5 Marketing Agency Strategies to Boost Your Business

Originally published November 2017. Updated with new content March 2023

How does a company that helps others market its brands market itself?

This is a question creative agencies grapple with. And it’s not an easy question to answer.

There is a perennial struggle between the business of being creative, and well, business. What might be good for your creative brand might not bring in business (and vice versa).

That said, there are solutions to market your growing creative agency, some conventional, some radical.

In this post, I’ll share some of these unconventional strategies and tactics to help you find the marketing agency strategy that will best market your creative agency.

1. USE TRANSPARENCY AS A MARKETING HOOK

There was a time when businesses could afford to corral behind long forms and opaque facades.

That time is long gone, thanks to the internet.

Your customers are actively seeking more details about your business. They want to know how much your service costs, how long it takes, and what kind of reviews it has.

And they want this information right now, not behind a form or a phone call.

There are two ways to deal with these customers:

• Hide everything behind a form and make customers work for the information.
• Put everything front and center and practice complete transparency.

As a growing number of businesses are beginning to realize, the latter option is actually great for business, and an important idea to consider for your agency marketing plan..

As Paul Gillin notes in The New Influencers,

The gist is that in the age of social media, your customers are going to eventually figure out your secrets anyway. So why not cut their hunt short and share them yourself?

As a general rule, the more complex and obscure a business’ offering, the more it will benefit from transparency.

Creative agencies fit the bill perfectly.

Because the creative process is often shrouded in mystery and because creative agencies often price their services on an ad-hoc basis, outsiders looking in can get intimidated.

If you run a digital marketing strategy agency, you’ll find that a more transparent approach solves this problem and helps with attracting clients and recruiting great people.

Further, being transparent can help differentiate your offerings from more traditional competitors. This can be a powerful brand signal when used right.

Here are four ways you can adopt transparency:

1. Transparency in Pricing

Sharing your rates publicly for selected services sets you apart from competitors with more opaque pricing. You can have a separate private rate for more customized solutions.

For example, WebPageFX has detailed rates for all its services. For creative services, it even shares a pricing calculator.

WebPageFX gives detailed prices for all its services, even something as complex as website development.

2. Transparency in the Process

Share how you work, what tools you use, and how you get results. This will give prospective clients greater confidence in your capabilities. With creative work, this can also give clients insight into why you charge what you charge.

Case studies are a great place to share your process. For example, The Charles shares detailed explanations of its process in all its case studies.

TheCharles doesn't just share the results of its work; it also shows the reasoning and process behind each design/development decision.

3. Transparency in Performance

Instead of sharing subjective data (“increased quality of leads”), share hard numbers about your work and its impact. Tell prospective clients exactly what kind of results they can expect, and when.

For example, SiegeMedia shares exact performance figures in its case studies:

SiegeMedia's case studies are very specific, sharing exact tactics and their results

4. Transparency in Payroll

A final, but more difficult form of transparency is transparency in payroll. This is where you share the exact salaries for all your staff (including the CEO).

This can be a powerful recruiting tool. If prospective applicants know exactly what they’ll get paid and why they’ll be more likely to apply.

Although it’s not an agency, Buffer has done this to great effect. It shares salaries for all 65 employees and the formula it used to get to these figures.

Buffer shares detailed reports of salaries for all its staff as well as the company's equity structure

After sharing salaries publicly, Buffer received more than twice as many resumes as it normally does.

This isn’t always possible to do in an agency setting, of course. But at the very least, try to be transparent in your salary ranges or compensation model in job postings.

2. TURN BRANDING EVENTS INTO LEAD-GENERATION OPPORTUNITIES

As a growing agency owner, your brand is critical for business. This is what differentiates you from your competitors.

To build this brand, you undertake a number of branding-related activities - social media, speaking gigs, live events, etc.

But your brand is just that - a brand. There is no hard monetary value attached to it, or to the activities that help you build it.

With a few simple tweaks, however, you can turn brand-building activities into lead-generation opportunities.

I’ll share some ideas below:

1. Turn Social Media Followers Into Leads

Social media is a powerful branding tool, especially all visual-heavy networks such as Instagram and Snapchat.

Usually, you’d use social media to showcase your work and work culture. You’ll likely just link to your website homepage directly since the objective is branding, not lead generation.

Red Antler, like most agencies, has a short bio with a link to its homepage

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

While sticking a lead-gen form isn’t always possible (or desirable) on a social media page, you can find some ways to capture leads.

One way to do this is to link to content which, in turn, links to an email collection form.

For example, IDEO links to its blog posts on its Instagram page. When visitors land on the post, they see a prominent email subscription form.

IDEO uses an Instagram -> Blog -> Newsletter conversion funnel to turn some of its social media followers into subscribers.

This way, IDEO is able to capture emails from its Instagram account without the hard-sell of a conventional lead-gen form.

WolffOlins takes a slightly less overt approach. It links to its latest report in its Instagram bio.

WolffOlins uses its annual report as a chance to show off its work. Along the way, it asks people to "join in" as well and go from readers into leads.

This report has a prominent “Join In” link which directs them to an email account. This can later be mined for links.

Try adopting such workarounds on your social media following. Don’t just link to the homepage. Instead, link to expanded content and use that to pitch your products/services.

2. Turn Event Attendees Into Leads

You’re speaking at an event, hosting a meetup, or maybe just attending a conference.

In each of these cases, your primary goal is to grow your agency’s brand. Share your vision, work and results with people. You might hope to get some leads, but it’s not a priority.

Besides, who has time to fill out forms (paper or online) at busy events?

There are some workarounds that aren’t so overt.

If you’re speaking at an event, you can close the talk by offering free downloadable content in exchange for emails. Use a tool like TalkBook to make this process easier.

"Upgrade" your event attendee's experience by sharing more advanced material via a gated form at the end of the talk.

Alternatively, get people to sign-up via text messaging. Use a tool like JoinByText and ask people to SMS you a chosen keyword to join your email list. You can even print this keyword on your business card.

Asking people to sign-up via text is more interactive and feels less like lead generation.

This is a much less “in your face” tactic to turn event attendees into leads.

3. USE SIDE PROJECT MARKETING

Creating products to capture leads is old hat as far as agency marketing goes. But in the last few years, this tactic has gone truly mainstream with agencies creating “side projects” to market their main business.

So much so that marketers are calling it the “new king” of marketing.

But first - what exactly is side project marketing?

This is where you create a small, standalone product that ties into your core offering. The product usually fulfills a niche need and has a built-in referral mechanism that helps it grow on its own.

A perfect example of a successful side project is Unsplash.

Unsplash, a curated photography site, helps Crew sign-up designers and developers for its platform.

The stock photo-sharing site started out as a side project to attract new customers for Crew, a “distributed agency”. Its success helped the company survive during a tough phase.

Three years later, Unsplash has grown so large that it is now operated as a standalone company with millions of users.

At the same time, it helped Crew land thousands of referrals and hundreds of customers.

The best part? It did this without any hard selling.

As Crew’s founder, Mikael Cho says:

For a side project to be successful, it should have two components:

• It should solve a niche problem, and
• The niche problem should be related to your business

The latter is particularly important from a marketing point of view. You’re essentially piggybacking on the side project to sell your main product. You want to be able to market your side project on the same channels as where your primary product’s audience hangs out.

In the case of Unsplash, the product solved a niche need: giving designers and developers access to high-quality imagery for free.

This gave Crew a “lateral” entry into the community of designers/developers.

Also, have a way to somehow capture emails from your side project. This isn’t always necessary but it will make your projects 10x more effective.

Keep this in mind and you’ll see great results from your side projects.

Before I jump to the next section, I’ll share some examples of successful side project use cases.

1. Improve a Common Process

Find something that people in your industry commonly do, then find a way to do it faster. Essentially, you’re creating a tool to improve a workflow.

For example, SEOs often target outdated content in hopes of scoring a backlink. Finding this content often requires creating complex Google queries.

So Greenlane Marketing came up with an “Outdated Content Finder” tool that automated the process, saving SEOs hours:

The Outdated Content Finder is a simple tool that simplifies a complex Google query and thus, solves a niche need.

2. Curate Resources

The more complex a field, the more resources, ideas, and approaches it has. A centralized website/app that curates the best of these resources can be an invaluable tool.

For example, the Web Field Manual curates the web’s best design resources.

A well-designed, well-curated list of resources can turn into a powerful source of links and leads.

3. Showcase Capabilities

Sometimes, the best side projects don’t really solve a problem. Instead, they simply showcase what you can do.

Creative agencies often gravitate towards such projects since they give them a chance to flex their creative muscles and it can bring out some fabulous performance agency-wise.

For example, this website by Paravel has detailed graphs and analyses of colorful characters from movies. It doesn’t serve a purpose but shows off the agency’s aesthetic and skills.

Side projects don't have to necessarily be useful. Anything that is entertaining, shows off your capabilities, or speaks to the interests of your target audience works well too.

The result? Traffic, and from that traffic, leads.

4. EMBRACE COMMUNITY

Community - building one or joining one - is often ignored by agencies. The reason given is often the same - investing in communities doesn’t yield results, at least not immediately.

For long-term impact, however, embracing community can be a powerful marketing tactic.

Communities help you in three ways:

• They help passively promote your brand.
• They act as sources of talent.
• They act as a source of referrals.

A community is a great example of “value-focused” marketing. The community acts as a conduit for your agency’s values. The ideas and beliefs you embrace within the community will have a lasting impact on your brand.

A community may be informal or formal. A “formal” community would be, say, the forum associated with an event. An “informal” community might be the community that comes together on a Reddit subreddit or a Twitter hashtag.

For maximum impact, embrace both formal and informal communities in your creative sales and marketing agency strategy.

Contribute to Niche Communities

The easiest way to be a part of a community is to contribute to one another. Whatever content you contribute to the community will become associated with your brand. If you’re helpful and informative, community members will see your brand the same way as well.

Take care to avoid being overly promotional or commercial in your community contributions. These might land short-term traffic gains but will hurt your brand in the long run.

For example, Bruce Clay of the eponymous marketing agency hosted an AMA (‘Ask Me Anything’) on the /r/bigSEO subreddit, answering questions from readers.

A Reddit AMA is one of the easiest ways to contribute to and establish your brand with the community

You don’t have to answer questions to be valuable. Even inviting contributions from the community can be helpful, as Ahrefs (an SEO tool) does here:

Soliciting feedback from the community is a great way to get "buy-in". People who contribute are more likely to consume and share the content in the future as well.

Essentially, your goal is to be:

• Informative
• Available
• Helpful

On Reddit, some appropriate subreddits for creative agencies would be /r/socialmedia, /r/advertising, /r/copywriting, /r/webmarketing, and /r/web_design. Try using a branded account name that clearly identifies you or your agency.

You can also find industry forums by searching for “[your agency focus] + forum”.

Finally, look up some Twitter chats that focus on your agency’s expertise. Participate by sharing valuable content. Use this page to find relevant chats. This is great from a networking perspective as well.

5. CREATE CONTENT TARGETED AT THE PEOPLE YOU WANT TO ATTRACT

What’s the easiest way to attract clients from a particular industry?

Easy: create content that explicitly targets them.

This is a little-used but wildly effective agency growth hack that can get you in front of the people you want as clients. In-depth, well-designed content shows off:

• Your knowledge of the target industry
• Your creative skills

For example, CODO, an Indianapolis-based design agency, wanted to work with craft brewers.

To show brewers that it was passionate about their industry, they created this Craft Beer Branding Guide.

CODO wanted clients from the craft brewing industry, so it created a branding guide specifically targeted toward them.

The guide walked craft brewers through the branding process for a brew. The site as well as the content worked as a showcase for the agency’s capabilities and knowledge.

Similarly, WellnessCreative, an agency targeting the fitness industry, creates a ton of content targeted toward trainers and health professionals.

When your target audience consumes your content, you get an opportunity to "upsell" them your services.

Again, this demonstrates the agency’s expertise, enthusiasm, and capabilities.

Try doing this for your digital agency strategy. Make a list of the kind of clients you want to attract, then create hyper-targeted content related to their industry.

But content has uses beyond getting clients; it is also a powerful community-building tool.

Create a Community Through Content

Content is the heart of any community. If you can consistently create valuable content and give people a platform to discuss it, you’ll find it incredibly easy to build a community.

Content can be in any form - in-depth blog posts, questions & answers, newsletters, and even events. The key is to develop a platform where others with similar interests can participate.

For example, ConversionXL started as a blog focused on conversion rate optimization. People who were interested in this topic found their way to the blog thanks to its valuable content.

The blog mushroomed into a live event for even more in-depth content and networking. The live event helped ConversionXL get leads and create an agency.

Building a community can lead to more opportunities, such as ConversionXL's transformation from a blog to a live event to an agency.

This is a proven approach to fostering a community - create great content, help people discuss it, and add your contributions.

Marketing your creative agency can be a challenge. With so little to separate your agency from competitors, the strength of your marketing will often impact the strength of your client roster.

Try some of these unconventional strategies to stand out. Embrace side projects, foster a community, and develop a marketing hook to differentiate yourself from competitors and attract clients.

How can Workamajig help with your agency’s creative marketing strategies?

Congratulations, your marketing strategies won you some clients!

Now what? How do you make sure your new clients stay your clients all the way through till the end? 

For that, you need an integrated and robust CRM software…which describes Workmajig to a T.

With Workamajig, you get to:

• Easily convert leads into contact & company records with full conversation history
• Get full pipeline visibility & see opportunities by stage, status & probability to close
• Set goals for the team & track performance against target revenue

• Easily move a contact through your entire sales workflow, from start to finish.
• Send estimates from your project templates,  or create one from scratch including hours, labor, expenses & more
• Get approval, create a live project, and have everything ready for the project manager
  ....all from Workamajig's sales dashboard. 

Propel your marketing success forward with powerful CRM