It’s Time for Agencies to Adopt Growth Marketing
Agencies today cite that 90% of new business leads come from referrals. In such a fragmented landscape, more channels must be adopted if agencies wish to grow in 2017 and beyond.
Growth marketing is a buzzword that has been floating around the startup space for quite some time now. According to Drift, growth marketing is about “attracting more engaged customers…while traditional marketing focuses on the top of the funnel, the growth marketing job description requires focusing on the entire funnel.” Brand awareness is not enough; growth marketing is about repeatable and scalable customer acquisition.
Two of the core tenets of growth marketing are rapid experimentation and constant optimization. Most startups can quickly cite their cost-per-user across various channels, including Facebook ads, Google AdWords, organic SEO and cold emailing. Knowing the lifetime value of a customer, they tweak various campaigns to consistently increase ROI. Can your agency say the same?
The agency world is a referral-centric network that is ripe for disruption. It’s time to take advantage of what growth marketing has to offer.
How Do I Start?
Content
Creating content that provides value to your target audience is critical. Write blogs educating your customer base on new industry trends. Create videos showcasing your team, culture and exciting projects you’re working on. Create conversion points on your website by producing whitepapers, ebooks and checklists where leads need to enter an email to access the content. Producing content brings prospects to your site, positions you as an authority and can push leads further down the buyer’s journey.
Not sure where to get started? Read how to use buyer personas, data-driven research tools and a “content matrix” to create together a content strategy for your agency.
Social Media and Paid Ads
Believe it or not, your agency can reach senior marketing executives through Facebook. The targeting capabilities on Facebook have advanced to the point that you can target ads based on firmographic data like revenue and number of employees, specific industries and job titles, or even a list of target accounts. Taking advantage of paid social marketing can help you compete with bigger agencies, defend against new entrants and keep your CRM topped-off with fresh leads.
How about Twitter? Are you following all of your prospects, customers and past customers? This is a simple, effective and free way to engage with your audience. By actively networking with your audience on Twitter, you’re creating a 24/7 community that you can use for the years to come.
It’s Not Too Late
The exciting thing about being an agency in 2017 is that there’s still an opportunity to get a jump on your competitors. Most of your neighbors have not begun traveling down the growth marketing road. If you make the smart decision to get started now, you’ll still have headstart.
It’s time to engage your target audience and invest in your funnel from top to bottom. This will allow you to stop relying so heavily on those client referrals and create a repeatable, scalable process for growth.
Andrew Bukuras is a Marketing Specialist at CGI Interactive, a digital design agency that has been serving the most respected brands in the world for 27 years.