Digital marketing agencies see more business than ever with the recent rise in online shopping. More companies of all sizes establish an online footprint to attract a larger audience. To help your agency stand out from the competition, you can optimize it for your audience by using the techniques you usually apply to client accounts, such as data analytics.

Use the Right Data

Preparing your data involves finding, cleaning and optimizing it for purposes such as reports, data mining and machine learning. This task is time-consuming and has seen a boom of improvements in the last couple of years. You can find self-service data preparation tools for helping non-technical team members access and clean the raw data for their needs. These tools save your analytics team from curating and cleaning data sets for each department while allowing your teams quicker access to more reliable data. You can also find tools to help each department cultivate data sets for specific needs and to help find the correct data already in your analytics systems.

Align your KPIs

With the right data in place, analyze your sales pipeline and the growth initiatives returns. Dive deep into your sales team’s performance, focusing not just on activity but on tangible outcomes tied to revenue. Instead of just counting the number of cold calls or emails, zero in on the revenue generated from each scheduled demo or call. Keep a keen eye on the volume of qualified leads each month and track the conversion rates from meetings scheduled to contracts sealed. Also consider the contract size, as it’s a solid indicator of lead quality. Remember, being the top agency in the industry doesn’t automatically guarantee success. If you’re attracting the wrong audience, it will be very challenging to grow. Often, the primary roadblock to an agency’s expansion isn’t fierce competition or lack of creativity – it’s overlooking the power of proper analytics.

Optimize Workflow

Before you try to scale up your agency or to optimize specific products, services and departments, it is vital to evaluate your current workflow processes for optimization. By reevaluating your current processes, company communications and procedures, you can eliminate any potential bottlenecks which can hinder other optimization efforts. For instance, if your accounting department tends to lag behind other teams, you can optimize the automation and workflow in that department before it slows down your efforts to scale up the agency.

Reevaluate Your Target Audience

Your buyer persona, the type of clients you want to work with, changes with the flow of business and the needs of your current customers. These changes should reflect a refinement of your overall target audience and the products and services you can and do offer clients. It is essential to evaluate these changes regularly to determine if your target audience needs to shift. One of the easiest ways to do this is to look at the priorities of your current customers and how well you are meeting their needs. If you have lost clients recently, reach out and see if that loss is due to your products, services or pricing. You can then evaluate whether it is better to shift your offerings or shift your audience to meet market demands better.

Cultivate Company Culture

One area often neglected by company optimization efforts is the cultivation of company culture. This area plays an integral part in the overall success of your agency, however, as it directly leads to recruiting and retaining the best talent. Employee morale affects work ethic and effectiveness throughout the company, so it is essential to check in with your workers to see which policies and procedures, benefits offerings and work environment items help boost or restrain job satisfaction and employee investment. As more companies shift to remote workforces, especially in online or internet-related fields, offering this option to your employees can show a company culture committed to working on flexibility while optimizing your workforce.

Nurture Customer Relationships

Nurturing the relationships you have with existing customers can not only provide the funding necessary to fuel optimization and expansion efforts, but it can help you determine which additional products and services to add, which ones to improve and which ones to cut. You can nurture these relationships by assigning large accounts to a single contact or a team to build familiarity ease communications. You can also ask for feedback to let your customers know that their opinions are important to you or offer bundles on your most popular services and products.

Optimizing your digital marketing agency can sometimes look like helping clients optimize their marketing strategies, but it can also involve a lot of internal evaluations and changes. In addition to ensuring that you are using the best marketing techniques for your business and nurturing your customer relationships, you should reevaluate your workflow, target audiences and company culture.