If you want your SEO agency to continue growing, earning more revenue and enjoying more stability, you’ll need to ensure you have a steady stream of new clients—or increased sales from your existing client base. But investing time and resources on new clients can spread your team thin.
So how do successful agency owners find new SEO clients without compromising their existing workflows?
All sales and marketing strategies need to start with sound principles, and any competent agency knows this. By adhering to these foundational principles, you’ll not only increase your chances of getting seen, but you’ll also demonstrate your knowledge of marketing fundamentals:
Ultimately, every strategy can qualify as an “outbound” or “inbound” attempt to acquire clients. Outbound strategies rely on intentionally reaching out to new prospects, pitching them on your services and persuading them to pull the trigger on a new contract. They come in many forms, but typically include traditional advertising and the use of an in-house team of salespeople.
Outbound strategies can be effective, but they require strict attention to efficiency. Hiring a team of full-time sales members might seem like a strong way to secure new sales, but it’s only worthwhile if you’re properly incentivizing those team members, measuring your results, and constantly tweaking your approach for improvement.
The other problem with outbound strategies is that they tend to have finite value; a targeted ad is only useful so long as it remains paid for, and your list of prospects is only valuable until you’ve exhausted it. Inbound strategies, by contrast, don’t suffer from these drawbacks.
Inbound strategies consist of tactics designed to naturally increase the visibility and attractiveness of your brand (and website). Again, there are many forms here, but search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are some of the most common.
Inbound marketing has several advantages over its outbound counterpart. Most of the strategies you’ll use here are permanent, or at least long-term, and will yield value indefinitely, increasing their ROI over time. They forgo the need for a robust full-time team of salespeople. And most inbound strategies are infinitely scalable; in other words, they can serve businesses of any size and at any stage of growth.
The best benefit of inbound strategies is that nearly all of them complement one another; investing in two strategies simultaneously can improve your results in both areas. Investing in multiple strategies can eventually result in a polished, lead-generating machine—and one that doesn’t require much maintenance.
For example, take the cohesion between these inbound marketing strategies:
It’s incredibly difficult to manage a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy all on your own, so the most effective route here is to outsource at least some of your needs to another agency that specializes in inbound marketing. There are some risks when outsourcing strategies like link building, but as long as you choose a trustworthy partner, you’ll see a return on your investment.
Remember, client retention is almost universally less expensive than client acquisition. In addition to utilizing strategies to attract or win new clients, it’s important for you to optimize your organization to reduce the chances of clients leaving—while also pushing for more sales from your existing client base. For example, you can improve your offerings with higher-efficiency and therefore a lower-cost SEO service, or you can try to upsell them on bigger, more effective packages of services.
If your agency needs a compelling link building service to add to your suite of offerings, or if you’re looking to outsource some of your marketing strategies to save time and resources for use with other client acquisition strategies, contact SEO.co today! We’ll provide you with a free consultation, and/or a quote for our white label SEO link building services.