Upon reflection, this makes sense, right? Running means growing your clients’ businesses while simultaneously growing your own business. That’s—uh—not an easy thing to do.But it is possible. In fact, when it comes to small and medium-sized shops, there’s one strategy in particular that we find to be an exceptionally effective driver of growth: verticalization.Verticalization is a big, made-up-sounding word with a surprisingly simple definition: It’s the process of making your agency industry-specific. In other words, a verticalized agency only serves businesses from a single industry.In this guide, I’m covering why you’d want to consider verticalizing your agency and how to do that. When you finish reading, you’ll walk away knowing:. Why verticalization helps your agency.
Grow Digital use the most effective and sustainable business advising strategies where every element is tailored to your needs. We combine long-term objectives with quick results. See our detailed work process. If you want to hire the best in the market get EZDMAs target oriented and advanced digital marketing services for gearing up your business to the stars. Get connected with the people who value what you value. EZDMA is a digital marketing agency that can put you on that path.
How to verticalize your agency in six stepsSound like a plan? Let’s get on with it. Why verticalization helps your agency growAnother key insight from years of surveying our agency customers is that earning referrals from current clients is consistently the most common way to acquire new clients. This isn’t surprising. For a small business owner, outsourcing their digital marketing efforts—whether it’s in just one area, like, or in every area—is a huge decision.
Nobody hands over the responsibility for filling their funnel and driving sales to an agency they don’t trust. And nothing makes a business owner trust your agency like a stamp of approval from a fellow business owner.And yet.Typically, the well of client referrals is a well that runs dry.
It’s more than likely that your digital marketing agency can’t rely solely on referrals forever. At some point, you have to prospect.—which refers to the process of actively finding and pitching prospective clients—is hard enough as it is. You have to convince those skeptical business owners we just talked about that (1) there’s room to improve their digital marketing and (2) that they should trust you to deliver those improvements.
Again: not an easy thing to do. An essential step towards winning over those business owners is demonstrating your understanding of the spaces they operate in. When you’re prospecting businesses in every industry from to brick-and-mortar, you have to spend a ton of time studying. Plus, you have to retain an immense amount of information.Alternatively, when you’re only prospecting businesses from a single industry, you don’t have to hit the books nearly as hard. Yeah—you better know whatever industry you choose like the back of your hand.
But it goes without saying that the time it takes to understand one industry is a heck of a lot less than the time it takes to understand five industries.The problems that come with representing clients from all kinds of verticals doesn’t stop at the prospecting stage, either. When the time comes to actually—you know—manage these businesses’ digital marketing campaigns, you’re going to be implementing widely different strategies for each one. Whereas your SaaS clients will need you to through an exceptionally long sales cycle throughout the year, your brick-and-mortar clients will need you to really ramp things up during Q4.The problem with managing all kinds of different strategies comes down to a single word: scale. Quite simply, the non-verticalized route (AKA the “scattershot” route) doesn’t scale well over time.
And if you’re not, then what are we doing here? The 5 key benefits of a verticalized agencyBefore we move onto the process of verticalizing your digital marketing agency, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to the principal benefits of verticalization. You can scale more easily. Representing businesses from only one vertical enables you to literally replicate across clients. All of a sudden, onboarding is a heck of a lot easier and a heck of a lot quicker. You can brand yourself as an expert. Is it easy to become an expert on all things ecommerce?
Of course not. But it’s a lot easier than becoming an expert on all things ecommerce and all things nonprofit and all things consumer-packaged goods. You can offer more services. Thanks to the time-savings you’ll enjoy by not learning the ins and outs of every industry under the sun, you’ll be able to offer a relatively wide array of services to your clients. In a word, you’ll make yourself indispensable.
You can earn laser-focused testimonials. Why would a SaaS prospect care about the results you’ve driven for a brick-and-mortar client? Answer: They wouldn’t. When you verticalize, all of your —you only need one, really—become relevant.
You can worry less about competitors. There are a lot of multi-vertical agencies. There are considerably fewer brewery agencies. Nuff said.Alrighty, then. Let’s talk about the six steps you can take to verticalize your agency. How to verticalize your agency in six stepsAlthough every digital marketing agency is unique, we’ve had enough conversations with our customers to feel confident that the following six steps constitute a pretty solid formula for verticalization and growth. Despite that confidence, we encourage you to take each step with a grain of salt and make sure it’s appropriate for your agency.
Pick a verticalThe first step towards a successful, verticalized agency is pretty research-intensive. After all, if you’re going to limit yourself to a single industry, you want your decision to be as informed as possible.At this beginning stage, keyword research tools (we have!) are your best friend. Use them to gauge the respective levels of demand for digital marketing agencies across a bunch of different verticals. “Dental marketing agency” and “restaurant marketing agency,” for example, both get searched a couple hundred times a month in the US, which indicates substantial demand. “Dance school marketing agency,” on the other hand, doesn’t get searched much at all. Hit the booksGot the industry you want to go after?
Now it’s time to study.Winning the trust of advertisers in your target industry requires knowing that industry inside and out. What are the most common?
What are the most common obstacles to growth? What are these businesses trying to accomplish? Who are they trying to get in the door? How long is the average? There’s no getting around it—you have to be able to answer these questions.Empathy plays a huge role in this. If you can’t empathize with your prospective clients—put yourself in their shoes and understand their perspectives, that is—then you’re not going to market their businesses effectively.Picking up on industry lingo is also a good idea.
It makes for good ad. Develop a strategyThis is where all the knowledge you’ve acquired pays off. Before you start pitching, you need to get the wheels turning on strategy. You’ve got to think in terms of the funnel.What do conversions look like in this industry?
Let’s say you’ve decided to target the local gym scene. Ask yourself: What do gym owners consider conversions? Off the top of my head, I’d imagine they include things like watching a Facebook video, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a guide, scheduling a consultation, doing a trial period, and purchasing a membership. Once you’ve determined the relative value of those conversion actions, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to drive them.
Get Facebook video views by targeting based on gyms’ current customers. Drive content downloads by targeting the people who watched at least half of those videos. Use the contact information you get from those content downloads to offer free trial periods.In a word: strategize.By the way—notice how that strategy will work for basically all of your clients? That’s the whole point. Prospect with purposeAlright. You’ve picked an industry, learned everything there is to learn about it, and assembled the bones of a.
The time has come to get some clients in the door.Considering that you’re just starting out, you’ll probably have to do some cold outreach. Once you’ve identified some businesses you can reach out to, give them each a quick Google search and evaluate the results. Are they running paid search ads? If so, are they doing a good job? If the answer to both of those questions is a resounding no, give those places a call and let them know how you can help. Make sure you don’t talk to them like they’re dumb, though.Once you’ve brought a few clients on board, you enable yourself to tap into two great sources of new business: referrals and testimonials. Don’t be afraid to straight up (and politely) ask your clients to refer you to other businesses.
On top of that, go ahead and ask them if they’d be willing to write up a quick testimonial or film a short video to let site visitors know how well you’ve served them. Again, this all comes back to earning people’s trust. Audit and pitchI have two disclaimers I need to share. One, I’m about to plug our free account audit solution,. Two, it’s going to get you fired up.Essentially, the Grader is your one-stop shop for auditing prospective clients’ accounts and arming yourself with the data you need to make an irresistible pitch.Here’s how it works. Simply connect a prospect’s Google Ads account to the Grader and, in about 60 seconds, you’ll have a ton of extremely valuable information:.
Where they’re wasting their ad spend. Their aggregate Quality Score and CTR.
The quality of their landing pages. And more! We’ll assemble all that information for you in a sleek, white-labeled report that you can use as leverage when pitching the prospect. Spoiler alert: You’re probably going to succeed.(Our paid solution, comes with a more robust version of the Grader known as the New Business Center. Just sayin’.) 6.
Go forth and conquerWith a brain full of industry knowledge, a foolproof, replicable strategy, a growing base of clients who are eager to vouch for you, and an affordable software solution that brings out the gunslingin’ dealmaker we all know is inside you, nothing can stop your verticalized digital marketing agency from growing.So what are you waiting for?
Running a digital agency is tough.You have to worry about hiring, selling, accounting, payroll, marketing, account management, etc.Oh yeah, and you need to get results for your clients or they'll move on and may not say the nicest things.Luckily for you I've put together 23 tactics to grow & scale your digital agency to make your life a little easier. Sure, you may already be doing a few of these things, but I guarantee that you'll find at least one gold nugget that helps take your agency to the next level.The list is broken up in to five categories:. Improving your internal marketing & sales. Reducing client churn. Scaling systems & processes. Shrewdly growing your team.
Enhancing your service offerings Improving your internal marketing & sales #1 – Pick a niche for your agencyThis recommendation is taken from this on picking a niche and running with it. Glen (aka Viperchill) had this to say about, ' some of the most successful marketing agencies in the world specialised in serving just a specific audience'.This is absolutely true and there are plenty of examples out there to prove it:. offers marketing services to gym owners and personal trainers.
specializes in SEO for attorneys. is an agency that focuses on dental practicesPicking a niche allows you to brand yourself the expert in that industry and helps you separate from the pack. It opens up other opportunities like getting booths or speaking at industry-specific conferences as well.Here are some ideas of potential niche industries to get you going:. Massage Therapists. Personal Trainers. Tattoo parlors.
HVAC. Water Damage. Rehab Centers. Auto Shops. Insurance Agencies.
Optometrists. RestaurantsThink outside the box as well.
It doesn't have to be an industry-specific niche, maybe you're just an expert in a specific marketing vertical like marketing for Shopify stores. You can even target a specific vertical and niche. What about adult ecommerce shops? That's bound to be an underserved market.
Anything to help you distinguish yourself from the other thousands of full-service agencies. #2 – Create a lead magnet for your agency siteThe vast majority of visitors to your agency website won't convert to leads. There are a number of reasons: they may not be ready to commit, they may not be sure what services they need, or they may not trust your company yet.By offering them an alternative to an intimidating phone call you can collect their business information and move them along the path to becoming a client.There are a few companies doing this well.offers free PPC analysis reports for any Adwords account.offers a website grader with an enticing offer to '10x your growth'.Be creative and offer something of value to your target audience. It can be as a simple which points out some flaws in their website. #3 – Walk the walk when it comes to web designRegardless of whether or not you specifically offer web design I believe that it's imperative to have a clean and presentable website.
If your website looks like it was designed in 1998, your revenue will stay at 1998 levels. Your website is how people perceive your company online.It doesn't have to be expensive either. There are a number of agency-ready WordPress themes available for next to nothing. As a matter of fact, to get you going.Of course, that's the bare minimum and there are some agencies which go above and beyond to display their services. See for example – now that's an agency that anybody would want to work with – it's true eye candy!#4 – Reduce your lead response timeIf you're collecting leads from your agency website it's essential that you get back to them as quick as possible. It's too easy to let them just sit there for a day or two before getting back to them. These potential customers are shopping around and your agency won't be the only one they stumble on.A found that many companies take far too long to respond to leads and just let them go cold.They found that the average response time among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours.
This is worrying for those companies since a separate study (done by HBR) found that firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour were seven times more likely to close the deal than those that tried even an hour later. #5 – Set up outbound sales and fill pipeline with leadsSo many start-up digital agencies are dead scared of outbound sales. It seems counter-intuitive when you can just put out a few paid ads to get some leads. The problem is, you're really limiting yourself by not considering outbound.I recommend checking out over at Audience Stack. It goes in to detail on his process of building a sales funnel through outsourcing and vetting leads and then reaching out to them through cold emails.
It works even better if your agency targets a specific niche because your prospectors will have clearer targets.While it's not for every agency, you should consider building an outbound sales funnel. You no longer have to hire an expensive SDR and they can deliver huge returns for your agency; especially if you're just starting out and don't have many yet. #6 – Turn visitors who haven't converted in to leadsThere are a number of platforms like popping up which match visitor IP addresses to databases of companies.
They essentially tell you who has visited your website even if they haven't converted to a lead. While it doesn't match every single visitor due to Dynamic IP addresses, you'll be able to recover a large percentage of lost leads.You can use this information to track down the decision makers through LinkedIn. If somebody at that company has visited your site, there's a good chance they're looking for a marketing solution.Give them a call to assess their needs. You may impress them by knowing that they visited your website! #7 – Build case studies from successful clientsAccording to a study by eMarketer in 2013, client case studies are the most popular self-promotional tactics used by marketing agency executives. A whopping 62.6% of respondents voted in favor of them being effective.
They can be used as: lead magnets on a website, part of email drip campaigns, or assets to your sales team to close more deals.Find a willing participant and tell their story with a case study. Make sure you lay out specific strategies you used and back everything up with data. Create multiple case studies based on buyer personas.If that sounds like too much work there is also a service available called which will make beautiful case studies for you. It's run by who's well known in the content marketing world. #8 – Be your own best clientIf you have all of this web and marketing talent, why not put it to use on your own product? That's exactly what two agencies did and it worked out pretty well for them:.
37signals started as a web agency that saw an internal need for project management software. They created to suit their own needs and it's turned in to a massive success. Coudal Partners was once a creative agency that started as a side project.
The rest is history!Side projects can be a fantastic learning experience for your agency as a whole. It can be a testing ground for new ideas, you can write about its journey in your blog, and there's a chance it can be the next big thing. Just don't forget about your clients! #9 – Start guest blogging even if you're not an SEO companyEven if you don't offer SEO, your agency can most likely benefit from ranking for certain terms. What about PPC agency your city or creative agency your city. Ranking for those kinds of terms will drive hot leads to your website. Guest blogging is a great way to build quality links to your agency site to improve your organic presence.That being said, SEO is far from the only reason to guest post.
By writing on reputable publications you position yourself as an expert in your field. Jayson DeMers is a fantastic example of this as he writes for, and a number of other places online. Along with SEO benefits, this drives referrals to his agency site and he also leverages the logos as trust signals.' Guest posting is dead' articles pop up once or twice a month, but it's far from it. Reducing client churn #10 – Use NPS surveysA little while ago I wrote a post for Kissmetrics on we use.
While you aren't marketing a SaaS product, you can leverage the same idea for your agency.If you're not aware, NPS stands for Net Promoter Survey. Essentially it's a survey you send out to your customers asking them to rate your service on a scale of 1-10. There are a number of products that can help you collect NPS including and.The basic idea is to send out this survey to clients a little while in to their contract to see how they feel about your service. There are three basic groups and here's how you should handle them:.
Anybody who scores 1-6 is considered a detractor and is ready to leave your agency at any moment. Consider them high priority and get to the bottom of why they scored so low. Anybody who scores 7-8 are considered a passive and are somewhat satisfied with your service but have something holding them back from scoring higher. Find out what you can do to improve their experience and try and deliver it.
Anybody who scores between 9-10 are considered promoters and love your service. Leverage them for case studies and set them up with your referral program if you have one; they'll say great stuff about your company.NPS is a great way to pinpoint customers who may be on the brink of leaving. If you don't ask, you may never know.You can also use NPS for a number of other things. What about offering a bonus to the employee with the best score for the year?
#11 – Build out recurring revenues over campaignsof wrote in an article:'Brands will realise that consistency is king and they will need a digital agency to run the social media and website functions all year round, with creative agencies that pitch for campaigns to overlay and enhance.The answer is to build recurring revenues in a retainer style relationship where you bill monthly for a fixed set of services (for example, X published blogs per week, Y Facebook posts per day etc).' He says to get out of 'campaign' thinking and to move towards charging recurring revenues.
Recurring is the key to the success of SaaS businesses and can be critical in building a thriving digital agency as well. It ensures you get paid every month.
While this may seem obvious to many agencies, some are still left behind pitching new campaigns every quarter.There are many tools at your disposal to manage recurred billing with clients, see:,. #12 – Send letters & gifts to clientsBuilding relationships is important to keep clients around.
It helps with communication and they're more likely to listen to your recommendations if they like you. Gifts and letters are a great way to build rapport and get on their good side.When you sign a new client consider sending a hand written letter as part of your onboarding process. No, you don't need to relearn cursive and go to the post office. There are services like that will write and send the letter on your behalf.If they're a valuable client make them feel valuable by sending over gifts. Forget about fruit cake gift baskets – send something memorable that their office will talk about. See for some fun ideas.
#13 – Client staff intake trainingBe Top Local explained it perfectly in their:'When you're about to spend $8,500 in marketing dollars to make the phone ring, the last thing you want is to lose leads to a busy phone line.' Be Top Local set up system where leads are followed up within five minutes and the staff receives a commission for every appointment booked to incentivize results.In the end of the day, your goal as an agency is to help your client make more money. If they're more profitable using your services, they'll stick around. Offer training to client employees to gracefully handle calls and turn them in to results for your client. Ensure that phone calls are never left on hold for long and are handled in a professional, friendly manner.By offering this type of training you not increase efficiency, but go above and beyond where other agencies are willing to go. #14 – Be laser focused on resultsA good agency will focus on getting financial results for their clients as opposed to vanity metrics.
Clicks, likes, impressions, etc. Mean NOTHING if they don't turn in to profit in the end of the day.When you first take on a client you should be quite certain that you can turn a profit on your services – if you can't, there's no point of providing the services at all.
By ensuring that your client is profitable, there's no good reason for them to leave your agency.Everything is measurable these days: Facebook has even recently from their ad platform. Report on the vanity metrics, but be sure that they're somehow translated in to money in your clients pockets. Scaling systems & processes #15 – Automate your marketing reportsHow much time do you spend on reporting each month? Some agencies have said that reporting takes up to a week of their employees time after manually putting the reports together and answering client questions.Reporting is a necessary evil that won't add to your bottom line. That being said, it is very important to keep clients in the loop with the state of their campaign and results their getting. Reporting also be a great opportunity to upsell new services; especially if you're giving them great news.Use a system like the to build reports and automate them to go out every day, week, or month. Integrate everything you need like rank tracking, backlinks, PPC, social media and more.
You even give clients access to a custom branded dashboard to eliminate reporting altogether if you'd like.Start focusing on what matters for your business instead of wasting time on reporting. Automation = scalability for digital agencies. Start using the out there that will help you scale. #16 – Build a client onboarding processCreate a repeatable client onboarding process to get the information you need and save yourself headaches down the road.The best piece of software I've seen to create this type of process is the aptly named Process.st. They have a ready to go and you can make up to five checklists absolutely free.
It even plugs in to your CRM and sets follow up reminders.Edit that checklist to suit your agency and ensure that each step is followed when a new client comes on board. Each service you offer will require different information – if you're offering SEO, see Jon Cooper's – otherwise customize it based on your specific needs. #17 – Systemize proposals & contractsYeah, yeah you probably have a proposal template in place for your agency but customizing each one takes hours.
What about if the client asks for edits? How do you handle the signature process?Using software like can speed up and systemize that process for you. It helps shorten your sales proposal turnaround times by creating templates that allow collaboration between multiple parties.They notify you within your CRM when the client opens the proposal so you know to follow up.
Once the client is ready to sign they can do so within the PandaDoc software. Integrate your payment gateway to give them the option to pay right after signing!There are also a number of other features like:. Managing HR documents when you hire new employees. Streamlining legal approval for agency partnerships. Quote management to help you price your services and calculate profit marginsP.S. Another tool to checkout for proposals is.
They allow you to create stunning proposal websites instead of sending docs back and forth. They look great and I imagine they impress the heck out of clients. #18 – Streamline appointment schedulingIn this day in age there's no reason to waste time going back and forth with clients to book a meeting time. It's a time hog to find a time that suits both parties and it isn't a value added activity.
Time to cut it out!There are a couple tools you can leverage to streamline appointment booking:. is a tool that allows you to share a link which lets people book meetings according to your availability. It automatically sets reminders before the meetings and shares a Google Hangout URL if you'd prefer to video chat. is an AI powered assistant who will automatically schedule meetings on your behalf at the best time and location for both parties. All you have to do is Cc: and she'll take over for you.Shrewdly growing your team #19 – Outsource as long as you canThe beauty of running a digital agency these days is that almost everything is outsourceable. You can truly be a 'full service' agency as a one-man freelancer if you know how to hire through. I'd say the majority of the outsourcers I've hired haven't worked out, but it's worth it for the few who do.
When you find the right people it's a goldmine: high quality work for relatively low cost.In 2015 and found that 58.6% of digital agencies are currently outsourcing SEO.Funnily enough, SEO is the one service I would be hesitant of outsourcing – it's too risky to be hands off – but I digress.If I were growing an agency I would be outsourcing almost everything I can until there's enough work to hire a superstar in house. Leverage those superstars to be your agencies core competencies. If you're lucky, some of the people you outsource can turn in to location independent superstars.See how Arianna O'Dell is building while. While it doesn't go in to depth on outsourcing, it's proof that you can run an agency without being in the same room as your employees. #20 – Leverage internshipsInternships are incredibly common among the marketing community. While I believe unpaid internships are unfair and a recipe for exploitation, you can hire a number of interns for a fraction of what a full time employee will cost and get high quality work.
Many interns are hungry to prove themselves outside of school and will surprise you with their determination.Just like outsourcing, the fantastic thing about hiring interns is that you will find a few superstars along the way. Those high performing interns can become the foundation of your agency and may determine your core competencies.' Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.'
Patton Enhancing your service offerings #21 – Partner with other agenciesThere are very few agencies that exist who are truly 'full-service' in house. In order to offer a complete package to clients it can be very beneficial to partner with other specialized agencies. This allows you to tap in to other company's expertise and portfolio without taking on much added risk.There are two ways that you can set up partnerships:. White label other agencies services. This works well if you're looking to have another agency manage smaller projects like PPC or reputation management. I've written a post on to increase the revenue of your agency. Quarter back the relationships between clients and agencies.
This works better for large projects like entire web design makeovers, strategic planning, etc. Your agency can generally work out a finder's fee system when you pass the lead over to them.#22 – Think about alternative marketing channelsDon't pigeon hole yourself as a basic digital agency offering web design, SEO and PPC. There are so many other marketing channels available that you can upsell and become experts in. Here are a few ideas:. Snapchat advertising. Indoor advertising (know those videos you see in the washroom? See as an example).
Experiential marketing. Pintrest advertising. Native advertising (see ). Content discovery networks (see ). Influencer marketing (see )A great thing about many of these is that businesses don't have the time to learn them in house. If you can expertise in one, or multiple, of these channels you can get lower CPAs than traditional advertising and kill it for your clients. #23 – Offer corporate trainingResearch in 2015 by the found that there was a substantial increase in the number of companies who no longer work with outside agencies – from 27 percent up from 13 percent in 2014.These companies haven't given up on marketing altogether, they've brought it in-house.
Many companies now want complete control over their own data and employees instead of handing it off to another company.This trend is looking to continue, but you can take advantage of this opportunity by offering corporate marketing training. There is a big need for this type of education and colleges are slow to catch up with the digital world.If you have some superstar employees, think about leveraging them in to teachers. They already have the knowledge and experience that you need.There are a few companies already doing it like but the demand is high and corporate pockets are deep. Training is also a great alternative for small business owners who can't afford your monthly fee.What tactics have you used to grow your agency? Share below in the comments below.
If I like it, I'll add it to the list and give you credit!