6 Proven Ways to Get Clients for Your Digital Marketing Agency

The Foundation of Attracting Digital Marketing Clients
6 Strategies for Getting Digital Marketing Clients
How Data Powers Client Acquisition

Every digital agency is working to get more clients. Depending on what phase of your business, you might be searching for your first clients, trying to add more clients, or looking for better clients.

But no matter where you’re at, higher-quality clients give you stable income, freedom, and fewer headaches.

Sounds great, right? But the question is, how can you stand out in a saturated space with competitors who have been entrenched for years?

The Foundation of Attracting Digital Marketing Clients

Doing the following can help you bring the right clients into your agency.

Identify Your Perfect Client

Let’s say that you sell SEO services along with countless other agencies. If you’ve established that your ideal client is “anyone with a website,” it’ll be impossible to stand out.

By creating an ideal customer profile, you can improve your brand, writing, imaging, ad targeting, and even the lead lists you buy.

Here are a few things to think about when determining the best clients for your agency:

Industry - Be specific. You could go after dentists, real estate agents, doctors, basketball coaches, golf suppliers—essentially anyone who can make money by having people find them online. The ideal situation would be if you’ve had a few clients in a specific niche to show prospects that you’ve already done exactly what they’re looking for. This also helps you to scale what works rather than reinvent the wheel with each client.
Company Size - A one-man show likely doesn’t have the budget for the services you’d like to render, while a 100-person company probably already has someone on the team handling SEO. Companies with 10-25 people are often in the market for vendors who can help with tasks that no one in-house has the time or skill for.
Indications They Need Your Service - For SEO services, this could mean identifying companies with slow websites, which means there’s easy optimization potential for you. Or, if you specialize in advertising, you could target websites with tracking pixels installed. (Hint: Coldlytics can show you this info for every prospect)
Decision-Maker Avatar - You’re not marketing to a generic, faceless company but rather to a CEO or another decision-maker. Who is that person?

That’s just a start. The deeper you go on this step, the easier you’ll find it is to customize your marketing messaging.

Have a Strong Website

If you’re still fairly new to owning an agency, there’s a chance that you either don’t have a website or you’re missing some key elements that could help you land clients.

The most important aspects of your website are:

Specify Your Niche - For example, you could have a headline that reads “We help dentists rank #1 in local search.” Throughout your copy, keep referring back to your niche and have imaging that makes it obvious who you work with.
Portfolio - Let people see exactly what you can do. This might be content you’ve written, graphics you’ve designed, charts showing traffic or revenue you’ve generated, or screenshots of websites you’ve helped rank #1.
Social Proof - The most powerful tool in closing a client is showing them that you’ve achieved the results they want with other people in your niche. These could be videos, quotes, case studies, screenshots of Facebook posts, or a plug-in that pulls in Google Reviews. Whatever it is, make sure these are prominent on your site.

Josh Nelson’s agency helps other agencies grow. Here’s the headline of his website:

It’s pretty clear who he’s targeting. Then, he has testimonials prominently displayed:

In addition, you could create a slideshow presentation that has all of this information in it. You could send the slide deck to potential clients if you don't have a website in the form of a video sales letter (VSL).

6 Strategies for Getting Digital Marketing Clients {#6 Strategies-for-Getting-Digital-Marketing-Clients}

Now that you’ve got a tremendous foundation, let’s talk about some of the most common ways to find digital marketing clients.

1. Personalized Value

We’ll get into specific channels in a minute, but this one works no matter where you go to find clients.

In every situation, prospects are more likely to get on a call with you if you provide an irresistible service—especially if it’s custom to their business. Here are a few examples:

Shave half a second off their site’s load time for free.
Design a new email header just for jumping on a call.
Give them a landing page template with a headline for their niche.
Offer a free live breakdown of any piece of content on their site.

If you want to work on a larger scale, produce a lead magnet that people in your industry can’t help but want to download. Put together something so good that people can’t believe you gave it out for free.

This is what HubSpot did to attract newsletter creators to their email list:

People in the industry know that HubSpot owns The Hustle, one of the most successful newsletters of all time. Getting a behind-the-scenes look at how to build something similar will attract a ton of leads for them.

2. Thought Leadership

This route can be difficult to break into, but done right, it can be the single fastest and cheapest way to attract people to you.

To be a thought leader, you will have to understand your niche incredibly well. You’ve probably already been on calls and helped people in the industry. Go into Reddit and see what people are talking about and their concerns.

Then, create content that you’ve put real time and effort into. Go for quality, not quantity. Provide insight and analysis that others haven’t thought of. Give data to back up your points. Predict what’s going to happen in the future.

Try doing this on:

LinkedIn
Medium
Reddit
X
YouTube

It makes sense to focus on one of these at first, and then expand. You could include your blog, but the items on this list have better networks for getting found and going viral.

3. Upwork

If you’re unfamiliar with Upwork, it is the most popular marketplace for hiring freelancers. As a new digital marketing agency, that’s essentially what you are, right?

With thousands of jobs posted every day, there are plenty of opportunities to find ongoing work in your niche. Frequently, there are even posts that ask specifically for marketing agencies.

While many postings are low quality, you can use their advanced sorting to find the high-paying, long-term work that your agency could grow from winning.

4. Google & Facebook Ads

While perhaps the fastest way to scale your agency, it can also get pricey. The key to successfully advertise on these platforms is to upload a highly-targeted lead list.

The easiest way to do this is to upload a list of people that fit your ideal customer profile. Then, you know that the prospects you’re targeting will likely be a great fit.

You can even have these platforms expand the targeting to find other prospects who are very similar to the ones on the list you uploaded.

5. Direct Mail

Again, it’s all about the quality of your list. Sending direct mail can get expensive with a large list because of production and shipping costs, so your ROI is dependent on sending your mail to the right people.

In addition to targeting your perfect client, you must have up-to-date information that also sends your piece of mail right to the decision-maker. If your list is two years old or sends mail to the secretary rather than the CEO, closing clients becomes much harder.

We’ve worked with agency owners that have closed recurring monthly clients for less than $250 a piece with direct mail. The lifetime ROI on that is astounding.

6. Cold Email Marketing

We’ve saved our favorite for last.

Why do we like sending out cold emails so much?

It’s Fast - You can purchase a list and send to them the same day.
It’s Cheap - You’ll have to pay for the list and an email marketing platform, but that’s it.
Results Come Quickly - If your email hits the mark, you’ll see responses immediately.
It’s Easy to Pivot - If your email doesn’t work one day, you can try another tactic with just a few minutes of tweaking.

We love cold email so much for getting clients that we put together our best information and templates into one place.

How Data Powers Client Acquisition

For our favorite strategies (email, direct mail), everything hinges on getting an irresistible offer in front of a decision-maker in your niche.

If your messages are sent to general office addresses or inboxes, they will rarely reach the CEO. Even worse is if your information is old, and you’re barking up the wrong tree entirely.

At Coldlytics, our niche targeting (including site speed, size of company, industry, pixels on website, in addition to other digital marketing buying intent data and much more) gets you a hyper-focused list of only your ideal prospects. Since we don’t create that list until the day you request it, you won’t find a better list of leads for your new business anywhere else.

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Schedule a free demo and let us show you how to get target clients in your niche.