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Video transcript:
Here’s why big agencies and smaller solopreneur micro agencies are both making mistakes that absolutely destroy their profits and make it hard to get new clients. The good news is that all these mistakes are really easy to solve if you know how. So let me walk you through the five most dangerous mistakes I see marketing agencies make over and over.
Starting off with clumsy positioning, offering too many different kinds of services and trying to appeal to too many different kinds of clients, rather than being clear and specific on who you help, how you help them, and your unique value proposition.
When you try to appeal to everyone, you wind up appealing to no one, because when you go broad and try to appeal to everyone, well you're forced to water down your message.
It's counterintuitive how the secret to making more money and getting more and better clients is actually by doing less, and offering less services to a smaller portion of the market. But that's exactly how it works, and all you need to build a seven-figure agency is one kind of service delivered to one kind of client. So here's how to find your one kind of client.
The process of carving up a target market into groups of potential clients with similar needs and behaviors called segmentation comes in two basic flavors. Horizontal segmentation, or selling a service to a wide variety of consumers, for example only offering Google ads but doing it for a bunch of different kinds of businesses, and vertical segmentation, which focuses more on serving a specific kind of consumer that allows you to be more open with what services you use to accomplish that goal.
An example here would be doing lead generation for a roofing company, but you could do it using Facebook ads, Google ads, social media marketing or SEO, or whatever else would work best for your clients.
Neither approach is better, and depending on your market size, you can usually combine them both by for example doing Facebook ads, or SEO for local service-based businesses, or email marketing, or any other combination that you can think of, which allows you to become even more profitable and even more in demand.
Once you have a clear idea of who your customer is, you can tailor the way that you communicate your value to them, which makes it hard for them to not want to work with you. I know it sounds way too good to be true, but all you need to do is to create an offer that's perfectly tailored to their needs, or in other words, your perfect profitable offer.
Now, here's the high-level overview of the framework so you can start to use it now in order to make deciding on what services to offer and which ones you can safely let go of. First, list out all of your business's current offers, and everything you could or may want to do, for example, Facebook ads, or SEO, or content marketing, or email. Then, you're going to want to rank them on a scale from one to five on the following criteria, with five being most enjoyable and one being least.
First, net profit. How much do you make? After all, if you're not making any money, then you're not going to be able to stay in business for very long. Next, fun and enjoyment.
How much do you enjoy doing this? In my experience, the agencies that grow the biggest and the fastest are all passionate about what they do, so make sure that you're actually enjoying the process.
Then, ease of delivery, or in other words, how easy is it to fulfill or deliver? Are you able to pack it up and send it off, or does this service require constant client feedback, and revisions, and meetings about the progress?
Next, ease of sale. How easy is it to explain and sell? Are you offering something that most businesses understand, like online advertising, social media marketing, or SEO? Or are you trying to forge a new path like AI automations, which requires educating clients on what you do, why they should care, and how it's going to help them? All things that are going to make your life a whole lot more complicated.
Then, sustainability. How long could you do this for? In other words, is there a technology like ChatGPT that threatens the sustainability of the service, or is it something that you enjoy, you're good at, and you could see being valuable for years to come?
Then, scalability. How big could this grow? Again, in my experience, there are almost no markets, client segments, or industries out there that can't at least grow to a seven or multi-seven figure agency.But, if your goal is a billion dollar empire, then more research is going to be required.
And lastly, automate. How easy would it be to automate or outsource this? Then, just add up your score, and the biggest number wins, providing you with a clear area to focus on first.
Now, this next mistake is a big one, Are you still using an at gmail.com email account for your agency? Do you not have a proper website with a custom domain name and URL that reflects your agency's name? Or are you still sending out invoices scribbled on sticky notes? If so, you're losing a ton of money, and the cost that you think you're saving by not upgrading your tools is costing you way more in lost clients, and lost referrals, and lost time.
Now, when it comes to marketing tools, and resources, and software, there are a ton of choices available. Some are good, some are bad, and some are just downright ugly.
I know, because after over 10 years in this game, I've used pretty much all of them. That's why my suggestion here is actually going to be pretty simple and pretty straightforward, which is to check out a piece of software called High Level, which is what I use in my business and with all of my clients.
Now, this video is not sponsored, but you can visit the first link down in the description below, which is going to allow you to sign up for an extended free trial and all my marketing for free, as well as a completely free strategy session with the High Level team, where they'll walk you through exactly how to use and set up the software so it's perfectly customized to you and your needs.
Next, when it comes to putting your best foot forward, and making a good impression with your agency, you don't need a fancy logo, or a fancy website, or fancy branding of any kind. But you do need a clean, and clear, and simple way to show that you're a professional, and that you actually know what you're doing. So whether you're just starting out, or you're looking to upgrade or rebrand your agency, this is going to help.
First, for a logo, just keep things simple, and use a type-based logo. Find a font that you like, and then just write out your agency name using that font. Now, for your brand colors, just pick any of these that you like from this list of trending color palettes on coolors.co.
Next, for a high quality headshot to use on your website, or through social media, in order to make yourself look more professional and more dramatic, go to a website called PhotoRoom. I think it's 10 bucks a month for the Pro version, but you can just use it for the month, get the photos that you need, and then cancel after that.
This next mistake could undo all of the hard work that you've just done, and maybe even make it so you regret doing this whole agency thing in the first place. You see, there's a tendency among new agency owners, marketing freelancers and contractors, especially when transitioning out of the corporate world, to want to charge an hourly rate. Don't do that.
Your job as an agency is to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to get your client's results in the fastest and most efficient way possible. When you charge hourly, you're essentially punishing yourself for working fast, or you're punishing your clients for working slow.
Not to mention, when you trade your time for money, you're essentially just creating a job for yourself, not building a business, which means you're going to quickly cap out at how much you can earn, or how big you can scale, as there are only so many hours in the day.
But charging hourly isn't the only bad agency mistake you can make when it comes to pricing, as underpricing your services can do just as much damage, maybe even more. Now, when you're first getting started, I have no problem advising you to work for cheap, or even free in regards to getting a case study, or a testimonial, or even a referral.
But this is certainly no way to grow an agency, certainly not long-term, which is why you need to structure your offers, your services, and your packages in a way that allows you to eventually automate and delegate as much as possible. And I'll show you exactly how to do this in the next section.
Automating and delegating things means that you can essentially remove yourself from much of the process, freeing up valuable time for you to focus on other, possibly even more important things, like finding new clients, and continuing to ensure that they're getting the best results possible. But there's another level to this as well, which is to productize your services, which essentially allows you to sell to a hundred times more people, even at a lower price point. For example, I talked about high level earlier when I was going over the marketing software that I use personally, and with all of the clients I work with.
But one of the best parts of this, especially when it comes to productizing your service, is something called SaaS mode. Now, like I said before, this video is not sponsored, but you can again, visit the down below in order to check this out for yourself, as well as get a whole bunch of other goodies like courses and a call and so on.
Okay, next mistake is trying to do it all and be it all, which usually ends up in you losing it all.
Now, I've got an exercise for you that I guarantee will change how you run your business and may even change your life as well. Here's how it works.
Over the next three working days, track your time in 30 minute increments and write down every single thing that you do from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. Then once you have a list of all the things you do, look at each item and decide if it's something you're good at and enjoy doing, something you're good at but don't enjoy doing, something you're not that good at but enjoy doing anyway.
And lastly, something you're not good at and don't enjoy doing. Then take all the things you're not good at and don't enjoy doing and get help with those immediately like today. Then once you've cleared those off your plate, you can also start to get help with things that you enjoy but aren't that good at, as well as things you are good at but don't really enjoy doing.
Now depending on what stage your agency is at, this could mean hiring a freelancer or getting a contractor or some kind of fractional support to help out even just a few hours a week. It could also mean using software and artificial intelligence and automation technologies like ChatGPT. Or it could mean hiring a virtual assistant to simply get some of the administrative stuff off your plate.
The next agency mistake is keeping toxic clients and not firing red flag disaster nightmare clients. Continuing to work with bad clients who chew up 80% of your time and offer you nothing but headaches and complaints and frustrations, is one of the fastest ways to destroy your agency and destroy your motivation and destroy your will to get out of bed in the morning.
I used to have email phobia where I was literally afraid to check my email first thing in the morning out of fear of what angry or hurtful or resentful email might be in there from a client that I probably shouldn't have taken on in the first place.
Fortunately those days are now long gone as over the years I've learned a system to help avoid those kind of clients like the plague and I've worked out a system to help work with and attract only the best kinds of people. So here's how to do it.
Now obviously the best place to start is by avoiding taking on bad clients in the first place, which you can do by being crystal clear about who you serve, how you serve them, and what they can expect along the way.
You can also frame the relationship in the right way right from the beginning by requesting that potential clients fill out an application form and taking the time to interview them prior to taking them on as clients.
But if somehow a bad egg slips through and they sometimes do, then here's what to do next. First you're going to want to make a regular practice of listing out and ranking all of your clients from best to worst.
You can create a couple different versions of this if you like. One for profitability and one for enjoyment that you get from working with them, but ideally this is going to be some combination of both of those things together. Then use the top 20% your absolute best clients and the ones that you'd love to get more of in order to create an ideal customer avatar profile.
In other words what are these top 20% of clients all have in common? Are they mostly men? Mostly women? Mostly centered around a certain industry or market? Do they all have a similar pain or problem that you're helping them with?
The better you're able to drill down on this the better you're going to be able to create marketing and messages to attract more clients just like them.
Then take a look at your bottom 10% of clients and do what you can to start getting rid of them either by referring them to someone else or firing them outright. That said, don't just call them up one day and tell them they're fired for no reason.
There is a right way to do this that'll help preserve your reputation by framing your decision as what's best for them. Now talking to them in person or over the phone is obviously best, but if you need to an email can work.
The key here is to let them know how much you've enjoyed working with them up until now and then informing them that you're taking your agency in a different direction and feel that you're no longer the best fit to serve them and their needs.
You can provide them with a referral to another agency or another provider if you like and make sure that you let them know that you're going to be doing everything in your power to continue getting them the best results possible until your final day together.
That’s all for now, thanks for watching and I will see in the next video.