Are you a new Social Media Marketing Agency (SMMA) struggling with how to find SMMA clients? Don’t worry! Just like with any agency in the industry, attracting new clients is expected to be challenging.
Over the years, the demand for skilled social media experts has skyrocketed, especially with businesses recognizing the power of platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to reach clients. So, how do you stand out among other SMMAs and convince potential clients to work with you?
As you continue reading, we’ll share with you ten simple but comprehensive strategies you can use to find more clients for your agency.
How to Get Social Media Clients – 10 Simple Strategies
Whether you’re launching a new social media marketing agency or wanting to grow your business, having a solid roster of clients should be at the top of your goals.
Below are ten simple agency strategies you can follow to help you find new (and more) SMMA clients:
1. Build a Strong Brand: Develop a unique brand identity that sets you apart and uses it to communicate trust, expertise, and professionalism to your clients. One way to do this is to create a professional website and showcase your services and portfolio.
2. Create an excellent Social Media Presence: Use social media platforms (e.i. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook) to connect with potential clients where you can showcase your work to educate and engage your target audience.
3. Use Content Marketing to Offer High-value Content: Employ content marketing to position your SMMA as an expert in the industry. You can create high-quality content – blog posts, infographics, videos — to showcase how to address your client’s pain points and challenges.
4. Use your Social Advertising Expertise: When reaching out to leads, use a strong marketing strategy with advertisements across different social media platforms. It will drive potential customers to your website or sales funnel, hoping to become your client.
5. Create a Social Media Case Study: Build a case study and share it directly with your prospects during a pitch sale to explain how you developed a successful SMM strategy. Creating one can help clients understand how much you can accomplish as their SMMA.
6. Keep up to date with Market Trends: You must stay abreast of the latest market trends and developments in social media marketing. Being well-informed about these will demonstrate your commitment to providing cutting-edge service and help make your agency the better choice among other businesses.
7. Reach out to different businesses: Being proactive with approaching companies across various industries increases your chance of finding a client needing SMM services. We suggest tailoring your pitches to address their challenges and show you expertise in the industry.
8. Utilize Online Communication Channels: Communication channels like email and DM’s can help you get more SMMA clients. For example, you can do cold email outreach and pitch an irresistible offer to your prospect list.
9. Leverage Referrals: Encourage every client you work with to refer your services to other businesses. You can establish a referral program to incentivize clients who create testimonials or recommend you. Remember, word-of-mouth recommendations can go a long way, even in this modern world!
10. Offer Prospects for a Free Trial: When starting an agency, it will be a good practice and marketing strategy to provide a free trial opportunity for potential clients. Offering a free trial will allow them to experience the value of your service for a limited time, increasing the likelihood of conversion to making them long-term clients.
The Importance of Nurturing SMMA Clients
Beyond the acquisition phase, maintaining a good relationship with your SMMA clients is crucial to sustaining the success of your business.
Long-term partnerships are forged through value delivery and an adaptive approach to evolving client needs. As a matter of fact, a happy client is not just likely to become a repeat customer but will also be a bridge to reach new leads.
That being said, if you nurture good relationships with your new or existing clients through transparent communication and good results, they will show loyalty and will reduce the likelihood of client turnover.
In essence, the significance of nurturing SMMA clients is a strategic investment for your agency and helps shape the agency’s trajectory in the competitive SMMA industry.
Common Challenges and Solutions in Working with Clients
The client-agency relationship can be challenging to navigate and present unique challenges. When learning how to find clients for SMMA, understanding and addressing such challenges is essential to foster a successful partnership.
Below are some common challenges in working with clients and the proposed solutions to mitigate these issues.
Managing Expectations of Clients
When it comes to client-agency collaboration, aligning expectations can pose a challenge. Social media marketing isn’t just about posting content and interacting with the audience; however, this is what most businesses think of.
Instead, collaboration is a two-way work. When closing a deal with a client, you should discuss the coverage of your service and set realistic expectations.
Thus, the best solution to manage client expectations is establishing clear objectives from the outset and outlining achievable milestones throughout the campaign.
Communication Gaps
Just like in any organization, you and your clients need to establish an open line of communication to lessen misunderstandings and any form of frustration.
Ensure that regular updates are provided during the campaign and that clients are encouraged to give their feedback so you can have a shared understanding of progress and project goals.
You can also set up regular meetings (when convenient) or share reports through communication channels whenever necessary.
Client Budget Constraints
Often, budget limitations pose a challenge for clients who want to work with SMMAs. To solve this, first create a transparent line of communication about financial constraints early on, allowing you to tailor SMM strategies within the range of the client’s budget.
Discuss it with your client and share that even with cost-effective initiatives, your agency can ensure that they meet investment yield optimal results. Remember, a well-informed client is more likely to appreciate the value of the services, even within budget constraints.
Evolving Goals
With the fast-growing social media industry, market trends tend to change fast, and it’s no surprise that client’s goals will also evolve.
As clients’ goals evolve, maintaining alignment with strategies becomes challenging. To keep up with this, you can regularly assess and adapt strategies and align them with the client’s objective.
Demonstrate your flexibility as a digital marketer and show them you can efficiently respond to changing needs.
Delays in Approval of Content
Delays in content approval can hinder campaign timelines and affect results. In fact, it is one of the top reasons why most SMMA’s miss their deadlines.
We suggest you implement a streamlined content approval process to ensure timely client feedback.
How to Scale and Expand Your SMMA Client Base
Starting a social media marketing agency may look easy, but scaling and expanding is the trick. The industry has countless challenges and competition, so you need help garner more clients.
That being said, you must have it all planned out well before starting anything. Below, we’ll share ways to help you scale and expand your SMMA client base.
Strategies for scaling an SMMA business
Creating strategies for scaling your SMMA business should be the first on your list. Some fool-proof techniques you can use are:
- Refine your Brand: Begin by analyzing your market goals before working on scaling your business. It will be the first step to refining your brand. Create a USP, logo, slogans, and other visual elements that will help make your agency easily remembered by clients.
- Optimize Systems and Processes: To optimize systems and processes in your agency, you should have the right tools and software to help streamline tasks. Invest in project management, SEO, SMM software, and tools like Buffer, Clickup, Airtable, and more.
- Invest in training and workshops: When expanding your client base, you should invest in training and workshops to help your staff upskill. Check out courses where experts can help you learn more about expanding your SMM Agency.
Leverage testimonials and referrals
We cannot stress enough that satisfied clients are the most influential advocates for your agency. It helps boost your credibility, increasing the chance of gaining more clients.
After working on a campaign with you, encourage them to provide testimonials, sharing their experience. There are several ways to get client testimonials without taking too much time. You can also send them survey forms or ask for a quick client call.
Additionally, implementing a referral program can further help clients recommend your SMMA to other business owners.
Collaborate with strategic partners or agencies
One way to collaborate with other agencies is through working with bloggers or related social media marketers. They can help establish your authority in the media. For example, guest blogging on a known blogger’s site can help build high-quality backlinks to your professional website.
So, don’t hesitate to contact other agencies, marketers, and bloggers who can help widen your network.
Utilize digital marketing techniques to increase visibility
As a social media marketing agency, your marketing efforts can raise brand awareness. However, most of the time, SMMAs must pay more attention to their marketing.
That being said, digital marketing should be one of your best tools to help expand the agency’s reach. So how do you do it?
It’s already a given that your social media platforms should look professional and demonstrate how you work with SMM. A better technique we suggest you try is to invest in advertising, strengthening backlinks, and search engine optimization (SEO).
Having an SEO strategy in place is crucial to increasing online visibility. Learn the basics of keyword research and optimization. Don’t forget about Off-Site SEO, which includes backlink strategies or creating a Google My Business listing.
With the right use of SEO, you can boost valuable content and make sure they reach your target audience.
How to Manage Multiple Social Media Clients
We get it. It can be overwhelming for you to manage multiple social media clients since you have to be mindful of a myriad of things.
However, handling more than one client is the reality of being in the business. It should be your goal! Whether you’re a start-up or a growing company, you’ll need to learn to manage more than one client at a time.
Here are some tips to help you:
- Use Project Management Tools: There are a lot of available project management tools for you to use, such as Trello, Clickup, Airtable, and more. Use these to schedule posts, assign tasks, and monitor productivity.
- Create a Content Calendar: A well-planned and organized content calendar in advance will help maintain a consistent posting schedule, regardless of multiple clients
- Understand Each Client’s Audience: Before starting the campaign, you should know how to approach each content strategy to help establish clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each client.
- Train agency employees: Social Media Marketing employees should be equipped with the proper knowledge to handle several clients. At Prospecting on Demand, you can check a few of our programs that can help you learn more about the industry.
Tools and Resources for Managing SMMA Clients
Imagine handling multiple clients for your Social Media Marketing Agency, yet you don’t have great tools to keep everything organized. Well, this should not be the case.
If you want to expand your SMMA and find more clients, you should have access to great resources. That’s how you can ensure project success to customers and fast-track your path to growing your business.
We’ve put together a list of a few SMMA tools and resources you can use to manage your clients:
- Buffer: A tool for integrating, reporting, and managing multiple social media accounts. It lets you easily create and schedule multiple posts and track post performance.
- Hootsuite: Software for content creation that features functionalities expected from a social media manager.
- Agorapulse: Agorapulse is an excellent option for start-up agencies. It offers a free version that you can use to connect three social profiles and schedule up to 10 social media posts in advance.
- ClickUp: An all-in-one project management and team collaboration tool.
- Canva: This free design app lets you create all kinds of graphics – Facebook cover images, Instagram stories, Publication Materials, and more. It’s also easy to use; even beginners can create their own designs.
All those mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of available SMM tools and resources out there for you to try. You can always use free trials to test the waters and, later on, subscribe to paid tools when you find something that best fits your needs.
Conclusion
Providing social media marketing services is easy, but getting clients can take time and effort. However, having a SMMA is worth it. It involves a strategic blend of networking, showcasing expertise, and effective communication.
We have shared more than enough tips in this article, which you can use to help find more SMMA clients. Remember to be proactive and experiment with various methods to expand your client base.
So, if you want to expand your network and land higher-paying clients, don’t hesitate to contact Prospect on Demand. We offer curated, industry-leading courses and programs to help you reach an MRR of 7-figure MRR by:
- Helping you charge 3.4x more
- Retaining clients 5.5x longer than the industry average.