There is a common misbelief that business growth is only about increasing numbers and finding potential clients. However, the most successful marketing agencies will tell you that holding to this mentality comes at the expense of your clients.
Focusing only on gaining new accounts too often leads marketing agencies to the pitfalls of making short-term decisions to win a new account while sacrificing other long-term client relationships, trust, and success.
The truth is that to win as a marketing agency, you must do both. You must define marketing goals for your agency that also benefit your clients.
Follow the steps below to create marketing goals that your current clients will care about.
1. Establish trust by determining what your clients care about.
Do your clients trust you?
Clients who are unsatisfied with their marketing agency often report that their agency partners seem more interested in selling their firm’s ideas than in solving the client’s actual problems.
The first marketing goal you should set for your agency is to determine what your clients actually care about.
Agencies with a growth mindset regularly communicate with their clients to make sure that they know what their clients care about.
You can communicate with your clients in many ways--customer satisfaction surveys, one-to-one calls with the decision-maker at your client’s company, or team-wide feedback sessions after a big campaign launch. Whatever method, or combination of methods, you take, there are a few questions you should be sure to ask:
2. Create measurable goals—for your team and for your clients.
Once you have identified what your clients care most about, you need to translate those ideas and values into business goals for your team to continually monitor their progress toward.
Setting measurable goals is a key aspect of defining your funnel analytics because it allows you to quantify your progress and respond as needed. By aligning your goals with customer expectations, you will build stronger loyalty with clients and increase retention rates.
Consider these common KPIs marketing agencies use to track their customer satisfaction and engagement:
KPIs related to customer satisfaction and retention:
KPIs related to customer contact and interaction:
For more ideas of Marketing KPIs to track, check out
For your clients:
Every client’s needs may differ, but your guidance to translate their needs into metrics that can be measured and managed must remain consistent across all your accounts.
Setting goals with your clients will ensure that you are on the same page and make it easier to measure the impact of your agency helping them achieve their marketing goals.
The following metrics are particularly helpful for your clients to use:
Again, you should also include any other metrics that are relevant to your client’s specific company goals, and drill down on any campaigns or channels that are particularly important to the marketing strategy your agency recommends. Just don’t forget to tie that data back to your client’s top-line growth!
3. Use data as a common language for your agency and with your clients.
Communicating in generalities can be frustrating for clients, as well as for people within your agency. When you have created KPIs and established methods to track them, you can change your discussions from talking in vague terms about trends, to discussing the actual real-time data.
By using a BI tool, you can easily track this data and quickly see a visual representation of real time data, these real-time visualizations benefit your team and each client account your agency works with.
When you frame your agency’s internal marketing goals through the common language of data, you can better target your team’s efforts and identify opportunities for growth and optimization.
When you frame your regular communications with your clients by data, you establish a clear purpose for each conversation and keep both the client and their account managers from your agency on the same page.
4. Use dashboards to track KPIs and keep clients informed.
To truly make data your common language, you first need to create dashboards to connect all your data.
The most effective way to quickly communicate the data within your agency and with your clients is through dashboards.
With dashboards you can ensure that everyone has the correct, most updated data.
Grow can help you identify your most important KPIs and create dashboards to connect all your data. By having all your important data in one place, you can view successes and areas for improvement quickly in one central location. Grow provides an all-in-one business intelligence solution by having all your information in one place and allowing you to share it with the team in real time.
Dashboards for your clients
Request a demo to learn more about using Grow. For more information about how Grow can enhance your marketing process check out the Marketing KPIs Cheat Sheet.
