Written by: Kristen DeGroot, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Want an easy and effective way to increase the revenue at your agency? Lucky for you, you’re reading this post and I’m going to tell you a not so well known way to boost profitability.
Clients’ businesses and the marketing landscape are constantly changing like trees in the fall. Sometimes, it is important to go back to basics. Everyone wants their agency to be unique to stand out and increase profitability. Funny enough, offering and proving the effectiveness of traditional marketing tactics can actually help your agency gain a competitive advantage. As I said, many of us need to go back to basics, myself included. So let’s hop in my time machine and revisit the marketing tactics we’ve discarded for agencies and replaced with shiny, new strategies.
One thing I urge all agencies to keep in mind is that buzzwords shouldn’t fuel your fire. Focus on what adds the most value to your clients. This usually means what tactics will bring in the highest ROI. Look at it this way: will a client be happier with a campaign that capitalizes on buzzwords that performs okay or a campaign that goes back to basics with great performance? I already know how you will answer this question, so let’s move on to the most important section of this post and explore traditional marketing tactics that yield a higher-than-average ROI and make sense with what your agency offers.
Stay Agile And Open To New Things
Are you a little uncomfortable implementing new strategies at your agency? So many agency owners get comfortable with their tried and true services because they know they can knock them out of the park while adding a new service is new territory. If we look at how other agencies do things, you may feel more comfortable. I was surprised that last year, 86% of agencies added a new service to what they offer their clients. If it didn’t do good things, would so many people do it? Does this help you feel more comfortable?
The ideal scenario is that adding one or some of the new services to your agency will compliment your current services. For example, if you offer email marketing, try being open to adding direct mail services so that you’re connecting with the same people online and offline for your clients. Now that I feel I’ve convinced you to stay open to new things that can grow your agency, let’s explore 8 traditional marketing tactics that have a higher than average ROI when you offer them to your clients.
8 Traditional Marketing Tactics That Will Make You And Your Clients Money
In-person Networking
Now that we are past the pandemic's peak, people want human interaction to make up for a long time sitting alone in front of our computers. In fact, let’s look at the facts (I love a good pun). 79% of business owners report that face-to-face time generates the most leads for their businesses. Like I said, human connections are key.
When it comes to offering networking as a service to your clients, you can offer conference support and identify the best conferences for your clients. You can help them with the logistics and coach them on their networking skills. You can even offer to set in-person meetings for your clients. I recommend charging per conference since they all have nuances.
Phone Calls To Customers
Unfortunately, cold calling isn’t very effective. However, making phone calls to customers is very much alive. Customers want to feel a humanized connection to the brands they buy from, and doing check-up calls is a great way to make customers feel like businesses care. Please note that I’m not saying phone calls should replace modern-day communication strategies like chat, email, DMs, etc. Rather, periodic phone calls in addition to what is offered can enhance communication.
When it comes to offering phone calls as a service to your clients, I suggest charging your hourly rate and making the calls on their behalf. Or, you can design a phone call strategy for them, complete with scripts for talking points, for a one-time fee.
Traditional Mail Advertising
Snail mail got abandoned for a bit, but it’s back and thriving. In fact, after the pandemic began, people became more interested in direct mail. To get really specific, if your target audience is millennials, they have embraced mail more than Gen X and Baby Boomers.
To get a high ROI, only send mail to people who are engaged with the brand. So many people throw mail away that they get from brands they don’t recognize but value the mail they get from brands they actually like. If your clients could benefit from this strategy, it’s fairly easy to add to your repertoire of services. First, find a service like Postalytics to automate and white label your direct mail program for your clients. Take into consideration your time and the cost of your solution to create a once-per-month fee for your clients.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is sometimes treated like the red headed stepchild. A lot of agencies and brands use it but they don’t deem it worth their time to really use it effectively. With email marketing brining in $36 for every $1 spent, it shouldn’t be ignored. There are a few components to an email marketing strategy that should be recognized. Brands should use it to nurture and upsell their current customers. They should also use it when someone fills out a form for something like a lead magnet and nurture these potential customers with an email sequence.
If your agency doesn’t implement email marketing but I’ve convinced you to do so, when implementing it for your clients brand, make sure you have all of your ducks in a row. Decide on a platform like HubSpot and bill your clients a monthly retainer fee to handle all of their email marketing.
Guest Posting
Guest posting was really hot for a couple years and I’m here to tell you, it still works. Traditionally, businesses did guest posts for the SEO benefits. Now, brands are seeing the value of thought leadership and how it brings traffic and credibility to their brand. The key thing to observe about how guest posting has changed in terms of how it’s used is to realize it’s all about thought leadership and brand awareness.
It’s not hard to find guest posting opportunities as long as you have a decent portfolio. Or someone on your team has a decent portfolio. Simply reach out and talk about why your client’s brand and unique story would be a good fit for their publication and provide them examples of past writing. It also helps to say that you’ll promote the post you contribute to sweeten the deal a bit. When designing a guest posting campaign for your agency’s clients, factor in the fact that you’ll need to do the outreach to find spots, you’ll need to write the actual post, and you will promote it. For guest posts, you can charge a fee per post, usually around $600. Or, what I do, is charge a price for a bulk of guest posts which is usually about $5,000 for 10 posts.
Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs have been around for a long time. Their great for any business, the process just may look different in different industries. Basically, this program encourages loyal customers to make repeat purchases with incentives. A strong loyalty program offers things like access to new products early, discounts, gift cards, and information about sales to the people in their loyalty program. The thinking behind it is if brands treat customers as a part of their brand, they’ll purchase more with the personalized rewards the brand offers.
When it comes to implementing this as a service you offer your clients, it’s going to look different for each industry. Spend a lot of time with your team to identify what your loyalty program will entail for your clients and come up with a yearly rate for this service as it is a slow build but so worth it.
Radio And Television
As you know, radio and television opportunities can reach literally millions of people. Consider implementing this strategy for your clients to compliment the online strategies you are running. This won’t work for smaller clients so consider taking what you know about radio and television promotions and use that knowledge to implement a podcast strategy for clients with a smaller budget.
If it makes sense for your agency to offer radio and television placements, research the costs and consider teaming up with someone who organizes these promotions. I’ve only ever had one client that this made sense with and I got all of the information and connections that I needed through Facebook and LinkedIn PR groups. Specifically, this one.
Implementing These Old New Services At Your Agency
Depending on your goals and agency niche, choose one or two of these services to implement for your current and future clients who are interested. Plan out what you will charge and what your process will entail. Of course, implementing new services means they need to be known so a lot of your time will be promoting them.
For a thorough overview and game plan for agencies when implementing new services, check out this post that I wrote a few weeks ago.
Final Thoughts: I Want To start Implementing These Services
Of course, you want your agency to be profitable, and what better way to increase profitability at your agency then by expanding what you offer? Not only that, but growth can quickly happen when you start implementing some of the services I went over.
So many agency owners I talk to just don’t have time to grow their agency because they spend so much time on awesome client work. If you are one such agency owner, that’s exactly why I created The Campfire Circle. One of the many services that I offer is to implement new services at agencies as I’ve got it down to a science and you can contact me for a free consultation here.
Do you have any plans to implement more services at your agency? I would love to read all about it in the comments below!
Kristen DeGroot, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Kristen DeGroot is the CEO of The Campfire Circle, an agency for agencies. She has been helping agencies grow for over a decade. Kristen has an English writing degree so a lot of her strategies that she implements for her clients are content driven. Basically, Kristen grows agencies so that agency owners can spend more time on what matters: Doing awesome client work.
