When you’re running or work in a social media agency, you spend so much of your time focusing on building up other people’s already established businesses that it’s easy to put marketing your own on the backburner. If you don’t, however, you’ll struggle to attract the new clients that your agency needs to grow and survive.
Promoting your social media agency can be a little tricky, especially since there are so many direct competitors out there vying for the same clients that you’re trying to connect with. Having the right strategies and content in place will make it much easier to stand out from the competition, put your brand in front of the types of clients you want to land, and convert them successfully.
Want to learn how to successfully promote your social media agency so that you can connect with new clients? In this post, we’re going to go over five key promotion methods that are essential to social media agencies and look at specific strategies to successfully leverage each one.
Brand Yourself First
Before you starting marketing your agency, get your branding down. Know what you want to offer, who your target clients are (or who they would be, at least), and how you want to stand out.
For some, this will mean niching down, like offering B2B social media services or healthcare social media marketing services. For others, it might mean focusing on ad services instead of organic marketing, or vice versa. Others still want to go prioritise large corporations, while some want to go for small businesses. Some might also focus on engagement and community nurturing while their competitors while go for a data-driven strategy sell.
Develop a solid brand, getting your logo, tagline, and unique selling proposition (USP) down to a science. Then you can safely start marketing your business. With your branding in place, you’ll be able to stand out; without it, you’ll struggle to attract and convert clients properly.
Start with a Strong Web Presence
You should have a strong website and overall web presence. Not only does this give you the chance to reach users through SEO tactics, it also ensures that no matter how they’re finding you, your agency looks great and they’ll find the information they need.
There are several things that you should make sure that you’re including on your site. These include:
- A homepage that clearly defines your brand, your USP, and your approach. Are you offering hard-hitting ad services, or a boutique approach to social that’s customised for each client? You want this to be immediately visible.
- A testimonial page. This will help you establish social proof quickly, helping people to feel more comfortable with you and increasing the likelihood that they get in touch. Remember that 88% of people trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts, even when the reviews are written by strangers.
- A list of services that you offer. You want potential clients to know exactly what you offer, even if that’s a customised package for each one. If they can’t find this information, they’ll go elsewhere. You can see how to create and describe your social packages here.
- A quick and easy contact form. Make sure that getting in touch with your agency isn’t a huge nightmare. Keep the contact form simple: Name, email address, maybe company name, and then the space for a message to be written. Simple forms increase the likelihood of conversion significantly.
- Full keyword optimisation. Keyword optimisation will be important so that people are able to find your site, so optimise each individual page for relevant keywords. You can always add a blog later for long-tail keywords and more SEO potential.
In addition to having a strong website, you’ll want to develop your overall web presence, too.
Get started on social, and do everything you can go boost engagement rates and follower counts quickly so you can show that you know what you’re doing.
Get your company set up on LinkedIn, which is where potential clients may be searching for you, and leverage your personal and company profile to help you here.
Finally, claim your business on Google My Business, or create a listing if one doesn’t exist yet. This will allow you to manage your listing, appear in more searches, and respond to questions, reviews, and more. More than half of all businesses don’t claim their listing, so if you do so it will put you at a direct competitive advantage.
Offer Incentives for Referrals
Referrals can be the bread and butter of social media agencies. When happy clients send new potential leads your way, these leads are already going to trust you more than if they just clicked on an ad somewhere. This helps you convert them more quickly, and they’re also more likely to be low-churn and high-value. They’ll go all in on higher-cost services or retainers earlier on average than those who find you in other ways.
When you’re actively growing your social media agency (which we’re sure you are if you’re reading this post!),reach out to happy clients. Let them know that you’ve got a special going on, and if they send someone new your way who hires you, there’s an incentive in store for them. This can be 10% off the next invoice, or a bonus like an extra analytic report. Even though that 10% hit can seem like a lot when you’re growing, it’s a good investment that will often pay for itself many times over.
Sometimes, all your happy clients need is a reminder to actually send more business your way. More than 50% of responders in one survey stated they'd be likely to give out a referral if offered a direct incentive, even if it was something simple like social recognition or a loyalty program. Leverage that.
Use PPC Campaigns to Expand Your Reach
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are one of the top choices you should consider for promoting your business. They’ll help you expand your reach faster than almost any other platform or marketing strategy. While PPC campaigns do come at a cost, we all know that investing in marketing can easily be worthwhile, and the advanced targeting systems of the best platforms increase the likelihood of a positive ROI.
There are three specific PPC platforms that we recommend starting with when trying to promote your social media marketing agency: Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.
Google Ads
Google’s search ads are what we’ll be focusing on here, as they’ll allow you to bid on certain keywords that will trigger ad placements for your services. This is so important because these ad campaigns can help you connect with potential clients when they’re actively searching for services like yours. If you don’t get the click, one of your competitors certainly will.
Keyword research is going to be an important part of Google Ads, and you’ll want to at several factors. The search volume will tell you how popular a certain keyword is, while the competition will show you how hard it is to rank for it. Typically high volume keywords come with some high competition, which means increased ad costs. Try to find a balance of high volume and low cost, making sure that you’re never bidding more than what makes financial sense to do so.
There are both free and paid keyword tools available. To get started, you can use a free tool like Google's Keyword Planner. Some good keywords that you should start researching may include the following:
- Social media marketing services
- Social media marketing agency
- Facebook marketing agency
- Australia social media agency
- YouTube marketing services
- LinkedIn marketing services
- Real estate (or insert niche here) social media marketing
- Social media consultant
On Google Ads, consider using negative keywords to prevent irrelevant placements. If you offer social media marketing services but not social media ad services, include the latter as a negative keyword so you don’t show up in placements that have no chance of converting.
Facebook & Instagram Ads
Facebook Ads (and Instagram Ads by association, as they fall under that Facebook umbrella) are one of the best discovery ad platforms. Here, you aren’t harvesting demand that already exists like on Google; you’re creating it by showing your ad to users who fit certain demographics, interests, behaviors, or other shared characteristics. You aren’t waiting for them to come to you, so you’re putting yourself at a competitive advantage.
Facebook Ads can admittedly be tricky for B2B businesses, including social media agencies, but there are plenty of brands who have had excellent success. Using a combination of targeting and careful funnels will be the best choice here for you.
On Facebook, you can target by almost anything you can imagine-- including select job titles and interest in certain industries. This is so helpful, because you can target users who are most likely to be decision makers in whether or not to hire you.
Retargeting is also powerful here. You can set up funnels so that once someone watches a certain percentage of your first video ad (we recommend at least 50% or more than 10 seconds) or clicks to a specific landing page, they’ll see another ad from you. Consider following these ad campaigns with a lead ad combined with an offer like an ebook or webinar to entice them to convert.
Facebook Ads can get a little pricey, but they’re much more cost-effective per click than Google when they’re successful.
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads are a powerful force for B2B businesses, and that includes social media marketers. Unlike any other social platform, when users log-in here, they’re thinking about business first. There’s no scrolling through looking at pictures of babies and puppies and weddings; it’s all professional updates, industry breakthroughs, and business announcements.
People are therefore more receptive to seeing B2B ads here. Take advantage of that.
LinkedIn’s ad system is fantastic, too, and it will be the most effective in terms of helping you to target specific decision makers within certain types of companies. You can target, for example, by job title. Agencies should be looking at targeting CMOs, CEOs, small business owners, Heads of Marketing, and other similar titles. Showing an ad to a customer service rep likely wouldn’t do much, after all.
If you want to, you can niche your ads down. You can target both large corporations and small businesses, but create separate campaigns using different messaging for each one. For small businesses, you could promote your most cost-effective plans and talk about how you’ll care about their business like it’s your own, while large corporations may respond better to enterprise packages and hard data.
For best results, try focusing on newsfeed ads. This will give you maximum visibility. You can use more personalized sponsored inbox ads to try to reach key people at either specific companies, or companies within similar industries. You could write, for example, a seemingly tailored-for-them pitch but that applies to all SaaS software CMOs, or all real estate agents.
Conclusion
As social media experts, we’re so confident in our skillset of building up brands through social that it’s easy to understand why so many agencies struggle to promote themselves in other ways.
While we all know that social is an important part of the marketing puzzle, it’s typically best for building marketing momentum and relationship building; you need to get the ball rolling somewhere, and using multiple marketing platforms and having multiple touch points available will be essential.
As you’re marketing your business, remember that you can adapt these strategies for your specific agency as needed. If you really want to target wedding photographers, for example, and find that they’re just not using LinkedIn in your area for whatever reason, pull out your ad spend from there and invest more into other platforms. And if you’re on a super low budget, prioritize low-cost platforms and try to really ramp up the referral rates and SEO potential. Find the marketing mix that works for your specific agency, and don’t be afraid to fine-tune it as your agencies grows over time.
Want to brush up your social media skills or start a new career as a social media practitioner? Learn everything you need to know in our advanced courses! You can check them out here.
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