Having effective sales strategies for a digital marketing agency is crucial. With a strong sales strategy, your brand will not only be able to increase revenue and grow its client base, but also develop a healthier internal system that results in a wider portfolio of clients.
One of the biggest challenges facing digital marketing agencies today is client retention. With such a saturated market, it can be difficult to keep clients on board. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In this guide, we’ll look at a selection of winning sales and client-nurturing strategies that helps your digital agency close more deals and establish stronger, more lasting relationships with clients.
Understanding the Sales Funnel
The sales funnel is a marketing term that describes a customer’s journey to conversion. Sales funnels form a big part of most sales strategies for digital marketing agencies because they present a clear path for potential customers to follow. There are several stages of the sales funnel:
- Lead generation – this is the “awareness” or “interest” part of the process. Making your brand known to the potential customer and presenting them with an opportunity to engage.
- Customer conversion – the moment a customer decides to invest their time or money with you is a conversion – they are converted from being a random consumer to a patron of your agency.
- Closing the deal – when a customer hits purchase, orders, or signs up for a newsletter, you have closed the deal. This is the final step in the sales funnel.
To find the best sales funnel trajectory, you can use lead scoring and lead nurturing. Lead scoring is the process of quantifying different tactics based on their effectiveness, and lead nurturing is the process of refining and honing in on those that perform the best.
Lead Generation Strategies
Lead generation is one of the most crucial stages in a healthy sales funnel trajectory. Without exposing your agency to a wide net of potential clients, moving on to the later stages of deal-closing will be virtually impossible. Here are three different methods to try:
1. Leveraging Social Media
We all know that social media is one of the best places to find and engage with online audiences – so use it to your agency’s advantage. Disruptive Advertising is one of the best examples of a digital agency that leverages social media, with thousands of active followers and a 4.9 out of 5 average rankings.
Develop a strong social media presence, post engaging content, and redirect as many followers as possible back to your website.
2. Optimising Your Website for Search Engines
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has a conversion rate of 261% — higher than any other leads generation strategy. The higher your website content ranks, the more traffic your website will see.
3. Networking at Industry Events
Simple, reliable, and highly effective. Networking and communicating in person with other digital marketing industry faces will present collaboration opportunities, expose you to new audiences, and keep your agency in the loop about emerging trends and technologies.
Lead Qualification and Nurturing Strategies
Without lead qualification, even the highest click-through rates are just vanity metrics. Lead qualification is all about ensuring the leads you generate are most likely to drive business goals. You can nurture lead qualification through these strategies:
1. Personalising Communications
We all know how much customers love personalisation. It makes them feel special and prioritised. Small things like using their name and providing customer-specific suggestions can help separate the fickle customers from the ones who are ready to commit to your agency.
2. Providing Value-Added Content
Some examples of value-added content include exclusive video content, podcasts, blog posts, case studies, and promotional offers.
You can nurture your relationships with long-term clients by offering them value-added content that other clients don’t have the privilege of access to.
3. Using Price Extensions
If you need a strong but effective way to sift through qualified leads, a price extension is one of your best options. Only clients who are serious about working with you at the level you are seeking will stick around after price extension offers are put in.
Take a look at Google Ads’s price extensions system to gain a better idea of how to use these tactical paywalls as a means to nurture leads qualification.
Closing the Deal
Once your agency has laid out a clear path for quality clients to follow, it’s time to bring the sales funnel process to an end by closing the deal. This can be achieved through a number of approaches:
- Use a consultative approach – In marketing, a consultative approach is when you put your relationship with the potential customer above whether you sell them a product or not. This helps establish deeper trust that often convinces the customer you are the agency to choose.
- Addressing objections – Addressing your customer’s pain points and objectives is an important part of establishing trust with them. Instead of pretending like their objections don’t exist or aren’t important, try addressing them head-on and providing solutions.
- Close with a summary – Providing potential customers with a summary of everything they get out of hiring your agency is an effective way to close the deal.
Retaining Clients
Even high generation and conversion rates have limited growth potential without retention. Obtaining clients is very important for digital agencies but incentivising them to stay and hire you again in future is what will keep your agency’s sales funnel sustainable. You can retain clients through:
- Providing exceptional customer service – Client retention starts with excellent customer service. Every client should feel like a priority to your agency.
- Delivering measurable results – Clients love to see how your work has benefited them in measurable metrics. Providing solid, KPI-based feedback is a great way to meet that need.
- Starting a customer loyalty program – Who doesn’t love a rewards program? You can incentivise your customers to stick around with a program that rewards loyalty.
Use Sales Strategies to Grow Your Digital Marketing Agency
A solid strategy is the key to a digital marketing agency’s success. In order to both obtain and retain loyal clients a sound structure is needed to help guide them – from the lead generation stage all the way to a closed deal. With these approaches, any digital agency can develop a winning sales strategy