5 Musts For Scaling A Digital Marketing Agency

Just because you want to scale, doesn’t mean you’re ready to scale. What do we mean by this? Well, even though a solid cashflow might be hinting it's time to move on up, your processes and systems might not be there just yet.

So, before you get all excited about how to scale a digital marketing agency, you’ll need to set up a healthy foundation. One that will allow you to grow and expand without causing havoc to the entire business operation. This means making sure you have: the right people (and enough of them), the right tools (ideal for your business), and the right operating systems (so you deliver quality to the entire quantity of clients).

Now, if you want to make sure you dodge the common risks and hurdles most agencies run into when scaling, there are five things you must do. Keep reading to find out what they are.

1. Gather A Team: One You Can Count On

The first, is to secure a team you can count on, from top to bottom. Opening up for more clients, or broadening your services, without having the right people on board to lead and do the work, is a recipe for disaster if you want to grow your business.

But where do you start? You start at the very top with your leader, and move your way down the reporting line.

When it comes to putting together a team you can depend on, there a few questions you need to ask yourself:

Do you have a top-notch leader?

This is the highly influential person who motivates and drives your entire agency team to score goals, over and over again. For a digital marketing agency, an ideal lead would be someone who has a good mix of first-hand experience in marketing, as well as proven people management skills. Great agency leaders are very much like great project managers: they know how to apply and moderate their refined leadership skills and business acumen to different scenarios.

Out of all the people on your team, this person will be the most important choice you make. Here’s why:

• They run the show which means everything starts and ends with them
• When they are just right, they’ll instill a sense of confidence in clients, who will keep coming back and spreading the good word about your agency (meaning more business)
• You’ll find great leaders also know how to bring in, identify, and grow great talent, and they tend to have a knack for keeping that talent, minimizing your agency’s turnover rate (which also means keeping re-hiring costs to a minimum)
• Finally, a top-notch leader knows how to balance your agency’s business objectives, and your employees’ aspirations and needs perfectly

Do you have the right people in the right roles?

Making sure you’ve allocated roles to individual strengths and passions can make all the difference to the quality of work your team delivers. When you have the right people in the right roles, you’ll realize more quality creative work can be done in less time. This is because it’s being produced with enthusiasm and enjoyment. And you’ll need that when you decide to scale.

When everyone in your team is in their best place, you will:

• Increase your agency’s productivity and deliver work more efficiently
• Lift employee satisfaction, which builds a positive organizational culture and spurs business growth
• Boost client satisfaction because the positive vibe from your agency team has a flow-on effect
• Have a lower staff turnover rat,e which means you won’t need to go through the hiring drama often

Now, the best way to make sure everyone is where they should be is to do a review of your entire team. Speak to your team leaders and people. Get their feedback and listen to their development goals. Find out if there are any bad weeds amongst your ranks. Put it all down on paper to identify your:

Once you have this list together, you can reallocate staff to their rightful roles, let go of the ones that don’t add value, and prepare to onboard new people you’ve just realized your growing business will need!

Do you have an efficient hiring and onboarding process?

An efficient and streamlined hiring and onboarding process can save face when employees leave unexpectedly or when business grows and you need to quickly add more members to your team. Knowing you have a smooth process in place will remove much of the pain, delays, and embarrassment that comes with having to tell clients you won’t make the deadline because one of your team members has left the agency, or you can’t take on their work because you don’t have enough people to cover it.

Now, depending on the size of your agency, you might have a small HR department, a one-man/woman team, or you might have administrative staff managing new hires ad-hoc.

Before you scale, it’s a good idea to consider how you can make your hiring and onboarding process more efficient and aligned to the needs of a growing business.

How you choose to approach this will depend on your resources and budget, but some of the things you could consider to simplify your hiring in the future might include:

• Working with a recruitment agency that can screen and deliver the right kinds of candidates that fit your agency culture and come with the skills you need
• Having a few dependable freelancers who can jump in on call to take on work when things get out of hand
• Hiring a dedicated HR professional to manage hiring, onboarding and any other people management and development tasks at the agency
• On top of one of these, you’ll also need to create an onboarding hub for new employees so they can quickly get accustomed to the workflows of the agency, standard operating procedures and processes to speed up learning in the first few weeks

2. Systematize Operations: Deliver Seamless Results

Next, you need to look at how you can deliver results to your clients in an efficient, systemized and streamlined manner. What you’re after here is developing systems that are maintainable and scalable. This means they won’t fall apart or blow your budgets if you add a few more client accounts.

This is mostly about improving your workflows. For growing agencies, this is another must. Unless you systemize and tighten your workflows, you won’t be able to manage and keep a larger number of clients.

There are three questions you need to ask yourself when it comes to your workflow systems:

Does your agency have the right tools?

When you scale, ideally, you want to have a single workspace to visualize your entire agency and client workflows. However, many smaller agencies use either one inefficient tool or several tools to meet their full scope of needs when it comes to managing their people, time, budgets, billing, and creative work deliverables.

This isn’t ideal, because it means your people lose precious time switching between several platforms. It also means you’re paying for multiple subscriptions. And, it means you don’t have all the information in one place which can cause misalignment with messaging and client feedback.

What you want is to consolidate your tools and costs. For example, ActiveCollab is a professional services automation platform that has been specially designed with digital marketing agencies’ needs in mind. It gives agencies of all sizes all the features they’ll need to manage and grow their business when the time is right.

The tool is ideal for:

• Project management – To neatly organize, create and manage entire marketing projects and campaigns and let your clients be across all their work in real time
• Time tracking and monitoring – To keep on top of how much time your people are spending on each campaign or creative task
• Productivity and resource planning – To manage your team’s capacity, time and productivity
• Team collaboration and communication – To keep all team and client communication in one place, hold open discussions and chats.
• Client management – To add clients to the platform so you can manage all their work and approvals.
• Budgeting and profitability – To access dashboards and reports that will help you make better informed decisions on future client portfolio resource allocation and budgeting.
• Estimates, invoicing and expense tracking – To create estimates and send invoices to clients where they can pay at the click of a button and you can monitor paid and unpaid invoices.
• Integrations and add-ons – To streamline and connect with your other systems like Google Drive and Dropbox for files or apps like Zapier, Slack and TestLodge.

Do your people have access to playbooks and standard operating procedures?

A huge part of scaling your agency is making sure you consistently deliver the same quality and level of service and work, no matter who is behind it. Playbooks and standard operating procedures (SOPs) will get you there.

If you don’t already have these in place, it’s high time you get onto it. Here are a couple of tips for developing these invaluable team documents:

• Make sure the experts in each of your teams write these documents. The reason for this is to ensure they are prime quality reference documents. This is also what makes them ideal for developing and nurturing new team members to grow into new star talent.
• Make them available for everyone and easy to access. Having great playbooks and guiding documents means nothing if nobody in your team knows where to find them. So make them accessible and make it a must for your teams to use them.

3. Find Your Flow: Client Management and Strategic Planning

Keeping your clients happy and your account list growing is great, but to keep it that way, you’ll need to develop and maintain a healthy flow in client management and strategic planning. Now, this is all about thinking ahead and not living for the day.

This means keeping on top of your clients’ work and nurturing those relationships to always be across their changing needs. It also means identifying and clarifying the long-term strategic focus of your digital marketing agency. These two elements work to inform each other.

There are three questions you’ll need to address if you want to find, and establish a scale-ready approach for these two business drivers:

Do you have efficient client work and relationship check-ins that can withstand scaling?

If you want to keep and grow your customer accounts the first thing you’ll need to do to earn their trust. You’ll achieve this by delivering on the work you promise, and having regular relationship-building sessions.

This can be achieved in two ways:

• Efficient WIPs – Work in progress, or status meetings or reports help you monitor all your client work to completion, and they help you pick up key blockers so you can manage them as quickly as possible. In doing so, you help prevent delays and also create an opportunity for your team and clients to add or make necessary changes due to unexpected circumstances. One of the best ways to manage WIPs in agencies with growing clients is to switch from WIP meetings to WIP reports. They are especially handy for remote teams and if you have a minimum meeting policy at your agency. If you’re after some best practices and tips on this, make sure you check out our guide on creating a work-in-progress report for agencies.
• Client check-ins – Another important thing is regularly checking in with your clients to understand their business better and be across their strategic goals which will impact the services they’ll need from you. This could be a regular monthly or quarterly check-in meeting. The other option you can implement, especially if you have a long list of clients, is to send out surveys regularly focused on topics that will help you serve your clients better.

Do you follow through with our regular strategic planning sessions?

To grasp opportunities for the future which have potential you’ll need to keep a close eye on your entire business strategy. And the way to do that is through leadership and team planning sessions.

These sessions help you stay on top of industry trends and changes that will help inform and steer your agency in the right direction. They also push you to spot your strengths and your points of difference amongst competitors. Uncovering and analyzing this information regularly will help you evolve your service offerings in a way that keeps you relevant to your ideal customer profile and the future needs of the market.

Now strategic planning sessions come in two types: annual and quarterly. The important thing to note is that they are not exclusive. The annual plan should inform and be the basis for your quarterly plans.

Some things to consider with your planning sessions include:

• Who will see the plan through? Holding a planning session and putting the strategic plan on paper is only the first part. To make it valuable, you need to have a leader within your team also put together an action plan and then see it through to completion.

• Are your ambitions realistic? It’s important you do the research and use the insights and experience of senior leads to guide and inform your strategic goals. There’s no point in setting up an unrealistic plan that will lead to failure because your agency, as it stands now, in the industry settings that surround it, is not ready for that kind of over-ambitous approach.

What are your clients hinting at? Take insights from your client conversations to inform your strategic focus. Ask yourself what do our best clients love most about us and what’s missing in our service offerings that will make them love us more? You can get a lot of this information from direct client feedback, but you should also try to read between the lines in their regular feedback on the work your agency provides.

4. Harness Costs: Identify & Manage Lost Money & Time

If you’re serious about scaling (and if you’re serious about your agency in general), you’ll need to keep tabs on the health of your finances. This means making the most of your resources by harnessing and managing costs and expenses efficiently.

You don’t need anyone to tell you it’s a tough and competitive market you’re operating in, so keeping costs to a minimum, while also making sure you take advantage of growth opportunities that come your way is vital. So you’ll need to have some financial metrics by which you measure and monitor your agency’s progress and success.

There’s two questions you’ll need to ask:

How will you track, monitor, and keep your finances in check?

To run a profitable agency business, it’s best to get a finance expert on board who will help keep you, as the founder, across all the key metrics. While you’re busy with clients and the running of your agency, they will also be able to pick up any financial red flags early on so you don’t come up against nasty surprises.

The other benefit of having an expert take care of your finances when you want to scale is that they can act as your financial advisor, but if you’re determined to go it alone, some of the basic metrics you’ll want to keep on top of include:

• Revenue – How is your top-line revenue tracking, and is it within your budget and sales target?
• Labor cost as a percentage of revenue – How much are you spending on staffing? Ideally, this should be between 55-65% of your revenue. If it’s higher, then you are either over-servicing clients, under-pricing your services or you’ve under-budgeted for the portfolio.
• Marketing spend – How much money are you spending on building your brand? If you’re looking to scale, you should definitely be ticking this box. Ideally, you’ll want to be spending between 5-10% of your client fees here.
• Overheads – How much of your revenue is going to running your business (excluding labour costs)? So these are things like office space, bank fees, subscriptions, and so on.
• Net profit percentage of revenue – How is your business progressing? This figure will tell you if you are growing steadily, fast, or lagging behind.

Keep in mind, if you want to get granular, there are more extremely useful metrics that marketing agencies can use to not only track their growth but also to identify where their problem spots lie. Things like utilization rate, new client acquisition, churn rate and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

How will you keep on top of, and make the best use of billed time and resources?

Digital marketing agencies that decide to scale can benefit greatly from having tools that track time spent (and lost) by their teams on various client accounts, projects and tasks. These kinds of insights which you can access via a tool like ActiveCollab through the people and resources feature, can help you identify and manage lost time the minute you recognize valuable resources are being wasted.

Some of the things you should be tracking include:

• Workload distribution – See who in your team is doing how much so you can take the pressure off individuals who are beyond capacity and re-assign work to those that have a lower workload.
• Profitability – Track your project cost against final profit for each client so you can see what your profit margins are and if you’re losing money by having teams spending too much time on an account.
• Time-tracking – Make sure your teams log time spent on each task so you can track and identify where most resources are being invested. This feature can also help you make better time and cost estimates for various client tasks which can inform future pricing decisions for services.

5. Choose Your Method: Marketing & Advertising For Growth

The last thing you’ll need to work out is the approach you're going to take to market and advertise your digital agency so you get the growth you’re after. This will depend on the direction you’re planning to take. Do you want to expand your service offerings, niche out to a particular market or diversify.

Some of the things you might consider include:

• Updating your website – The first thing you need to do is audit your website and update it to align with your scaling goals and objectives. Here, you’ll need to make sure you tap into your target audience’s pain points in a way that resonates and speaks their language.
• Investing in paid advertising – This can bring in lots of clients quickly but it also requires a larger budget. If you have it, and intend to use it towards paid advertising, you need to make sure you target the right keywords, and challenge your competitors.
• Focusing on organic SEO – While organic SEO is a great option, you know better than anyone that this is a long-term strategy that takes time, effort and resources to reflect on your balance sheet. The great thing about it is that you’ve already got the experts to run this gig who can provide first-hand experience and valuable content. You just have to make the time in their busy schedules to prioritize and deliver the goods on a regular basis.

How ActiveCollab Helps Digital Marketing Agencies Scale

Before you scale your digital marketing agency, you need to set the groundwork that will give you the foundations to cater to, and manage a larger client base. This means having the best people, skills, tools and systems in place that will let you scale without losing grip of your entire business operation.

ActiveCollab is a platform that lets you grow and expand at your own pace. Simple and easy to use from the onset, it's an all-in-one client workflow and productivity management tool that adapts to your individual needs. Powerful enough to take care of agencies with up to 100 agency employees, it streamlines your processes, helps you monitor costs, and identify potential resource savings.

First, it lets you onboard all your clients to the platform so everyone is on the one workflow for projects and campaign tasks. Second, it lets you manage your team resources and client budgets, as well as track the time your team spends on each portfolio and task. And third, it helps you run a more profitable business by producing reports on resource allocations, and identifying projects and clients that are draining more time than others.

So, if you're planning on scaling your digital marketing agency, make sure you do it with the one tool that will let you grow and run your client workflows to perfection! Sign up to ActiveCollab’s 14-day free trial, or book a demo to get a guided tour from one of our people.