We've got to get a list of those prospects and make an introduction. The beauty of cold outreach is we We can start making outreach connections, we can start scheduling opportunities, and we can start to build a little bit of momentum. Cold outreach, couple things we gotta think about is how are we gonna get the list? Lots of options. My favorite is to join the association. If you work with plumbing companies, like in our case, you would join the National Plumbing Association because that's the list of actual business owners that are interested in continuing education, that are developing themselves, that are actually in business. And when you join, you're actually gonna be able to draft on affinity, right? The other place would be to use a tool like Coldlytics where you can say, I want all the plumbing companies all the plumbers in Dallas, Texas, and they can run that list for you and actually append the name of the owner, their email address, their direct phone number, contact details. So you want to get the cold messaging list data, quality data, so that you can send emails, make introductions, connect on social media, potentially drop in at the office or send stuff in the mail. This is where you have to start, and you need to do enough volume in order to make it make sense. Number 1 is we're going to do cold outreach. Number 2 is inbound marketing. And the beauty of inbound marketing, it doesn't cost you anything but your time, your energy, and your mental aptitude. And so inbound marketing is putting out content into the universe— webinars, podcasts, ebooks, blog posts— putting out content that can be discovered by your prospect. And you're putting out content that talks about their problems, talks about their challenges, talks about their issues, so that they find it and say, hey, this is interesting, this is useful for me, and they come to you pre-positioned to buy. The combination of cold outreach with inbound marketing works really nice, right? Because if you just create video content or you do webinars, you're doing that in a vacuum, right? In a might get discovered eventually, but there's a long gestation period. On the other side of that, if we've got a list, let's say 5,000, 6,000, 10,000 prospects that we've put into a system like HighLevel, and then we create some inbound marketing, we invite them to a webinar, we invite them to a podcast, we send them our lead magnet. Now we're not just creating inbound content in a vacuum. We get an audience of prospects that we're reaching out to and adding value and planting seeds that will lead to client growth. First, cold outreach. Second, inbound marketing. Third, is marketed lead generation. As a marketing agency, you probably are doing some Facebook ads, Google ads, retargeting. You do this for your clients, but you never really think to apply it for yourself. If you want to accelerate the growth within your digital marketing agency, know who your niche is, have the list. That way you can target it, put out content that makes you relevant, interesting, positions you as an authority, and then put some gasoline behind it by running ads. You guys know the channels, but what we find works best now, working with hundreds of digital marketing agencies, first is Google Ads, right? I know it's basic, but if I'm selling to plumbing companies, I want to make sure I'm bidding on plumbing marketing, internet marketing for plumbers, SEO strategy for plumbing companies, right? These keywords exist. There's not a ton of search volume, but if somebody searches that, they're your niche that's looking for your service. Obviously we want to come up for that. So Google Ads, from there retargeting, right? Just putting the pixel and retargeting your prospects so that regardless of where they entered your funnel, because they saw one of your cold emails potentially and clicked on something, or they watched one of your webinars and they wound up on a registration page or they saw one of your ads. Now we're going to be omnipresent in their world. So Google Ads retargeting and then Facebook ads, right? You know, you could play with TikTok, you can play with YouTube, lots of different strategies there. But the big three for growing your agency are Google Ads retargeting and Facebook ads, right? With Facebook, we can laser target our niche, right? We do that by taking the list and loading it as a custom audience. And then we layer on top of that our retargeting list. And now we're going to be putting out content content on Facebook as well as advertising to try and bring them into our funnel. And you can advertise a case study, you can advertise a book, you can advertise a direct VSL to schedule a strategy session. All of those work well. And so you want to make sure that you're spending those dollars effectively and then you're, you're managing it. Above that, we've talked about cold outreach, we've talked about inbound marketing, we've talked about marketing lead generation. Up from that is plugging into the association by exhibiting at their events, by spending time at the industry conferences and looking for opportunities to present, opportunities to speak from the stage. So practically speaking, using our company as the example, plumbing and HVAC companies, there is a National Plumbing Association that gets together 3 times per year throughout the country. And then there are statewide chapters that are getting together in smaller groups across all the states pretty much every month. And then there are local chapters like the smaller cities that get together every month as well. While it's great to be in a digital world and send emails and put out content and run ads, something powerful happens when you are in the physical space with your ideal prospects. You can do this by just showing up at the event, participating. Better would be to find out who's running the event and pay for a booth. That way you can be one of the sponsors of the event and there's a reason for people to come back and talk with you. But the most powerful positioning you could do that will make those prospects look at you as the expert is if you're the one that comes in and shares how they can generate better results online or how they can get ranked on the Google map or how they can leverage Google Ads or local service ads to generate more leads and more sales. We want to get to these associations at least once a quarter. And then we also wanna find opportunities to speak, right? So we've got cold outreach, inbound marketing, marketed lead generation, associations, and speaking. At the very top of the hierarchy, we have joint ventures, which is finding the people that are already doing business with the clients you wanna do business with and finding a win-win where they wanna refer you to those clients. I know several agencies that have been able to grow to 7 figures or add an additional 7 figures by strategically landing a couple of great joint ventures. While you can't come right outta the gates the Joint Venture, right? Somebody that's a premier coach within your niche and they've got a mastermind where everybody comes together. They're not just going to start passing you business. You have to earn their attention, you have to earn their respect, and you have to earn like them saying, hey, you know what, I should probably start sending some business your way. Maybe it turns into a revenue stream for them. But typically it's a culmination of everything that you're doing to market yourself. If you're doing cold outreach, you're doing inbound marketing, you're putting out content, you're doing webinars, you're doing podcasts, you're speaking at the association or hanging out at the association, that's where you're going to become exposed to the other vendors, the other the other speakers, the other presenters, you'll have equal business stature where they're looking at you saying, this person knows what they're doing. And that's where you can get 10x growth within your digital marketing agency. Big picture, cold outreach, inbound marketing, marketing lead generation, associations and speaking, and then joint venture opportunities. We boil this down to what we call our Agency Growth System, which takes this, this big picture strategy and boils it down into the things we want to do daily, the things we want to do monthly, and the things we need to Quarterly to make sure we get enough strategy sessions to hit our sales targets and to hit our growth metrics. Daily, we want to be doing cold outreach, like new messages going out to prospects and calling and making introductions, running Facebook ads, running Google ads, and then dropping content onto our social profiles— Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. As you're prospecting and doing your cold outreach, you're calling, you're sending an email, but you're also connecting with prospects every single day on social media. And so your following in social media starts to grow, and so it only makes sense that you're gonna be dropping value-added content, answering questions, seeding examples that is gonna get people to raise their hand and express interest. So that's what we wanna be doing daily. Monthly, there's two things I would encourage you to do every single month. Number one is a live promoted webinar. This is just a webinar on a specific topic specific to your industry where you show up for 45 minutes to an hour and you add value. One webinar per month gives you a reason to touch your database multiple times. Forces you to show up and create new content that, that you can then syndicate and it will make you prolific within the industry. So one webinar per month and then one podcast per month. And when I say podcast, we're talking about just getting somebody within your niche, could be a past client, could be an influencer, could be somebody that's just crushing it in the space and get them on Zoom or get them on Restream and interview them. Ask them a couple questions. Usually goes 35 minutes to an hour and you're creating great content, very specific to the industry. I promise if you just did one webinar per month and one podcast per month and you syndicate it out and you, you kind of share it with the world, you will be looked at within a short window of time as one of the go-to experts within your space. You'll start to attract more people into your funnel, scheduling in pre-positioned, and you'll start to become known as somebody that joint ventures potentially want to align with and refer business to. Quarterly, there's at least one event happening within your niche where they're getting together for continued education every single quarter. So at least once per quarter, we want to get live and in person. We want to have a booth, we want to be present, we want to be in the after hours, we want to be looking for those speaking opportunities. And then once per quarter, we want to document a client case study, just at least one client that we knocked outta the park for. That way we, we're creating content, right? With our webinars and our podcasts, but we're also validating our results so we can show like, here's a client just like you. Here's where they were when we started. Here's what we did. Here's the results that they've gotten and here's how their life is different and better because we did business together. And if you do that once a quarter and you share it out with your list and you post it on social media, you add it to your case study library on your website, become not just a prolific thought leader within your industry, but one of the few that's showing their work, that's showing their results. I promise you, it's a relatively simple concept. It lists 5 key marketing strategies, a couple things you want to do daily, a couple things you want to do every month, and a couple things you want to do every quarter. If you do this, you will have more clients than you can handle. So these are the exact strategies you can use to sign more clients in your agency than you can handle. But solving client acquisition is just one part of the overall equation. If you want to scale your agency to 7 figures, you need to make sure you can retain these clients, deliver excellent service, put systems in place, and much more. So if you're looking to learn how you could do all of that, then make sure you click the first link in the description and get our free 7-Figure Agency Roadmap Implementation Course. This course contains the exact system we use to help 133 agencies scale to 7 figures and beyond. So if you want to join them, make sure you click that link and get the course free. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you on the next video.
