Direct marketing has changed
dramatically over the last ten years.
Digital marketing is now the
predominant method to promote
products and services. However,
advertisers are still very much in the
dark about how to do this. Couple all of this with a burgeoning marketing technology arena and you have the birth of a new cottage industry, the small to medium size digital agency and/or freelance marketer. So how do you make money at this game?
I’ve been in or around the agency business model for roughly 20 years. I’ve worked
directly for agencies, digital publishers (who often act like agencies), and MarTech
software companies catering to agencies. I know the struggles of this space. Most often it's big success, followed by the fall from grace after the loss of a large client. This industry has also seen cutting edge marketing technologies fail spectacularly, i.e., Groupon and Yahoo. Likewise, on the other side, we’ve seen meteoric success
stories as a result of well executed online marketing strategies, i.e. Airbnb and
their unique content marketing strategy. The Agency model can be a lucrative one and even a very satisfying career; after all, you can make a difference. You can be the one responsible for your client’s success.
Although agencies may want to, they can’t be all things to all companies (more on that in a min), especially in today’s complex and extremely fractured environment that offers an
exhaustive number of available channels from which to promote products and services.
It doesn’t take a lot to be a very profitable agency, especially with all the Web-based tech that’s readily available today. However, knowing what to use, when, and how to use it to help your clients achieve their goals and retain them for a long-term contract is what makes the difference between being profitable and breaking even. It’s one of the more difficult aspects of owning a successful agency. Back to the “All things to all…..” topic; most agencies tend to
focus on a niche. Some are web developers, others focus on SEO, while many gravitate towards content creation and advertising. It’s usually the agency owner/founder who pulls on their experiences and knowledge that dictates the direction and focus of that agency.
It’s smart to focus on what you know, right? True! However, that doesn’t mean you can’t add revenue via other avenues to make your agency more profitable, well rounded, and dynamic. No agency founder has it all figured out. No agency founder knows all the tips and tricks or technologies available to them.
MARKETING STABILITY
So how do you get your small agency to that next level? Sometimes it’s a matter of revenue and sometimes it’s a matter of resources. In either situation, we have a few ideas you MUST be deploying on some level. The agency landscape is crowded; technologies are numerous and complex. However, the good news is that I believe we’ve entered an era of marketing stability. What I mean by that is that digital marketing has now been around long enough to see tried and true methods surface.
You can now see case studies emerging for verticals and textbooks that explain successful strategies that haven’t really changed much over the past few
years. The path to what works and doesn’t work is much clearer today vs. what was happening during Internet v1.0 days, where big brands and agencies took
random shots in the dark and used trial and error techniques to marketing. Remember pop-up ads? Wow did that bomb. No one really understood exactly how to market on the Internet. We were all just trying out the new toy to see how it worked.
Now everybody is talking about Internet v3.0, which is supposed to embody the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial
Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning. This new frontier is exciting and it’s unleashing some amazing new technologies, but it has also ushered in established practices that don’t appear to be going anywhere. Sure, things change rapidly in a competitive and technical landscape, but best practices and foundational strategies for certain disciplines, such as SEM and SEO, don’t appear to be changing or fading inside of a year or two like they were ten years ago. Mobile is here to stay, and voice search is only getting better and more powerful while using the same basic principles as text search.
There are now two foundational principles to obtaining leads and/or sales: you are either promoting content or directly promoting your client via advertising. That’s it;
those are the overarching strategies available to marketers today. Yes, tactics beneath those might change, but those are the established silos today.
We believe that the bottom line to digital marketing, if we could sum it all up in a very short description, is to compare it to the gold rush days. First off, there are a ton of people rushing into this career path and the digital marketing discipline in general, which is akin to the stampede out to the Klondike, but more to the point, we digital
marketers are a lot like the early “panners” who also used a technique that we still rely on to this day, which is to shovel tons of stuff into the top of a funnel and then systematically sift through all that stuff until we find the gold (leads and/or sales) at
the bottom. As I mentioned above, shoveling stuff into the top of a funnel is done
by either marketing content or advertising. There’s plenty of stuff!
Panning became the principal means of producing gold, once the gold rush had simmered to a crawl. Yes, people blasted through mountains and dug too, but
that was hit or miss and quite costly. I’m told that, right now, if you have the patience, a gold pan and you’re located on just about any creek you WILL find gold. It’s just a matter of technique and persistence. The gold is there, waiting to be found. How much you’ll find, I don’t know, but if you go out there, follow basic panning principles and stick to it then you’ll go home with some gold flakes in your pan.
The biggest nugget (pun intended) of information we can glean from the gold panning days is that the people who made all the money during that craze were the ones who focused on selling goods to those looking for gold, i.e. the hotels, the hardware vendors, the banks and security services. All of those were periphery products that supported the industry.
Let me summarize before we get to the ideas. There are tried and true methods to producing leads and/or sales for your clients. There’s no magic or luck. Tons of people exist online who are looking for what your clients are selling (they’re the “stuff” that gets shoveled into the top of the funnel). It's about having the right tools, persistence and focus. Many agencies make a lot of money on simply selling periphery products to the industry. So let’s take stock of where we are, having looked back briefly at where we were, and consider three things that TIMBUC believes agencies can do in 2020 to add new revenue streams to their bottom line, as well as make their offerings deeper and
more useful to their customers. Start shoveling my friends!
OUTSOURCING
Outsourcing may not sound like a new idea. However, outsourcing domestically vs. “offshoring” is the new wave. There has been a big backlash to outsourcing certain things abroad, such as tech support. Customers calling into your company looking for support get very upset when they connect with someone who doesn't speak or understand the language, nor really understands them, or their problem. However, finding a freelance expert who can configure Google Analytics for you could help you win over a skeptical client. Here are a couple of quick questions to ask yourself and your firm to see if you could benefit from or need outsourcing:
a) Do you have solutions for the most requested services? Maybe you don’t know the answer to this. If you don’t then I would recommend asking everybody in your organization to keep a running list of requests your clients and/or potential clients have. You might be surprised at the end of the month.
b) Are you lacking resources or expertise in an area that’s hurting you financially?
What can you outsource? In today’s environment just about everything! We now have a situation where the “Gig Economy” has an available freelancer for just about everything you can imagine, from voice-over work, website design, user interface design, ad creative, cloud computing management and the list goes on and on…. There’s almost no reason to have a ton of inhouse experts on your permanent payroll these days. The next time you get an opportunity that you aren’t sure you can tackle, it might be worth your time to jump on any number of Gig sites out there, such as: Fiverr, Upwork or Freelancer to see if you can find someone who can help you with a specific discipline, so that you can win and fulfill a particular opportunity.
I was skeptical of all these sites at first, but as they’ve grown, they’ve also (mostly) shed their stigma and they are producing legitimate results for agencies and clients alike.
There are talented people out there that simply don’t want to work for someone else and they often offer their expertise at a fraction of what you would pay a permanent employee with the same talent.
Outsourcing is also a great way to offer peripheral services to your clients. If search marketing isn’t something you do inhouse, but you have clients who are asking you to manage that for them, by all means- outsource this to someone and leverage their expertise. This will also enable you to really “own” the client and connect all efforts so that there’s a homogenous thread that runs through all of their promotions.
One of our Client's is an agency called Magnolia. They get a lot of business from Fiverr building websites, and most of their clients also wanted search. Instead of turning them away, Magnolia hired Timbuc (us!) to manage all their search marketing for them. How'd that work out? We'll talk about that towards the end of this eBook.... so stay tuned!
TRIPWIRE OR TEASER PRODUCTS
Some organizations use this method as a top-of-funnel strategy, but here’s how I see these working; I see these products as a means to simply get your foot in the door, add a small amount of revenue to your bottom line, and increase your customer base, which should
help you with reviews as well (bonus!).
If I told you that you could sell a lot of inexpensive products with very little effort at no cost to you, and that would enable you to go back soon after and upsell more, would you do that? Of course you would – who wouldn’t? There are so many inexpensive teaser-like products that add value, cost very little and get your foot in the door.
Pro tip: we use these Apps- you can too!
Invoca: (invoca.com) is a call tracking vendor that offers
agency services. Many of these vendors also offer their
technology as a private labeled solution, so make sure to
ask about this when researching vendors. Call tracking
can not only help your client but can help you home in on what’s working for them during an ad campaign or content marketing effort. Lines are inexpensive and easy
to get setup and the data that coms from using them can be invaluable to your customer.
TapClicks: (tapclicks.com) is a marketing performance dashboard. It’s simple to connect your existing ad campaigns on Google, Yahoo, Bing or Facebook up to
TapClicks and pull-down performance data that gets neatly displayed in their dashboard. This makes you look professional and saves you time by taking you away from painstakingly downloading raw data, manipulating it in Excel to make it presentable and then messing with the look and feel so that it fits your own brand.
Google My Business Setup: All advertisers should be up on GMB, Google’s business directory (finally), but they’re not! Offer to set-up a client for free to get your feet wet. Then when you’re an expert at it offer the service online, as a teaser, for super cheap. Maybe you get inundated with small purchases. Guess who you can go back to in a few months and pitch a website, some Google Paid Search or Facebook Advertising? If you’re not familiar with GMB, it’s now sophisticated, probably more than you might think. It’s way more than just a directory. It has a reviews function, chat function, offers and analytics. It’s a free and essential marketing tool that all companies should simply use, like fluoride in the water!
Dubsado (Dubsado.com) is a cross between a CRM, a task manager, your online portal for housing agreements and proposals and your invoicing software. Wow! Let me first start off by saying we use this product internally. When we first installed and configured it we weren't sure what to expect, but we were soon pleasantly surprised by how many
deals it helped us win, not to mention it's overall utility.
Here’s how; any time we’re in the process of answering an RFP or sending out a proposal we tend to win the bid simply because we look more professional than anyone else. Proposals are delivered via an emailed link that potential clients can view and agree to in the Dubsado portal. You also get notification they viewed it and/or accepted or rejected it. Last but not least it helps us keep track of everything, including sales! So why not become a Dubsado expert and then offer to set this up for your clients? This is a great service. This product will help take your client into the future and help complete their digital transformation. Many agencies are now straddling that line between being a systems integrator and creative marketing firm. Finally, you can CHARGE a pretty penny for this service.
CONDUCTING AUDITS
There’s an audit for everything these days and there’s a reason for that. There are a ton of people out there that do NOT know what they’re doing and are unqualified to be offering the services they’re offering. That’s why there are certifications and that’s why audits exist for all types of marketing efforts. Offering an audit for someone can also act
as a great sales tool. There’s nothing more impressive than walking into a potential client meeting with a ton of pertinent data about that client’s website or existing marketing efforts.
You Could Offer the Following Audits:
Content Audit – content marketing audits can be a little ambiguous but done properly they produce some interesting results that I bet most companies will be shocked at in terms of how little they’re doing against their competition. You can rely on off the
shelf products like: https://buzzsumo.com/ or https://www.similarweb.com/ to help you with this effort. Don’t be shy about using third party products. Offering these types of services to your customer is as much about knowing what product to use as it is about your experience as a marketer.
Digital Advertising Audit – ok this is a little more straight forward than a content audit. There are basic principles and structure here, so you have a framework to rely upon when conducting a Paid Advertising Audit. For example, at a very basic level, Google PPC campaigns should be setup so that each product or service has its own ad group with 3 to 5 ads in each. You can take a quick look at just about any campaign and judge whether it's been setup properly. However, if you’d like a software package to do the heavy lifting and get access to fancy AI-based analysis then look at WordStream.com. They have an automated “Campaign Grader”.
Website Audit – this is always a fun one. Website audits are probably the oldest of all the audits so there are several companies out there who can inexpensively help you with this effort. However, before you jump into the water and pull the trigger on a monthly subscription I would first look at your prospect’s website and do the basic sniff test, i.e. do they have a mobile friendly version, are there calls to action, is their contact data accurate and is there valuable content for potential customers to study?
Next, see what the experts say by punching in that URL to one of these solutions: MOZ.com, SEMrush.com or ScreamingFrog.com. They spit back very comprehensive
reports that you can typically private-label for your brand. The only caveat I would warn you about is to be sure you understand the report before you present it and/or use it as a sales tool. Some of these reports get deep and if you don’t know how to explanate the data, then that could blow your chances for a larger and/or longer-term relationship.
Remember Magnolia, from Fiverr? They outsource all of their client's Google Search and Facebook Ads to us. As a result of offering their clients digital advertising, they brought in an extra $135,000 in 2019!!!
TIMBUC is an outsourced resource for those who are lacking the experience and/or knowledge to effectively create and manage digital advertising campaigns. We cater to ad agencies, publishers, anyone reselling digital advertising and directly to advertisers. We are Google and Facebook certified and know how to work with resellers and their clients. We have 15 plus years of experience in this space. We always offer a free first-time consultation and/or proposal. Do don't be shy. Say hello!