You’ve built a successful social media marketing agency with a solid client roster. But somehow, your growth is stagnating and you’re still at the same place you were a couple of years ago. Now you’re itching to grow but you’re not sure how to get started. Here are a few steps to help you grow your social media marketing agency.
How to Get More Clients for a Social Media Marketing Agency
Getting more clients for your social media marketing agency requires strategic promotion. You need to get your agency in front of the right prospects and establish the value that you can offer. Here are a few tips to help you get more clients for your social media agency.
1. Leverage Lead Magnets
The content that you put out for free may be great at attracting an audience, but it may not be as effective at generating leads. One of the best ways to get leads through your content marketing efforts is by leveraging lead magnets.
This involves creating in-demand content that you share with your audience in exchange for their contact information. It could be anything from whitepapers and reports to ebooks and checklists that your target audience might find valuable. Then share these lead magnets through landing pages and social media posts or even promote them with targeted ads.
For example, you could create a detailed social media marketing checklist that people can download by providing their email addresses. That way, your prospects get the content they need while you get their contact details to use for lead nurturing. With their consent, you can nurture these prospects via email newsletters and marketing emails that promote your services.
Alternatively, your lead magnet can even be a free webinar where your audience can engage in an interactive session to learn more about social media marketing. Volume Nine did just that, hosting a free webinar on using social media for conversions.
2. Encourage Positive Client Referrals
People are going to trust the experiences and recommendations of their peers, especially when it comes to things that involve a service. As such, positive word-of-mouth is one of the most effective ways to market your social media marketing agency. This makes it crucial to encourage referrals from your clients.
Consider setting up a referral program where you incentivize your clients for their referrals. For instance, you could offer a complimentary service or provide a discount for every new client they bring in. Don’t forget to send personalized messages thanking them for their referrals.
You could also request your clients to share their reviews on third-party review sites so that prospects outside of their network can hear what they have to say about your agency. Additionally, ask for testimonials that you can share on your website and social media posts to show prospects just how big of an impact you’ve had on your clients.
Ninja Promo highlights some of the biggest results they’ve achieved for clients on their agency’s homepage. They take care to highlight numbers and names in these case studies to give credibility to their claim and build trust with prospects.
Source: ninjapromo.io
Fresh Content Society even shares client results and case studies with their Instagram audience. This is a great way to showcase what you’ve done for your clients, helping you boost credibility by adding social proof of your capabilities.
3. Invest in Paid Ads
Your organic efforts can only go so far in reaching potential clients for your agency. Run targeted ads on social media platforms that are most frequented by your target audience. This may include LinkedIn, Instagram, and even TikTok as these platforms are highly popular among business users.
Use your expertise to design creative social media ads that will appeal to prospective clients. Consider your offer, ad creative, and copy to ensure that they’re compelling enough to attract the right people. Promote offers such as free audits and consultations or showcase your best case studies, reviews, and testimonials to serve as social proof. Then use the native advertising tools to deliver these ads to people who would be most interested in your services.
As mentioned earlier, you could also combine your paid advertising strategy with lead magnets. This ensures that you have something valuable to offer that might get people to click while your paid promotion strategy gets the offer in front of the right people.
Steps to Grow Your Social Media Marketing Agency
1. Grow Your Online Presence
Being a social media marketing agency means that most of your prospects will look for you online. This makes it crucial to grow your online presence so that your target audience can easily find you. There are two main ways to do this:
Growing Your Social Media Presence
What’s a social media marketing agency with no social media presence? One of the best ways to grow your online presence is through social media. If your agency’s been focusing most of its efforts on growing the social media presence of your clients, it’s pretty easy to put your own social media in the backburner. But this makes it extremely challenging to show prospects what you’re capable of.
In other words, you’ll have a hard time attracting new clients as the lack of social media presence could indicate that your agency’s not very good at what it does (not that it’s the truth). Lead by example and show your prospects exactly what great social media marketing looks like. Actively post content related to the industry and interact with your audience to keep them engaged.
For example, Online Optimism maintains an active LinkedIn presence, sharing industry news and employee spotlights. They even create engaging videos like the one below where they ask employees (or as they call themselves, Optimists) whether they can detect AI.
You could even leverage your own personal brand on platforms like LinkedIn to share your expertise and build a connection with your target audience. Seeing a real person speaking on behalf of your agency will help your prospects feel more connected, enabling you to draw them in before turning them into leads. In fact, a Sprout Social survey found that 70% of consumers feel more connected to a brand whose CEO has an active social media presence.
Leveraging Content Marketing
When it comes to businesses that sell a service, such as social media marketing agencies, content is the best way to market to your target audience. The right content distributed through the right channels will help you grow your online presence and effectively get your agency in front of the right people. Whether this involves blog posts, infographics, videos, or even podcasts, content allows you to effectively share your expertise and build credibility as experts in the field.
For example, Sociallyin regularly publishes blog posts to showcase their social media expertise. They tackle topics like paid social advertising ideas and growing TikTok followers to show their audience that they know what they’re talking about. So when those readers need help to actually execute those strategies, the agency remains top-of-mind.
Source: blog.sociallyin.com
As more people discover your content through relevant searches or social media posts, it enhances brand awareness and helps you draw in prospects. Similarly, you could earn backlinks from reputable publications, helping you reach their existing audience base. As such, your content marketing efforts will enable you to keep your audiences informed and attract new clients simultaneously.
Personal Branding
Owners, founders, and leaders play an important role in building your agency’s online presence and reputation. A reputable and influential founder helps shine attention to the agency, helping you reach and connect with prospects. They help boost your credibility by showing the real people behind your agency while simultaneously showcasing their expertise.
In fact, a Sprout Social survey found that 70% of consumers feel more connected to a brand whose CEO is active on social media. This is mainly because it helps them understand that there are real people behind the brand. Moreover, 56% enjoy learning about the brand leadership.
This makes it crucial for agency owners to build a personal brand. In particular, LinkedIn offers the perfect platform to establish an online presence for your agency leader. Have them share their insights, tips, commentary, and industry updates to establish themselves as experts in the social media marketing landscape.
For instance, Jacob Baadsgaard is the founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising with an active LinkedIn presence. He regularly shares his insights, reposts content from the Disruptive page, and tells personal anecdotes that get his 30,000+ followers hooked. He also uses LinkedIn to show his appreciation for employees and long-term clients, sharing events like the party they threw for their first client.
2. Assess the Competitive Landscape
Who are the top social media marketing agencies and how are they growing their business? Scour the competitive landscape to get a feel of the effective promotional strategies and trending tactics to attract clients. A better understanding of your competitors’ effective strategies will help you devise an effective method to grow your own agency.
What content are they creating and how does the content resonate with the audience? Which platforms are they using and how are they growing their presence on those platforms? Are they creating other types of content beyond blog posts? Perhaps they’re hosting podcasts and webinars or creating informative videos.
How are they driving traffic to their site? Are they running ads? Optimizing their blog content?
Which keywords are they targeting and how are they ranking for those keywords? How can you create content that outperforms theirs in relevant searches?
Are they getting backlinks from reputable sites? If so, what are they top referral sources? How will you earn backlinks from those sites? Besides those, which other websites can you target to boost your backlink profile?
Do they participate in networking events? Which networking events do they frequent? Which ones are they missing out on?
Does their CEO have a LinkedIn presence? If so, how are they growing that presence? All of these details will help you build an impactful strategy to grow your agency. Make the most of competitor analysis software tools to see what your competitors are doing and use those insights to inform your strategy.
Source: ahrefs.com
3. Stay Ahead: Expanding Your Service Offering with Trending Solutions
While your agency may be great at what it does currently, growth tends to stall unless you expand your service offering. If you’re only offering the same set of services for years, you’ll only be attracting the same types of clients with the same set of needs. That means that some prospects may choose a competing agency over yours just because you don’t provide a specific service such as content production or community management.
Diversifying your services based on what’s trending will allow you to expand your reach and attract more clients with varying needs. For instance, when Threads first came out in July 2023, many social media agencies expanded their service portfolio and started offering Threads marketing as well. Now, a year later, they are experts at it. By staying on top of the latest trends and market demand, you can understand what social media marketing services your prospects might need. Then, upskill your team or recruit new talent (more on this later) to include those services as a part of your offering.
Another great example is the popularity of short-form video content. Many agencies such as LYFE Marketing have started to offer short video management and advertising services. Similarly, you can look at what’s in demand among potential clients to see how you can expand your services.
Source: lyfemarketing.com
You could even go beyond regular market research and ask your clients directly. Are there any services they wish you had? Do they face any challenges that your current service offering can’t satisfy? Then use those insights to understand how you can expand your services and better address your clients’ needs.
4. Assess Your Needs Before Recruiting Top Talent
A great agency needs great people behind it. As your agency grows, you’ll need more employees to support that growth. If you’re looking to manage more clients without expanding your workforce, you’re going to have a bad time. Not only is this a recipe for inefficiency, but it could also lead to worker burnout and client disappointment.
Evaluate your existing team and the skills they encompass. Examine your current clients and projects to understand your team’s workload. Make sure to keep track of growth patterns to forecast how many clients you might bring on board in the coming year and whether your existing staff can support that growth.
Then assess your staffing requirements based on those findings. Additionally, make sure to consider your staffing needs based on the new services you plan to offer. In some cases, you might not even need to hire a full-time employee at all. Instead, you could look into alternative options like fractional employment or take on freelancers to satisfy your team’s needs.
For example, you may already have a talented team of professionals who can efficiently manage your existing clients. But you’re struggling to produce video content on top of other social media content formats. The problem is, that only a handful of clients ask for help with video production so hiring a full-time video producer might be too wasteful.
In this case, you may want to consider hiring a freelance video producer through platforms like Fiverr. If you manage to find a great fit for your agency, consider striking up a long-term partnership with them so you don’t have to seek out a new freelancer every time a client asks for something outside your scope of service.
Source: fiverr.com
5. Review Your Plans and Pricing Strategy
Sometimes, you might fail to bring in new clients because your pricing strategy doesn’t work for them or they can’t find a pricing plan that suits them. Take a closer look at your current plans and pricing strategy to see if there’s a way to diversify it to attract more clients.
This is particularly true for agencies that offer tiered plans with a specific set of services. The rigidity of your plans might deter many prospective clients who are in need of something with more flexibility.
Say someone needs 50 social media posts a month but you only offer up to 20 social media posts a month or they need help creating Reels but you only offer plans for image and carousel posts.
That doesn’t mean you should completely do away with your tiered plans if they’re working well so far. But it’s important to consider the unique needs of your prospects and create pricing packages that address those needs. For example, LYFE Marketing offers three different tiers of plans and the option to get a custom proposal based on the specific needs of each client.
You could survey or interview your existing clients to get a better sense of how they feel about your plans and pricing strategy. Are they currently happy with the way you price your services? Do they have any ideas or suggestions on how they expect you to improve?
6. Update Your Tech Stack
A growing agency needs the right tools and technology to support its growth. Your existing tech stack may be able to support your current needs. But will you still be able to use it further down the line as you take on more clients and handle more projects? And will you be able to provide access to every member of your team who needs it?
It’s important to assess your current technology to see if it can scale with your growth. Many social media management tools have limitations on the number of posts you can publish a month, the number of users you can add, and so on. Similarly, your current plan may not give you the ability to report on the specific metrics that your clients want to access. Or your project management platform may set limitations on the number of actions you can perform per month.
Make sure to evaluate your current technology needs and forecast your future needs to see what needs updating. Sometimes, you may only need to upgrade your plan to scale your operations. In some cases, however, you might need to switch to a different platform altogether.
The good news is that many social media marketing tools come with scalable plans that are perfect for agencies. Buffer, for instance, lets you manage up to 10 channels with the Agency plan, but you have the option to add additional channels at an extra cost.
Source: buffer.com
7. Get More Done with Automation
On the topic of tech stacks, you can leverage technology to automate various aspects of your social media tasks and boost productivity. Whether this involves using AI to write your social media captions or scheduling posts to automatically publish, automation will allow you to save time and do your job more efficiently.
That way, you can allocate your team and resources toward activities that need a human touch. For instance, freeing up your team’s time will allow them to focus on building relationships with your clients and boosting loyalty. As a social media marketing agency, some of the top tasks you can automate include:
- Scheduling your social media posts and first comments for various clients and across several social networks
- Sending automated emails triggered by specific actions or criteria to nurture leads and streamline client onboarding
- Auto-generating performance reports and sending them to clients at pre-determined intervals
- Using AI to generate ideas and source images to speed up content creation
- Using AI to come up with relevant hashtags to boost the visibility and performance of your posts
- Generating enhanced captions to accompany your social media posts
- Getting recommendations on how to optimize your posts and publish your posts at the best times to drive engagement
- Leveraging AI to analyze and forecast trends to adapt your strategy
- Analyzing customer sentiment around your clients’ brand and social media posts so you can pivot accordingly
- Monitoring your clients’ social media to detect engagement opportunities and potential reputation risks that need immediate attention
Platforms like Sprout Social come with AI-powered features to help you automate and streamline your tasks. You can automatically detect high-priority messages based on sentiment detection and get timely notifications for potential crises. It even provides you with AI-enhanced suggestions to optimize your replies and better engage the community.
Source: sproutsocial.com
8. Grow Your Network and Develop Strategic Partnerships
The partnerships you form can play a vital role in facilitating growth for your social media marketing agency. Partnering with other agencies, experts, or companies can help you expand your reach and attract more prospects.
Form Strategic Alliances with Complementary Agencies
But it’s important to take a strategic approach to ensure that you get the most value out of your partnerships. For instance, a partnership with a content creation agency like ClearVoice might help you expand your service offering beyond just social media marketing. This will allow you to outsource the content creation aspects of social media without having to commit to a full-time hire.
Additionally, you might consider partnering with another company that offers complementary solutions to host an event or a webinar where you can showcase your expertise. That way, you can effectively reach the company’s existing audience base through a strategic cross-promotion effort.
Boost Your Agency's Visibility through Influencer Partnerships and IRL Networking
You can even partner with influential personalities in your industry to host interviews and share insights that your audience might want to learn about. This is an effective way to grow your reach beyond your existing audience base and attract prospects through the influencer’s connections.
Alternatively, you can even engage in traditional networking strategies by attending conferences and in-person events. This gives you the perfect channel to meet potential clients and partners alike and build a connection with them.
Approach leading industry experts, give out cards, set up stalls, and ask the right questions. Sign up to be a speaker at relevant events to get your agency name in front of the right people. Have members of your team participate in panels and talks hosted by third parties to showcase their expertise and attract more prospects. For instance, Viral Nation’s Chief Product Officer was part of the panel at the Creator Economy session at DMS by LUMA.
Gear Up to Grow Your Social Media Agency
Growing your social media marketing agency is no easy feat. It involves time, resources, and careful planning that may yield slow results. Make the most of the ideas shared above to get started with your growth plan. Expand your service offerings and strengthen your tech stack to support your clients’ needs. Don’t forget to actively engage your audience and produce great content that attracts the right prospects to your agency.
