How To Market and Grow Your Agency In 2024: The Definitive Roadmap

Dec 5

My goal for this post is that it will be the only post you need in order to make a plan to grow your agency in 2024.

As the CEO of The Campfire Circle, an agency that grows agencies, I’ve been growing agencies for over a decade and have a ton of insights to share. This is not a regurgitation of popular agency growth strategies, this post covers every single strategy that I implement to grow agencies from my actual experience.

Want 2024 to be the best year yet for your agency? Then let’s explore the following strategies to grow your agency in the upcoming year. I’m adding an in-depth guide for each of the strategies so that you can thoroughly understand how they will grow your agency.

Here is my brain dump of all of the successful ways to grow your agency. I hope it helps!

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are my most popular service because they generate a ton of qualified leads. With cold outreach not working like it used to, lead magnets generate more organic leads.

Create something of value like an industry report, eBook, or webinar and house it on a landing page with a lead capture form. Once you capture the information of your target audience, you can nurture them strategically and turn them into a client for your agency.

Lead magnets also establish thought leadership and credibility. Use your lead magnet for all of your lead gen efforts by creating one per quarter and promoting it for 3 months.

Publish Your Own Data

Jumping from lead magnets, publishing your own data makes for a great lead magnet among other things.

Use a third party like PollFish to survey 300 members of your target audience to gather you own data. Brands love data about their industries or services they are considering so data is the easiest thing to promote so you’ll get a lot of leverage and thought leadership from it.

Create a comprehensive report with the data you gather and of course, use it as a lead magnet but there are other ways to leverage it to. You can create an email series about the data you aggregated, a series of social posts, leverage guest posting, and more.

Strategic Lead Nurturing

In my experience, a lot of agencies excel at lead gen but not so much lead nurturing. It’s not enough to put out something like a lead magnet and expect your audience to contact you on their own. That’s why you need to nurture all the leads you generate.

Segment your leads so that you can tailor your messaging to resonate with each list. You can segment by things like revenue, interests, location, industry, and more.

And always lead with thought leadership. Your nurturing emails should offer something of value like your weekly blog posts or industry insights. While I don’t advocate for a sales pitch in the nurturing phase, I do advocate that you put a CTA at the end of each email to book a call with your agency.

Embrace a Niche

With 79% of brands reporting that they are willing to pay more for an agency with expertise in their industry as opposed to a full-service, broad agency, it’s crystal clear that brands want agencies with a niche.

I get that it is scary to not cast a wide net for all industries but this could be harming your business. Choosing a niche or two allows you to focus on specific industries and establish yourself as a thought leader in those industries, increasing your client base.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership gets you out there and conveys expertise and expertise lands clients.

Choose a niche you want to showcase your expertise in and get yourself out there through things like writing for high-profile publications, having an active social media presence, speaking at online and offline events, running a blog for your agency, getting featured in publications, and having a strong email marketing presence.

Add a New Service

With digital marketing constantly changing, keeping up with the trends often includes adding new services that your agency offers.

Be strategic about the new service you implement and create a whole roll-out campaign to get the word out there about your new service.

Lately I’ve seen agencies add services like TikTok ads, influencer marketing, AI-generated content, and podcast marketing.

Survey your current audience on which services they would like to see from your agency so that you move forward with actual insights.

Social Proof

Social proof gives brands the third-party endorsements that they crave. Brands want to see how a brand like them got value out of your agency.

Social proof needs to be both earned and leveraged. To earn it, contact your happiest clients and ask them for social shoutouts, testimonials and case studies. Incentivize them if you have to.

Leveraging social proof is crucial because it’s so effective in landing new business. Feature it on your website, on social media, in emails, and in blog posts.

Guest Post On High-Profile Publications

Guest posting gives you access to an audience the publisher has already curated.

Your posts should be thought leadership and casually mention your agency or a lead magnet and of course link to that.

If you’re not a strong writer, there are plenty of ghost authors you can find on platforms like UpWork.

Some publications charge a fee while others just care about good writing. So create a portfolio like mine and it will dramatically increase the amount of publications that will let you post.

Create Better Proposals

All agencies have lost a potential client because they didn’t create the best proposal and were beaten by their competition.

Don’t go overboard and write a novel but create slides with sleek graphics, display past success, dive into your strategies to grow their brand, identify fair pricing, and personalize your proposals and showcase how much you understand your potential client’s brands.

Implement a Referral Program

Referral programs are the number one way that agencies land new clients. It makes sense if you think about it, a current client is probably well connected to other decision makers in their industries. If they can say they had a great experience with your agency, this recommendation holds a lot of weight.

To maximize the effectiveness of your referral program, it’s important to note that sometimes clients need an incentive to send referrals your way. And with theses leads converting so high, it’s well worth the money to offer incentives. What I do is give a $100 gift card to any referral that books a call with me and $250 if they become a client.

Join Directories

Brands often consult agency directories when choosing their agency. There are a ton that you can submit your agency’s information to and get listed.

Getting listed isn’t enough, though. You need clients to leave reviews of your agency in those directories. Just like with a referral program, a small gift card can go a long way and enhance the presence you have in directories.

Improve Your Client Retention Efforts

With it being more cost-effective to retain a client than landing a new one, it’s time to revisit your client retention strategy.

Keep a pulse on all of your client relationships with things like surveys and check-in meetings. Identify their further needs and how you can help.

Make clients feel valued with exclusive perks.

Final Thoughts: An Agency for Agencies

I’m sure a few of these ways to grow your agency resonate with you. It’s also possible that you’re a little overwhelmed by the time it takes to implement these growth strategies. That’s where I come in.

As the CEO of The Campfire Circle, an agency that grows agencies, I can implement these strategies for you at a reasonable fee. I find agency owners spend a lot of time doing fantastic client work but often don’t have the time to grow their own agencies.

Having scaled agencies for over a decade and constantly publishing in high-profile publications, I have a lot of insights and connections that would be extremely valuable for you and if you want to explore working together, you can contact me here.