Risks and Opportunities For Digital Marketing Agencies

Marketing agencies face as many risks as opportunities. It's easy to get swept up in the negative and only focus on the risks however. This is a look a most common agency risks and how to avoid them, as well as some emerging trends and opportunities to jump on.

1. Competition

This is an issue all companies face, regardless of industry, but this is especially true for digital marketing agencies. Because everything is done online, it means no matter where you are in the world you can start a digital marketing agency and score clients from everywhere, regardless of location.

While many businesses are limited by distance or borders, digital marketing agencies are not one of them. Basically, competition is everywhere and there is nothing to limit this competition.

The solution to this risk is to understand your niche. Every business has something they specialize in. Get really specific here. Who is your ideal customer? What are their issues? Why do they need your service? How can your business help them solve their issues?

Different niches for digital marketing can be different industries? Your agency might specialize in digital marketing for IT consulting businesses. Or you may specialize in digital marketing for high class bars. Or you may specialize in digital marketing for e-bike businesses. Know your niche and the competition will immediately decrease.

2. Having Too Many Small Clients

Growing your digital marketing agency by getting more clients is not always the best solution. It means handling different clients and different projects at once. This is both time consuming and chaotic. The better solution is to grow your business by growing your clients' business. Or the easiest solution would be to find larger clients who stay longer and pay more.

3. Finding and Keeping Talented People

A successful business is only as successful as the people that run it. This is a little bit similar to the first point I mentioned, Competition. Competition for the best talent is also quite challenging because your competitors are also seeking out the talent you are. And a lot of the time, the best talents are already working for larger agencies and getting those talents to jump ship is a very difficult task.

The solution to this issue is to offer remote working opportunities. Remote work has become a very attractive perk for a job opening. Not only are consumers changing their behaviors but employees also demand different benefits. One of these is remote, and with digital marketing, that is quite easy to accommodate, so definitely have that as an option.

The second thing you can do is in-house training programs where you can develop the skills of new college graduates and young “creatives”. This way, you will have employees with the perfect skill sets for your business by the time they finish the program.

4. Managing Client Relationships

Managing client relationships is key for your digital marketing agency. This is because it is easier to maintain relationships with current clients than try and attract new ones and build a relationship with them. It’s like starting to build a house and then halfway through you go “ehhh, nevermind” and start building a new house from scratch. It is just not an ideal solution. Getting new clients is one thing, but managing relationships with these clients is another.

The last thing you want is dissatisfied clients who leave and then end up leaving bad reviews about your business. (switch camera angles) As a side note, if you want to know how to get less bad reviews and more good reviews, check out my video on how to make a review funnel, I have linked it below.

So how do we avoid this? Firstly, a digital marketing agency has several specialists such as SEO expert, a PPC specialist, a community manager, etc. A client will have multiple interactions with different people in your agency. It is important that the client receives the value and support they expect. Setting the right expectations with your clients and proactively managing them is key in maintaining good client relations.

Additionally, scheduling calls with them on a recurring basis such as weekly or monthly can ensure that your values and expectations are aligned. It’s never a bad idea to schedule an extra call with your client, rather than having no communication at all.

5. Staying Ahead of Industry Game

We all know how fast things change in today’s world and we also know how important it is to keep up with these changing trends to be successful, especially in digital marketing. Many algorithms value people who follow these trends and will push their content above others. As a digital marketing agency, predicting future trends is something that needs to be a high priority. It can make or break your agency’s success.

We talk about personalization for a reason. 72% of people are only willing to engage with personalized messaging. One of the top digital marketing agencies, KlientBoost, uses a Marketing Strategy Generator, to attract new clients. This tool, otherwise known as Zoltad, “uses conditional logic to give you actionable strategies based on thousands of marketing experiments”.

They really nailed the combination of automation and personalization and all of this with a quiz. By the way, you can also easily create a quiz that looks like this in involve.me They also have several other quizzes on their website that rate how good your SEO is or how good your Facebook ads are. Personalization is key!

Another trend that has experienced amazing results are landing page videos. Here is why they work and why you should use them too

• 86% of people want to see more videos from brands

• 68% of consumers prefer to watch a video about a product than read an article about them

• 86% of marketers say that videos help them generate leads

Video is the future, so hop on that! And lastly, if you haven’t seen our landing page trends video, you can watch it by clicking here or it will also be linked in the description below. We all know how important landing pages are to generate new leads and in that video I outline several landing page trends that you need to watch out for in 2022. So go check that out, maybe it will help give you some inspiration.

Opportunities

Now for the exciting part - easy win opportunities everyone is sleeping on. These are trends you need to jump on before they become standard practice.

1. Not Limited by Location

A huge opportunity for digital marketing agencies is the limitless and borderless aspect of the industry. You can have clients from all over the world and still achieve all your goals and targets because everything is done online. And this isn’t only true for clients but for employees as well. You are not limited to your location to find the most talented employees, you can look at the entire world.

This is one of the biggest advantages of having a digital marketing agency, you have the freedom of location. So definitely use this to your advantage for finding the right employees and finding the best clients that fit your expertise.

2. A Mindset Shift Towards Small Businesses

Let’s be honest, most digital marketing agencies are not massive. Most of them are small businesses. The market is experiencing a shift in consumer preferences which is favoring small businesses.

67% of Americans prefer shopping at a small business rather than larger businesses. This is not surprising if you ask me. A lot of times, smaller businesses care more about what they are doing because they are more passionate about it. They care more about their customers and clients, providing more value and a better customer experience. Not only that, but they get a more personal experience.

Smaller teams work better together. Communication in larger companies can be difficult to manage and sometimes a client has to repeat information to several people in the company due to this lack of communication. Working with smaller businesses is something that consumers enjoy and many digital marketing agencies are smaller in size, presenting a great opportunity.

3. Marketing Automation

A study by McKinsey found that 31% of businesses have at least one function automated and found that 66% of business leaders were piloting solutions for at least one business process. And this study was conducted in 2020 so I expect that this number has only increased since then.

We can also simply look at the example of Zapier. Zapier has become an industry standard in just 4 years and many businesses are looking to automate more and more processes in their business. You can focus your niche all about marketing automation. Your clients will think you are a wizard.

4. Building Internal Tools

I get it, you’re a marketing agency, not a development one. But you can still make internal tools for your clients without having to code. I’ve briefly touched on this earlier in the video but I also want to show you some examples from involve.me. With involve.me, you can achieve this in just a few clicks and you don’t need to know how to develop to make beautiful looking quizzes.

Like this Helix mattress quiz that helps people find the best mattress. Or this "How much money would you make doing the same job in a different country?" calculator. No-code tools make the difference between marketers and developers shrink by the minute.

This is definitely an opportunity to jump on before everyone else does. It will help your clients get to know their customers better and it will also give you an edge over other agencies in your niche.