Scale your agencies for growth

Launching your digital agency is an important achievement. But once you complete your client list and execute one successful month after another, you need a next plan.

So, how can you grow your agency and make the most of your momentum?

Let’s see how you can expand your services for growth so that you can take your agency to the next level.

What does it mean to expand your agency?

Most social media owners strive to grow their operations – but this is not the same as scaling up.

Before taking steps to expand your agency, we need to define the terms and be clear about the differences:

• Growth involves the increase in revenue and resources simultaneously. For example, if you hire another social media marketer, your agency may attract more customers. You will generate more revenue but also have higher expenses.
• Scale enables your agency to generate significant revenue without spending the same resources. If you adopt a new software platform, your agency can increase it exponentially. You will increase productivity and generate more revenue without extra expenses.

When should you scale the services of your agency?

To build your agency successfully, you need to know when to take the next step.

Here are some signs that it’s time to expand your agency:

• You earn a profit. If your agency has been making steady profits for more than a year, you are already on the right track. You have a good base to build from, and you can use what works to increase your profits exponentially.
• Your team is at full capacity. If your agency is already working as hard as possible, you can no longer take on clients without causing burnout. Scaling down your operations can help you earn more revenue while reducing resource production.
• You have more clues than you can handle. Hiring new employees may seem like a logical solution – until you recalculate your profit margins. Instead of spending more resources, you can expand your agency to serve more clients and increase your revenue.

How to scale your services for growth

Are you ready to grow your agency exponentially?

Here are ten ways to increase your services:

1. Define and target your ideal customer

Without a target client in mind, your agency can waste a lot of time managing clients with diverse needs. As a result, you may have to spend extra resources on extra processes, applications, and research.

If you ideal customer, you can market effectively, quickly on board and successfully meet needs.

To create a target customer profile, examine their industry, location, service needs, pain points, and budget. Do not forget to include social monitoring as a tool for your research. By using a tool for monitoring social media Like Agorapulse, you can listen to online conversations about your space, your business, your existing customers, your competition and your industry.

Then use your knowledge to create more compelling marketing copies and more effective processes.

2. Perfect your lead generation strategy

Do not let customer acquisition happen by chance or rely on an unreliable process like word-of-mouth marketing.

The sooner you can perfect the agency’s lead generation strategy, the sooner you can rely on maintaining your client pipeline.

Use repeated, very focused tactics, such as:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) ads, such as Google ads
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to generate organic website traffic
• Content marketing to educate prospective clients
• Email marketing to nurture hot clues
• Social media posts and ads, such as LinkedIn or Facebook ads

3. Offer containers or recurring services

One-time campaigns can be incredibly profitable. But if your team is constantly pursuing one-off projects, you could leave a lot of money on the table and have big gaps in your schedule.

To complement your big projects, you offer persistent or recurring services that generate ongoing revenue. For example, you can offer social media management on an ongoing basis.

If you set up customer contracts to renew automatically every month, you can focus on delivering good work rather than delivering repeat sales points.

4. Identify your unicorns

Review the internal analysis of your agency and identify outliers. Do you offer a service with a particularly large profit margin? Are certain customer segments significantly better than others?

Then draw up a plan to utilize this service or segment.

What would your agency and profits look like if you focused on your most profitable client groups or service with the highest value?

Calculate some scenarios with different focus levels to find the right balance between specialization and diversity.

5. Analyze your customer flow

Does it seem like customers are always waiting on your team to promote things? Review your customer flow to identify issues and improve efficiency:

• Where do you get customers? Separate them into groups based on their initial entry point.
• What does your onboarding process look like? Does each group have a different process, or do you use the same workflow for everyone?
• How many touch points do your customers receive on average? Can you set up a standard workflow for each group?

Then use your insights to develop consistent procurement, on-board and renewal processes for different types of customers.

6. Develop repeatable processes

Customer management does not have to be as resource intensive as you might think. To reduce wasted time and effort, create on-board processes, daily tasks, reporting and delivery.

Then document the steps and technology and share the knowledge with your team. Use an app like to streamline the process further Process Street, which allows you to design reusable checklists and tackle workflows as a team.

7. Use specialized and integrated tools

To keep costs low, it is tempting to use free tools, even if they are not designed for the purpose. To grow your agency, it is essential to use specialized tools that integrate easily with each other. Some may require extra investment, but it can help you save time and improve productivity. Standard digital agency platforms include:

• Social media management equipment
• Social media analytics tools
• Reputation management tools
• Social Media Monitoring Centers
• Hashtag research tools
• Content Management Tools
• Image and video management tools
• Team and client collaboration tools

8. Give priority to quality assurance

As your customers and team grow, it can be difficult to maintain the same oversight. However, if you deliver high quality work for the first time, you will spend less time on it later.

Clients who recognize your high quality work are also likely to renew their contracts or refer your agency.

This means that it is essential to prioritize quality assurance, even if you no longer have time to review each delivery yourself.

Keep the following rules of thumb in mind to keep your quality levels high as you scale:

• Train your team to adhere to the quality of your agency.
• Establish an approval process with internal teams and clients.
• Take a sense of quality in your corporate culture.

9. Build complementary partnerships

To fill your client pipeline, you need to develop a partnership with another agency that has a similar main generation strategy. Find an agency with services that complement you.

For example, you could work with a PPC or website design agency to complement your social media agency.

When customers request services offered by your partner agency, you can refer them and vice versa. With this setup, you can create a strong referral system and satisfy more customers without having to provide additional services.

10. Weigh the benefits of outsourcing

Who says your team has to deal with everything in-house? Outsourcing of selected processes and tasks can improve productivity and performance. After all, it frees up your team to tackle high-level projects and revenue-generating strategies.

To take the pressure off your team, consider outsourcing things like:

• Internal processes such as accounting
• Sales processes and customer acquisition

You can also outsource additional services, effectively improving your agency’s offering while keeping resource outputs to a minimum. Consider setting up contractors or other agencies for client procedures such as:

• Social media scheduling
• Content production
• Community Management
• Customer service

Once you have decided to expand your services for growth, you can start building better processes, improving productivity and increasing production. With a solid strategy, you can increase your profit margins and sincerely scale your agency.