When you tell people you own a social media agency, their first response is “You must love working for yourself, flexible timings and all, right?” And you cannot help but roll your eyes. Thousands of worries lie beneath all the fun and glam of having an agency. One such major question that is keeping you up at night is “How to scale your social media marketing agency?”
And your concerns are valid. Although we can’t promise that this will be an easy process, we are down to break down the steps for you. This way you at least have a starting point, right?
So, let’s get down to business!
What does Scaling your Agency mean?
Scaling the agency is a term that gets thrown around a lot but what does it mean and does it apply to you? Let’s see!
Say, you have started a small social media marketing agency and you get a consistent flow of leads. You are profitable and stretched to the capacity, so much so that you have to turn away perfectly good prospects just because you can’t give them the same quality of service.
If this sounds like your agency? Then you are in desperate need of scaling, which is nothing but the ability to take on more work and not compromise the quality of your services. This can be anything from using tech to automate your mundane work or hiring more manpower to take on the extra work. This looks different for each business, so if you want to scale, you have to check internally to see what you need.
If you do not scale at the right time, you might:
- Lose new opportunities aka throw away new business and money
- You risk getting burnt out
- You do everything on your own, just like when you stated thus pushing yourself beyond limit.
So how to scale your social media marketing agency without losing out? Let us tell you how!
How to Scale Your Social Media Marketing Agency? 5-Step Approach
Scaling an agency is not an easy task. But with the right strategy, you can make your life easier and know where to start. If you don’t know what strategy to follow, copy this and customize it to your agency.
1. What is a niche and Why does it matter?
Focusing on everyone means you are not getting anyone. It is as simple as that.
Let us elaborate. When you have clients both from the law and the fashion industry, you need personnel with two different sets of industry knowledge. For example, your content writer who usually writes law-related social media posts will not be able to churn good quality content for some other niche.
When this happens, the quality of work is impacted. Similarly, when your agency handles multiple niches, a customer might feel skeptical if you have relevant experience in their industry.
To weed out all these issues from the root, define your niche (ie specific industries that you work with eg: Retail, Tech, and so on) and stick with it. And once you have that down, delve deep and become an expert in that particular niche.
2. Streamlining Processes is Vital
In this modern age, social media agencies are rising in large numbers to help businesses, which means competition is tough.
On the flip side, every tool that you need to make your agency is also present in the market and all you have to do is look.
The best way to combat rising competition is by first perfecting your business from the inside out. You can have any mundane, boring routine tasks that take up a lot of your team’s time automated. Do bills need to be generated at the end of the month? Boom, a tool can take care of that for you!
Do social media posts have to be scheduled and sent out at the right time? Get a tool to automate content creation for you!
Free up your time so you can focus on things that actually matter and make you money.
3. Tech meets Talent
If Tech alone could do a great job, then AI would have run a lot of us out of jobs. But fortunately for us, tech needs the right talent to make the business prosperous.
So when it comes to manpower, choose the best of the best. And that is hard, so how can you accomplish that? Here’s how:
- When hiring, do not just stick to job boards, instead speak to everyone and ask for references. This includes everyone in your circle, your employees, and previous contacts. Put the good word in everywhere, so you can get good candidates who people are willing to put in a good word for.
- Internships are a great way to see a candidate in action. But be strategic about it, so you do not get accused of exploiting them. Check their problem-solving, leadership, and teamwork skills on top of hard skills.
- Have a rock-solid onboarding process, with assessments to get a peek into their hard skills, and an interview to understand their personality and soft skills. This process can be customized based on what you are looking for from that particular candidate.
4. Make A Product
When you sell a service that is customizable for all your clients, you will have to work with each of them exclusively to figure out how to design a solution that fits them. As a result, you are spending hours of your team’s billable time on building a solution and getting paid.
While this is how most businesses work, there is another easier way to make money. And when you incorporate this into your agency strategy, you will keep making money without spending too much time.
And that is creating a product. When you create a product that your potential clients can download and implement on their own and start generating results, you start making money without actively putting effort into it all the time.
That means more capital for you to scale your business.
5. Track Performance
Set clear, actionable goals when you start thinking about scaling your agency. These goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) and when you identify said goals, also identify the relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you need to track and monitor.
Once you have the goals set in stone, now it is time to start working towards them. Formulate a strategy that will help you achieve the said goal. These strategies should be well-built out with the exact steps that you are planning on taking.
Once implemented, keep on checking the metrics from time to time and see if you have progressed. If growth seems to be stunted, then it is high time you reevaluate your strategies.
And finally, be patient. After all, Rome was not built in a day.
Challenges in Scaling an Agency and How to Overcome it?
Let’s face it. When scaling an agency you do not just deal with the internal concerns, there are many external factors involving your success as well. Sometimes, the economy might not be in vibrant condition and corporations might be curbing their marketing budget. In such cases, your agency might have some trouble convincing clients to pay good fees for your services.
There are multitudes of challenges such as this which you might need to face. This might not be a comprehensive list but we are listing some common concerns that you can anticipate and prepare for.
1. Consistent Leads
Having a steady lead gen process can be sometimes hard for an agency owner. Until now you had to look for clients to support only you. But now that your business expanded, you have to find more customers to sustain your agency.
So how do we solve it? Do not just depend on your cold mailing techniques to keep you afloat. This is not scalable and is frankly tedious. Build a robust brand for your business, so that your social media and content can speak for themselves and act as a lead generation machine.
65% of marketers find social media marketing as a reliable source of lead generation. So, it is worth giving a shot.
In addition, you can build strategic relationships with other agency owners and offer them help when they are in a bind.
2. Managing all Fronts
Managing multiple factors at once is hard and founder fatigue is a real phenomenon. Until now, you had to manage only yourself and yourself to get quality work out the door fast. But now, you have subordinates, tools to automate your work, and pipelines to maintain on top of building client relationships.
Phew, that does sound like a lot.
3. Resource Allocation
Striking balance in resource allocation is another big headache. As an agency owner, you will be stretched to the limit and if you do not get people to pull their own weight then you will be in big trouble.
For example, when you want to market your social media marketing agency, you will have a dedicated person for that. If they do not stay on top of their schedule, you might have to step in and take up the extra load.
So, how do you get around this?
There are many resource management tools out there that you can consider to help you with this, everything from free to paid. You can opt for one with features that match your requirements and get it set up. To solve this issue, the bottom line is to plan your projects and meticulously track resource utilization so that your team is working efficiently.
Final Thoughts
When scaling an agency, think about what your business requires and optimize it from there because one thing that works for an agency might not work best for your business.
Actively analyze your agency and figure out areas where you can do better. Then figure out if you need manpower to solve it easily or if tools can get you a quick fix. Also make sure this solution falls into your budget, which is most important after all.
For example, you might want to create and schedule all your social media posts from one platform. This way you can save time and effort and also be able to post consistently, which is a great use of resources.
Once you weigh the pros and cons of both sides and figure out a solution, employ that systematically and keep measuring results. If your solution is working perfectly then great or else, it is time to rinse and repeat.
When you tackle one issue at a time and optimize your business consistently, you are bound to scale. And what is better, you will be able to scale organically and maintain that growth efficiently.
Hope this answers the question of how to scale your social media marketing agency. If yes, then check out our blog for more informative content.
FAQs
Scaling a social media agency is nothing but increasing your capacity either with technology, manpower, or a combination of both. This way you will be able to take up more projects, make more money, and become a bigger enterprise.
It is high time to scale your agency in the event of the following factors:
1. Your business is profitable
2. You get a steady stream of leads and have to turn away business because you do not have bandwidth
3. You have the funds to initiate scaling your agency
4. You have a retainer client base and get consistent income
Scaling a business is often personal because each business is different and has its own set of requirements. Your agency might require the help of some specialists or you simply need someone to take some things off your plate. In such cases, hiring a team member can be a good idea but be wise about it and hire strategically.
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