Business owners spend hundreds of hours trying to figure out how to start an agency—from finding the right resources to navigating legal ops to marketing and more. However, once all that is resolved, the work isn’t over. Now it’s time to learn how to scale your marketing agency, so you can continue maximizing your profits and growing your business with your success.
Growth is necessary to ensure your business has consistent revenue. That’s why it’s so important to learn the best strategies to scale your business. In this article, we’ll specifically be talking about:
- How to Scale a Digital Marketing Agency with Platforms & Tools
- How to Scale a Digital Marketing Agency through Strategic Partnerships
- How to Scale a Digital Marketing Agency by Defining Your Niche
- How to Scale a Digital Marketing Agency and Hire Talent
- How to Scale a Digital Marketing Agency by Systemizing Processes
- How to Scale a Digital Marketing Agency with Slam Tools
So, why should you listen to us anyway?
The answer’s quite simple: we’ve been in your shoes, and have succeeded. Slam Media Lab is an award-winning digital marketing agency that started during the pandemic, and grew to become a $2M business within three years. We’ve spent hundreds of hours researching and doing, and now offer a vast collection of products and resources to businesses across the board to help them grow their businesses. We’re also proud to be a Hispanic marketing agency that rethinks marketing and provides opportunities to everyone—especially those who have been underrepresented in the past.
We partner with brands to elevate their SEO, web design, and content marketing to help more businesses reach more people with our custom-tailored digital marketing services. We have experience working with all types of businesses, from small businesses such as Sprig & Sprout to venture capital firms like Symphonic VC, proving that we can custom-tailor solutions to meet your unique needs.
We write articles like these so that you take back those extra hours of research and spend more time making your business thrive. If you’re ready to learn, let’s get started!
How to Scale a Digital Marketing Agency with Platforms & Tools
When it comes to learning how to scale a digital marketing agency, your first step should be exploring all the agency tools and platforms you can leverage. There are a wide range of solutions at your fingertips that make running your business easier:
- Social media
- Online advertising
- Website content
- Word of mouth
Social Media
Social media is a great avenue to leverage when it comes to scaling your business. According to Hubspot’s State of Marketing Report, the social media channels with the most marketers and the biggest ROI as of 2024 are as follows:
- Youtube
- TikTok
- Twitter/X
Depending on the complexity of your content strategy, it can be helpful to automate processes and save some of your focus for other parts of your business. Platforms like Sprout Social and Iconosquare make it easy to schedule content in advance and track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns, saving you time and delivering data to your fingertips week after week.
Knowing how to scale a digital marketing agency means you have to master navigating the social media world. The good news is that you don’t have to do this alone. With Slam, you have endless resources at your fingertips to help you through every stage of starting and growing your business. This includes tools like our comprehensive social media planner, or more specific guides like our TikTok content planner.
Maintaining consistent social media presence and management is essential as more people spend more time on these platforms. According to DataReportal, social media users are growing at a rate of 9.6 new users every second. This means that having a social media platform immediately gives you a greater chance of people seeing your business. To ensure greater visibility and conversion, you may want to go beyond organic social media strategies and utilize paid advertising avenues like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, PPC campaigns, and more.
Slam makes it easy for you to learn how to start your own social media marketing agency and set yourself up for success for decades to come. We also offer more specific resources to teach you things like how to use TikTok for small businesses.
Online Advertising
Beyond social media, you can reach your customers through online marketing. The Internet Advertising Revenue Report states that search Google advertising revenue reached $84.4 billion in 2022, and that number is forecasted to continue growing from there.
That being said, the space is crowded with individuals and organizations competing for visibility, so they can bring the most customers in. In our “How to Start an Agency” course, we have a whole module on what tools you can use to maintain operational readiness and stay organized as you grow your business over time.
Search advertising is only getting more expensive, so it’s important you have a solid strategy when it comes to using Google Ads for your business to help you cut through the noise.
Here are just a handful of ways to optimize your advertising strategy:
- Always track ad campaigns for insights
- Back your ads with solid copywriting
- Clearly define your marketing funnel
- Define your target audience & cater content to them
As far as the online advertising market goes, Google is the dominant player. Statista reports over 80% of desktop searches occurring on Google. Moreover, the search engine is projected to make up 24.6% of the digital advertising market by 2025. That said, it’s going to give you the best ROI for your efforts.
Website Content
Once you draw people in with your marketing efforts, it’s important you have valuable content for them in addition to offering your product or service. It’s your job to find a clear and organized way to share relevant content with your target audience, so you can establish yourself as a reliable resource and an expert in your industry. By optimizing your website, you can establish yourself as a thought leader and expert in your industry.
This all starts with designing a cohesive website that is capable of housing all the information you want to show potential customers. Slam can guide you through every step of the process of creating your website, including choosing the right CMS website design, implementing webflow integrations, and more. Use our website launch checklist to keep yourself on track, and build out a website that suits your style.
Once you have a functional website, you should think about what you want to share on it. This is important for ranking on search engines and gaining traction as a trustworthy business. We’ll talk a bit more in depth about how to create optimized content a little further along in this article.
Beyond the content, it’s important to put the work into getting your content in front of the right eyes. You can maximize visibility with technical SEO tools, keywords, images and videos, backlinks, and more. Slam can help by fixing SEO issues, explaining SEO terms, and teaching you how to choose keywords for SEO.
Did you know Slam gets approximately 50% of our new clients from search? In fact, there’s a decent chance you may be reading this article because it showed up on your search engine results page. That’s because we’re always going hard at SEO!
We have tons of valuable knowledge spanning many different topics, and we want to make sure it gets in front of the right eyes. Due to our hard work, we’re the first thing to come up if you search things like “how to start a PR agency.” And that means we get to help more businesses rank highly in their categories, too.
Not sure where your website stands as it is? Schedule a FREE audit with Slam!
Word of Mouth
There are countless ways to market your business these days, leaving you with unique avenues to reach your audience. That said, there’s one piece that can get lost in the fray when it comes to advertising anywhere: trust. With the intelligence level of technology and the volume of ads people are seeing every day, it’s getting harder and harder for people to believe what they see or hear directly from a business.
According to Nielsen’s Trust in Advertising Study, trust in advertising in North America and Europe is lowest by an approximately 20 percent margin. This leaves you with an extra responsibility: to prioritize forging strong relationships with customers and staying connected to them as you grow.
Generating word of mouth is an organic marketing practice at its core, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take actionable steps to yield better results. Here are some easy ways to get the most benefit from word of mouth:
- House reviews/testimonials on your website
- Incentivize your customers to leave positive reviews
- Share user generated content on social channels
- Track progress to create case studies for clients
Slam offers a wide range of tools and resources to help you through the different stages of starting, building, and maintaining your business—but you don’t have to take our word on it; check out our case studies and let our work speak for itself.
How to Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency through Strategic Partnerships
As your business grows, your customer base grows. So, you should balance this out by also scaling your partnerships. Strategic partnerships refer to your collaboration with other businesses to achieve similar goals.
These partnerships give you the flexibility you need to handle the ebb and flow of market trends and consumer demands. By having partners, you can also expand your offerings and innovate together to continue elevating both businesses.
How to Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency by Defining Your Niche
When you started your agency, you defined your business goals and offerings, essentially choosing what you bring to the table for your customers. So, why does defining your niche matter for scaling your business? Here are some reasons for why you should be defining your niche:
- Expanding your offerings
- Becoming an expert
- Creating optimized content
Expanding Your Offerings
When thinking about how to scale a digital marketing agency, you should start at the beginning. And that means thinking about your niche and evaluating where you can either refine or expand upon your offerings to better serve your customers. By building a strong brand identity with clear offerings, you can scale your business effectively.
Becoming an Expert
Defining your niche gives you the opportunity to not only offer products and services but also to become an expert in your field and position yourself as a trustworthy resource to your customers instead of just an entity trying to sell them something.
As you’re scaling your business, you can focus on positioning yourself as an expert by:
- Attending events with industry professionals
- Being a guest of relevant shows/podcasts/webinars
- Interacting directly with your audience
- Keeping up with a blog
- Sharing helpful resources
- And more!
Creating Optimized Content
Having a solid social media strategy is only a piece of the puzzle. You also have to be sure you have valuable content to share with your audience on these platforms—and at every other touchpoint, too.
Your goal already has been to demonstrate that you’re an expert in your field, so people immediately know they can trust you when they come across your name. When it comes to figuring out how to scale, marketing agency professionals should focus on staying ahead of the curve. Mostly, this means consistently engaging with industry news and trends and sharing relevant information to your audience.
Another important aspect of optimization is writing for SEO. This essentially means that you create valuable content by using keywords, key phrases, and other tactics to rank higher on the search engines and get in front of more eyes.
Slam offers SEO article templates and keyword research templates to make it easy to create content and put it in front of the right eyes. There are many ways you can optimize digital content, including:
- Domain authority
- Image/video content
- Mobile design
- On-page technical SEO
- Optimized alt text
- SEO website webflow
- And more!
You can use Slam’s technical SEO audit template to ensure you’re doing everything you can to optimize all the content for your company. We also offer SEO tools for small businesses, so you can optimize your success regardless of what level you’re on.
How to Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency and Hire Talent
A big part of growing your business is filling it with the right people to grow with it. As you learn how to scale your marketing agency, you may find your hiring needs change, too.
Finding Talent
There are many places to look for talent for your company depending on your needs. If you’re looking for independent contractors, freelancer websites like Upwork make it easy to connect with freelancers that specialize in whatever task you need done. You can also check out one of the many job boards and platforms to find both part-time and full-time employees. This includes:
- Indeed
- ZipRecruiter
Onboarding & Ongoing Training
Once you find the best people to hire, you have to set them up for success. That happens with a solid training and onboarding program. Streamlined agency onboarding helps new employees adjust and starts them off on the right foot right away.
When it comes to onboarding, it’s important that your business materials reflect your brand identity in its entirety—including any changes you make along the way. Ongoing training is also a crucial tool to utilize for your business, especially when it comes to scaling your business. It’s important that your entire team is on the same page and grows with your business, and presenting clear materials and strategies is the best way to do that.
How to Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency by Systemizing Processes
You have to strike a balance when it comes to automating processes for your business. On the one hand, automations make adjusting easy when it comes to how to scale digital marketing agencies. However, you don’t want to over-automate and let mistakes slip through the cracks or lose your “human touch.” Ultimately, systemizing processes helps you stay organized and up-to-date even as your business fluctuates.
Project Management
There are plenty of project management applications from which you can choose to support your business. At Slam, we use Notion for all our clients, saving us hundreds of hours on tasks. Our team wants to share as much of our success with our clients, which is why we offer a wide range of project management resources. This includes:
- Agency Meeting Template
- Assignment Tracker Template
- Company Wiki Template
- Content Creation Template
- Documentation Template
- Feedback Template
- Go-to-Strategy Market Template
- Meeting Notes Template
- Social Media Planner Template
- Sprint Template
- Task List Template
- Vision Board Template
- Website Template
Plus, we have a whole module on operational setup for managing your business in our “How to Start an Agency” course.
Many project management applications also feature AI software to automate processes, saving you even more time. And that brings us to our next point.
Artificial Intelligence
AI integrations are becoming the norm across the board for businesses in every industry. AI can increase efficiency in research and every-day business, making it a clear solution when it comes to how to scale a marketing agency.
While AI can simplify processes and help with the overall flow of operations, it can also lead to less interaction between a business and their customers, and this brings us back to trust. When implementing AI in your business, be sure to lead with a healthy balance between improving efficiency and maintaining human connections.
Some helpful AI applications can include:
- Chat bots
- Databases
- Machine learning operations
- Meeting assistants
- Project management software
- Scheduling tools
- And more!
Learn more about how to grow a digital marketing agency with Slam.
How to Scale Your Digital Marketing Agency and Measure Performance
Whether you’re actively scaling your business or not, measuring SEO is a must. You can learn all about digital agency reporting, including using SEO agency reporting software and more. Luckily, Slam offers helpful resources like an all-in-one marketing agency report template and SEO ROI calculator, so you don’t have to organize everything on your own.
When it comes to measuring your business’ performance, you have to pay attention to multiple avenues. This includes (but is not limited to):
- Conversion Rates: The number of conversions per ad interaction. This percentage is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of total ad interactions during a certain time period
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): A measure of how well your products/services and overall experience meets customer expectations. This can be measured through surveys, ratings, reviews, awards, and more.
- Functional KPIs: Measures the performance of specific functions or departments within an organization. These can be either qualitative or quantitative.
- Net Profit Margin: Measures how much net income is generated as a percentage of revenue.
- Online Advertising Efforts: The use of digital platforms to deliver targeted messages to a specific audience.
- Sales Cycle: The journey of turning a lead into a customer. You should define clear stages in your sales cycle depending on the nature of your business.
- Social Media Traffic: The amount of people seeing, sharing, or interacting with content on your social media channels.
- Website Traffic/Clicks: The amount of people coming to your website and interacting with elements on the web pages.
We know it sounds like a lot, but you can easily stay on top of the best SEO practices with Slam!
How to Scale Your Marketing Agency with Slam Tools
It’s not enough to know simply how to start an agency. With Slam Media on your side, you have access to top-quality resources to get your business up and running and to know how to scale an agency. That way, you can grow with your success without the speed bumps.
And if it’s one thing Slam knows about, it’s how to scale a digital marketing agency! Our founder and CEO, Silvia, is known for starting one of the largest startup publications in the world and growing it to 250,000 readers in three months. She also started and grew Slam Media Lab into a $2M business within just three years! Now, Slam goes above and beyond to help other businesses grow and succeed.
If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, get in touch with Slam Media Lab, and we can discuss your wants and needs for your business. There are countless responsibilities to keep track of when it comes to being a business owner, and our job is to take some of the heavy lifting off your shoulders!
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