Do you know which are the most common mistakes marketing agencies’ make?
There are several mistakes marketing agencies make, learning which they are will help you to avoid them and thrive.
Digital marketing is a rapidly growing field, and more and more marketing agencies are being created to meet the demand for SEO services, which are quickly overtaking old PPC marketing as the primary choice of digital marketing solution.
Indeed, marketing agencies can be absolutely vital team members for business owners looking to increase their firm’s outreach. This means that digital marketing agencies are rapidly becoming increasingly popular ventures for new marketers to get into.
But, before you take the plunge and try to found your own marketing agency, it’s important that you’re aware of some of the common mistakes agencies make and how to avoid them.
Focusing on Revenue and not on Profitability
One of the biggest mistakes new marketers make is to focus their marketing efforts on revenue, without considering the profitability.
Why Revenue Isn’t Everything
Imagine that your digital marketing agency has a turnover of – for example – $200,000 annually. This might seem like a good turnover, especially if you have just founded a new business and just begun to consider your target audience for SEO services.
However, this turnover isn’t necessarily everything, and so it’s important for all digital marketing agencies to consider more than just revenue.
This is admittedly a trap that many SEO and search engine optimization businesses fall into.
Indeed, it’s easy to assume that the costs of running a marketing business are low, and so much of the business’ revenue will translate to profit. Hence, it can be easy not to spend enough time considering why having great revenue for your business isn’t necessarily enough to make your business profitable, on its own.
The Costs of SEO
Your digital marketing strategy will likely be unique from other businesses’. Nonetheless, you still need to consider the costs of providing SEO services to your clients in order to understand whether your content marketing services are successful.
After all, your business isn’t there just to cover its costs; to make the most of your digital marketing business, you need to ensure that your marketing team is bringing in a profit!
To begin with, it’s important to consider the overhead costs that your business faces. For many digital marketing agencies, overheads such as premises rent and paying salaries for your marketers are significant expenses for your business. As such, as part of your marketing strategy, it’s important that you consider whether your clients are providing you with a profit or merely breaking even.
However, this is something that should be considered more specifically than on an overall basis. You should carefully think about the costs associated with every marketing customer you take on. After all, not every marketing campaign will necessarily be profitable.
Some marketing campaigns could actually be costing your team more money in staff fees than the job is actually bringing in. This is usually the case for projects hired on a fee whereby there is a set fee for marketing services.
By contrast, hourly rate projects, in fact, are typically not such a concern in this case. After all, with hourly-fee projects, your client will pay for the work done.
But, if you charge a set rate for certain projects, and they take time over what you had initially expected to provide the SEO services, you will potentially find that your online marketing services are not providing the profits you require.
How can you prevent this? By calculating the costs on every new client‘s marketing needs will help you avoid taking on low-profit clients, giving your business the boost it needs overall.
Taking on too many clients at once
In order to make your digital marketing business successful, you will probably want to consider taking on new clients and contacting potential customers to bring them onto the business’ books.
Remember that you should consider your brand’s ability to take on clients. After all, while new clients might seem imperative parts of a successful marketing plan, you need to ensure that your business’ marketing budget and staff are able to handle the workload.
How to Decide Whether You Need New Clients
It’s always important to consider your business’ needs to take on new clients. This is an important aspect to consider, because it isn’t a highly successful management strategy.
Indeed, if your marketing agency should suddenly get a huge rush of exposure and many new clients flocked your way, you might find yourself tempted to offer services to all of them. However, this could be a major mistake, and one that might severely impact your agency’s success overall.
As a result of this, it’s important that you carefully consider your team’s workload capabilities. Time tracking can be notably important in this regard, as it can help you ensure your team is spending enough time on their SEO work to make hiring marketing team staff efficient and affordable.
In turn, this will help you determine the optimal number of clients to take on to ensure that every staff member is working at peak productivity.
Why Taking On New Clients Can be Risky
The first question you should make to yourself is if your current team will be able to handle the workload.
If you take on too many new clients, you might find that your team isn’t able to commit enough time to each of your marketing customers. In turn, lack of time and resources can have consequences and you won’t be able to deliver.
The Danger of Poor-Quality SEO Work
If your team isn’t able to give your customers the SEO and digital marketing services that they have paid for, your clients may find that their brand’s metrics begin to fall.
In turn, this poor service could translate into reduced customer retention and a poor reputation for your digital marketing agency. Hence, it’s clear to see why this is one of the most common mistakes for an agency to make.
Why Not Just Hire More Staff to Tackle the Workload?
While this is a possibility, this isn’t necessarily a risk-free marketing strategy either. Your customers are business owners and, as such, they need high-quality, reliable marketing campaigns that will convert for them.
Hiring new team members to provide SEO services, though, may not be the right option. These new marketing team members might not provide the same style of marketing services as your brand is known for.
In addition, the cost of hiring new staff can be expensive, and this expense may also lower your business’ profitability.
Alternatively, even if you get lucky and the SEO provided by your new team is effective, you’ll likely have higher overheads in terms of training, work space, staff fees, and the like.
Unless you can ensure that new marketing team members’ time is fully utilized, you might end up paying for a team member who you don’t necessarely need.
Do not give the client enough visibility to be aware of the progress of their account
A third common mistake that many digital marketing agencies make -but fortunately a mistake that is easy to resolve – is not giving clients the information they need about their marketing channels and strategies to see results. Indeed, most digital marketing solutions are designed to provide long-term, continuous results; as such, immediate boosts aren’t necessarily likely.
Hence, most SEO strategies will focus on marketing goals that are long-term focused, such as achieving a certain number of followers for social media marketing or reaching a set number of potential customers with standard SEO. However, the risk with this continual improvement is that your clients won’t necessarily see how your services are helping their business.
Hence, it’s absolutely vital that you involve your clients with the web design and SEO process at every stage, if possible. Offer them value propositions initially to help them understand why your team is the best one to help, and then make sure they understand the marketing plan and marketing goals. Providing your customers with the metrics behind their SEO strategies throughout the collaboration, as well as highlighting the process that you use, will help you to ensure your customers are aware of how their marketing strategy is helping to attract new customers.
This digital marketing mistake is common across all sizes of business, from small businesses and startups through to large digital marketing agencies, and it’s a mistake that your marketing agency should actively work to avoid.
Engaging with new business customers doesn’t need to be difficult. However, it can ensure good retention rates for your business looking to the future. So, no matter what marketing services you’re offering, it’s important to ensure that you provide plenty of marketing metrics and data to help business owners understand how your marketing team’s services are improving their brand’s profitability.
Put too much focus on creativity and forget operational excellence
Creativity is an integral part of any great digital marketing agency. Indeed, in order to create the best marketing campaigns, your team needs to use the most creative practices and know how to provide great value propositions. However, there is more to effective SEO and digital marketing agency management than just providing great website design and content strategies. As such, it’s vital that your team can take time to focus on the business management aspect of online marketing.
What does this mean? Well, it mainly refers to the efficiency behind your marketing services. After all, your online marketing agency is a business like any other, and it has a set marketing budget for paying staff and the like. As such, if project management and efficiency is low, you’ll likely find this is a major marketing mistake.
After all, poor project management can completely throw off your marketing plan. It can impact on how well your team works, their productivity, the quality of service offered by your marketers, and more.
Therefore, in order to ensure your marketing campaigns are running at their most efficient, it’s not enough to just focus on being creative with content and web design. Instead, your marketing strategy needs to be well-planned and managed. Fortunately, there are numerous project management tools that can help you avoid making marketing mistakes in terms of efficiency vs creativity. So, if low productivity is something that you have been struggling with, you may want to consider this as a viable, affordable option.
Not investing in the right project management tools
A final common mistake for marketing brands to make is forgetting to invest in the right project management tools. Indeed, it is easy to focus on other aspects of your brand, such as the marketing plan you’ll follow, who is in your marketing team, and how your marketing efforts will benefit your customers for long-term retention. However, without great efficiency for your team members, you’ll likely find that all of your marketing efforts are not yielding much profit.
If this is the case for your digital marketing agency, there is a solution you could try. Investing in the right project management tool can help you focus not only on offering great services, but also the profitability to your SEO business of providing these services.
Project management solutions such as COR are designed to help optimize the budget for online marketing jobs, the expected frequency and retention of orders, the current status of marketing campaigns, and more. These tools can help you to provide your clients with a better overview of the SEO work that’s been done for their website; moreover, they can help your business manage the number of staff working on any project at one time, the amount of time spent on each task, and the like to focus on improving profitability of projects.
In doing so, these tools can automatically calculate a projected profitability for your digital marketing agency’s services – giving you a centralized source of information that makes it easier to find enough time to optimize your firm’s digital marketing strategy.
As such, it’s clear to see why this common marketing mistake can have big impacts on how well businesses are able to manage their content marketing services – investing in these services could help your business improve your offer and learning this marketing agencies mistakes can help you avoid them and achieve success.
