26 Jun
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As a service business, a digital agency will offer custom and unique experiences and solutions for each client. What method or formula that works best for one may not work for another. As a result, a digital agency may find it difficult to grow and scale due to the labour-intensive nature of custom solutions. For instance, winning more clients means needing more hires to deal with and manage their custom marketing requirements.
With more than 50% of agencies stating growth was a major challenge, how can they overcome this and what are the reasons why they can’t grow?
Why is it harder to grow a digital marketing agency?
There are numerous reasons why digital agencies struggle to grow, as we previously mentioned it is a service business that delivers highly customised solutions to its clients across different industries. This is labour-intensive for all teams involved in the marketing campaigns and customer journey. It is then difficult to transfer this winning solution to other client projects without damaging the client relationship if unsuccessful.
Digital marketing agencies are also seeing unprecedented competition from other agencies, freelancers and even software solutions that provide in-house marketing services.
The more clients a digital agency wins the more unique projects it will have, which means it will need to hire more people. This comes with a higher financial risk because what will the agency do with those hires when the work slows down?
Differentiation can also be a reason for stifled growth as it can be seen as both a benefit and a hurdle. This is because specialising in marketing for one specific industry sector such as hospitality, fitness or entertainment means providing expert knowledge and value on that sector. But is a hindrance to scalability as this knowledge cannot be transferred to a different sector.
This begs the question, what can digital agency’s do to overcome these growth and scalability challenges?
Transform your Business Model to Encourage Growth and Scale
Scale and grow your digital agency by transforming its business model to one that can respond to demand. As well as develop a scalable strategy that can deal with client peaks and troughs as a result of budget cuts. To not only reduce financial risks but improve profitability and customer experience.
This can be achieved by dividing and conquering with automation and identifying which manual processes can be automated to reduce the time and labour spent on them. Whilst maintaining key offerings that define your agency and allow you and your team to focus on developing creative and unique campaigns for your clients.
How can automation help your new digital agency’s business model and growth?
Automation and AI are here to stay so why not embrace their incredible functionality? They will help you stand out from the competition and compete in the digital era we find ourselves within.
Accepting change can be hard, but automation services are designed to simplify and eradicate mundane processes to free up your time. For instance, marketing automation software can eradicate manual data entry across multiple platforms. How? A simple workflow can add a new email address from a website form to a CRM and email platform in seconds. Just connect and watch the data flow with marketing automation tools.
Tired of content switching and logging in and out of different platforms to wrangle data for a client presentation? Well stop and automate it, get that data from a marketing analytics tool, social media and wherever else and send it to a centralised database or dashboard. It can even visualise it for your presentation.
How can this automation be repeated I hear you ask, one workflow might work for one customer but it won’t be repeatable for others. Well, the great thing is marketing automation tools like CE (ConnectorEngine) allow you to not only copy and paste great performing workflows but they can be highly configured and customisable. For instance, if one client uses MailChimp instead of Campaign Monitor simply swap out the Connectors and authenticate with the client’s details. Then add the relevant steps and watch the data flow.
We designed CE as an automation service that helps you grow, scale and reduce labour on mundane processes. As well as help you deliver consistent value to clients with winning formulas. Simply connect, automate and grow whilst focusing on customer relationships, team communication and collaboration and excellent project management.
Automation Adoption for a Digital Agency
Ultimately, keep processes that make your digital agency unique and different but automate the repetitive tasks and processes. To not only reduce labour on them but enhance data collection and the customer relationship.
Toni Voutilainen notes, “Automation can help transform your business because it’ll let you focus on your clients’ wider strategy rather than just their performance.”
Get connected today with CE!
