Easy Ways To Get More Clients For Your Agency!

This module, we're going to be talking about how to promote your agency because the reality is many agencies spend most of their time promoting their clients instead. If that sounds like you, you need to consider a few things. So, for example, some agencies like Blu-ray have a dedicated marketing person that handles their own marketing needs in-house. If this is not you or you do not have the means to do this and by means I mean time, patience, money, this course will help you. The most common complaint I hear from many experts is it feels a bit uncomfortable or gross to promote yourself. If that sounds like you, I have something to tell you. People do not think about you half as much as you think they do. So you need to make sure that you communicate adequately. And when you communicate adequately about what you do and for whom you do it, you have better chances of reaching good clients that are great fit

for you. It could also be a case of you used to do something but you no longer offer the service. You offer something new instead. Please take the time to update people because if you do not, they will keep sending you clients that are not a fit for you or they may want to be your client and they are no longer a fit for you. Here's an additional tip. If you are making posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, any other social media that go viral among other SEO experts, you are doing this promotion thing. maybe a bit wrong unless they are your clients because at the end of the day you are not here to impress your peers. You are here to get clients. If you are creating, growing or scaling an agency, you really need to communicate on what you want to be doing, not necessarily what you

are currently doing. If this is a service that you are retiring, you need to make sure that people's perceptions align with where you want to go. So concrete example, when I went into training, I had been doing training for quite a bit throughout different agencies. But saying that I am a consultant and trainer communicated clearly. I offer trainings to a lot of people. and of course the contracts followed. So make sure you communicate adequately as to what your services are. But when we say what your services are, we mean the ones that you actually want to sell, not the ones that you're willing to put up with. And now that I have covered this, we need to talk about another very important element. It's called the Prattful effect. It's a cognitive bias meaning that humans have a tendency to think certain ways and as marketers we lean into them. We

have biases. The prful effect means that people do not seek out perfection. Forget perfection. People want relatable. So do not hesitate to get weird. And we agree there's different types of weird. You need to find your own. What I mean by this is people want relatable companies, brands, and experts to do business with. So, in my case, it's mainly the dog. People love my sausage dog. But enough about me. I need to tell you about Billy Gina. Billy Gina is an agency veteran that launched her own consultancy. And one of the things that sets her apart is you can quickly notice it. She has a vibrant blue green hair. It's rather unique. And when you go on her website, Uptake Agency feels exactly like Billy Gina because she made a bold choice. Her color

scheme looks exactly like her hair. So when you go on there, you know it's her. Another thing that sets her apart is her love of Tik Tok. Not everybody likes that social media, but she knows how to get the best of it in terms of SEO. So, keep in mind, you need to find your own little weird zone and own it. If you think I'm the only one going for the weird little dog, you're wrong. Many other agencies also have furry friends that they put front and center. It's just that mine has the chief dog officer about page. So, you may know this or you may not, but there is an established hot sauce tech worker connection going on. The Prattful effect is amazing for this. So, if you like hot sauce, you have a common point with quite a few people that work in tech. But it goes beyond that. Here's why. Everything that matters happens in the DMs. So if you're present on social media,

you will get private messages inquiring about your services and you know asking a few preliminary questions before any lead generation happens. So for me I got to discuss the merits of salami, international salami. We had a congregation. Austria was represented, Hungary was represented. many many countries were. At 2:00 a.m. on Twitter and after passionately discussing the merits of Hungarian salami, I got a DM from one of the people I was talking to. And the person went, "Oh, I saw in your bio that you offered SEO and PPC services." And I said, "Yes." And they were like, "Oh, oh, we don't like that stuff. I'm supposed to be in charge of it, but I'm an engineer and um I need someone to help me." Great. This ended up an SEO contract that was ongoing for quite a bit and a $50,000 PPC spend a month. That's quite an accomplishment on the back of Salami at 2 a.m. So,

keep in mind the Prattful effect is real. Do not be afraid to be relatable or to be a little weird. Another element once you do have that weird factor going for you, do not forget everything that pays doesn't happen in public. Everything that pays happens in the DMs. A lot of industry veterans will discuss this openly. You get contacted via social media because it removes friction. There is less of a fear of filling out a form and maybe talking to someone that you don't know within the agency. You want to talk to the person you see online. So many of your employees could have their own personal brand. And this is something that you can choose to lean into or not. Your choice. However, I will say that it is very beneficial when employees are a point of contact for potential leads. It once again removes friction and makes your brand more relatable. And of

course, we know that this is great for promoting your agency. Okay, so we've spoken about the weird factor, but we also need to get really concrete about other elements that most agencies are really worried about. Where do you fit in compared to the competition? And the reality is you shouldn't stress too much about this. I know that at first you will want to benchmark and audit everyone else's presence online and figure out what they write about, what they do, what their services are. good. But the competitors you have today will not be the competitors you will have in five years. So keep this in mind. And if you're too busy focusing on what you can replicate from the competition, how are you setting yourself apart? How are you standing out? And how do you resonate with people? You're busy replicating another brand. Do not do that. Maybe maybe if done just

right your competitors could be your clients. Yes, this is another opportunity if you are starting out either as a freelancer or as a boutique consultancy. Very often you offer services that are complimentary to what bigger players are offering. Or you could choose to work with companies that may win some contracts because they do something that is related to SEO but not quite SEO. Hear me out. I have worked with many many big marketing agencies that won contracts promising to deliver SEO and when the time came they did not have an SEO person. Here I was a proper white label. But sometimes it's beyond this. Sometimes it's because you have a very very specific set of skills aka knowledge on different aspects of SEO that some of the agencies do not have. France,

I speak French. You want to hire me to help you if you are an angophone company because the French bit it's always a bit complicated. Beyond international SEO, you could also choose to work with agencies that are mainly specialized, for example, in user experience. I work with quite a lot of development centers and UX agencies because I bring in certain skills that they do not have, but that are an integral part of the mandate they just won. So depending on what your services are and how you position yourself, maybe those competitors are your clients. There are some upsides and downsides of promoting your services through these channels. One of them is you will be working on tight deadlines. That is a bit of a downside because yes, of course, they will be looking for you as an emergency fix, but you will get to work with some very big clients maybe that you would not be able to work with in your current status as a beginning agency or as a freelancer.

You may also work with different industries or face different types of projects. So, you get to learn fast and you get to learn, okay, this could be a clientele for me as well. I hope that this sheds a new light on how you should see your competition. So if you want to promote your brand, you should maybe promote it where people who could work with you happen to be. And this is conferences. But the ROI of conferences is nuanced because how does it truly work? Ideally, when you attend a conference, you are supposed to network, meet people, smoose with clients. But the truth is, it's much easier and much better to promote yourself when you happen to be the one taking the stage. So for me, good branding when it comes to conferences is your expertise, your experience, plus the stage. As soon as you are able to showcase this on the stage,

so remember you're the guide in the story. If you can showcase empathy and authority, meaning you know what you are doing on a stage where people pay to come and watch you or maybe it's a free conference, these also happen. You are much more likely to have an efficient promotion of your agency. And this means learning how to craft a good pitch. Most of us do not wake up in the morning and get emails going, "Oh, we are inviting you to speak." So, you need to get really good at crafting a pitch. What can help your pitch get picked? I hinted to it. First thing you can do if you want to be picked is to already be famous and already have given quite a few conferences. And that's not you. That's not most of us here. You need to get really good at crafting a pitch. And I hear you. I hear you. Let me take out the tiny tiny tiny violin. Oh, Miriam, I don't know how to

pitch. My pitches never get picked. I don't know what to talk about. I don't know how I could be interesting. I have heard it all and I have helped many people craft their own conference pitch. So, let's take a concrete example here, one that ties into my own business flywheel. Let's talk about image SEO. Image SEO is something that people are just starting to care about. Great. I've been caring about it for quite a bit. I have quite a bit to say. So, what is the obvious problem when it comes to image SEO performance? How does it work? Images are heavy. Everybody complains about it. Nobody does anything about it. Why? There are no concrete processes. Just advice on what you should do a checklist. A checklist is not a tool to help you communicate with stakeholders, with developers, and with designers. Hey designers, you want beautiful, high-quality images. They have a cost. They weigh a ton. Hey developers, you think it's someone else's responsibility to compress the

images because designers are the ones recommending it. No, we need to work with you to figure this out. We need to establish guidelines. So, enter the concept of an image performance budget. That's a great tool where you fix some metrics going, "Hey, our budget is this big. If we go over it, we need to fix that image performance problem and fast. Do I have your attention?" I hope so, because I know this pitch was actually selected and I'm going to be talking about it in a few different places, a few different ways. You can guess, you can guess that it's part of my business flywheel. I complained about images quite a bit on social media. Got invited to speak to a few podcasts and then I went, you know what? Here's the real problem. Let me pitch it. Is it going to be an ebook at some point? Yes, it's already ready and I already got asked for it. So, it's going to be on another website, not my own. Great promotion. So, I hope that this inspires you to figure out how you could pitch. Don't forget, it's not because the topic has already been

covered by someone else that you cannot have your own spin on it or your own twist. We all have our own way of doing things. Bonus tip. If you want to make sure your pitch gets picked, go check out the types of topics that have been featured in the previous editions. Did someone already talk about what you talked about? Maybe. Maybe it's time to find another topic. Did you think okay this person did it well but I want to talk about something else. Rework your pitch and make sure that it aligns with this perspective because at the end of the day you are here to make sure yes that you get selected but that you also answer common concrete client and industry problems. So if we go back to image SEO and the image performance budget, this is a concrete answer to a problem that other agencies have. but also that clients have. So at the end of the day, it is a great opportunity for me as an agency to sell my services. Most of the time uh conferences function like a business.

So you getting picked is a mix of your name recognition or your agency's brand recognition, the topic, is it in demand, and the approach, is it something cool? Now, if you're thinking, "Okay, I'm not sure I want to pitch at an SEO conference because my clients aren't there." You may not be wrong. You should be pitching at different conferences as well. So, if you're a technical SEO, what is the most logical thing? Pitch to dev conferences. My image performance budget. There is an SEO version, but there is a version for developers. Concretely, how do you do it? If you're a developer, how do you set it up? You can speak about this at a dev conference. If you happen to be an SEO that is more specialized in content, where should you be talking? Well, marketing conferences, wider marketing conferences, you are very much needed there. If

you're specialized in off-site and link building, maybe PR conferences are where you should be. In my own case, I have found success speaking at UX conferences as well because user experience well it really really fits in with SEO quite well. Accessibility conferences for technical SEOs that really care about accessibility are also a great opportunity. So when we talk about the ROI of conferences, please do not focus necessarily on SEO conferences. Think about conferences as an opportunity to promote yourself where your clients happen to be. When you speak at a conference, you have an opportunity to meet other people with a different status. So people will want to exchange with you. Once again, you appear as a guide with authority and empathy. But the interesting part about conferences is that you get to connect with people. You get to have meaningful exchanges with

them. So keep in mind if you are going up on that stage and sharing stuff that everybody could find on LinkedIn, in newsletters or in articles, are you really bringing added value? Are you really promoting yourself quite the way you should? Make sure that you bring your agame, but that you also take the time to build meaningful rapport with people because you never know how opportunities will come to your agency. So, this is part of lead generation. You don't know what doors this may open for you. I mean, I'm here because I attended a few conferences. So, keep that in mind. One of the key issues is that not every client goes to conferences. So, what do you do? Well, you should have testimonials. And getting reviews or testimonials or information for a case study, it's always a bit awkward. So, here's how to make it less awkward. Are you teaching a course? Add a slide. Ask people to leave a review at the end and explain to them why they are helping other

students figure out if this course is good for them. If you are doing a free intervention at a meetup, in an incubator, in whatever capacity, you should also ask for reviews. Do not hesitate, but make sure you take the time to do that. You need to ensure that you have proper visibility where your clients are looking for you, but also once they get to you, do they trust you? And if you're having issues with the first bit, you know how to handle the reviews now. But what about visibility? Where are your clients online? The answer is not straightforward. What I would recommend is making sure you are selected or approved, aka you need to apply and you need to find these spots in different directories online. And I know directories is a strange word for it, but if you check out websites like Credo, you will see that there are places that vet agencies before

presenting them to big clients. And Credo is not the only place. Of course not. Have you checked out the SE Ranking catalog? So if you're an agency and you opt for the agency pack with SE Ranking, of course, this comes with visibility. So, your agency will be featured in a directory of other highly valued professionals that work with SE Ranking. This in and of itself is a testimonial to your capacity as a brand carrying out SEO services. So, do not hesitate to figure out where are my clients looking for companies like me and make sure you are there and put your best foot forward. So, here's a recap for this module. Number one, communicate properly on what you want to be doing, not what you used to do. So, make sure people know where you are going and the types of services you offer. Number two, collaborate. Communicate and collaborate should be the thing. So, if you have the opportunity to exchange with people, make sure that you do it

from a genuine perspective. It has to come from the heart because this will open doors and bring you opportunities you may or may not have had otherwise. Number three, you need to consider the ROI of conferences. Here's why. Making sure that you are up on the stage gives you the opportunity to show that you truly are the guide of the story, that you have empathy and authority and the skills to make things happen for your clients. Number four, be where your clients are. So, some clients are not at conferences, but they will find you in directories. So, do not hesitate to apply and make sure you get picked by putting your best foot forward to directories like SE Rankings Catalog or Credo. Be there where people are looking for you and be your authentic self to be able to get them to reach out to you. I hope that this has been useful for you and I'll see you