Your Agency 2023 New Year's Resolutions

Here's a fun post to end the year.

After our own year in review, let's look at some of the high impact things you can do to grow your agency in 2023.

1. More quality clients

One of the biggest mistakes agency owners make is focusing on wrong-fit clients.

Pay attention to these red flags 🚩:

• Your clients always want more for less
• They complain about your pricing instead of seeing value you provide
• They ask for "discounts" or free extra work
• They're new companies, without established product/market fit
• They have low/no revenue or any funding

So how do you solve this?

1. Set attributes of your ideal clients
   
   Example:
   - SaaS Martech companies with >$500k/year in revenue
   - Min. Series A to B funding with min. $2.5m in funding
   - Ideal person of contact: Head of Marketing
   - Ready to commit $x,xxx/mo for 12 months
   
2. Set crystal-clear expectations.
   
   Example: "We produce 4-5 blog posts / month. Week 1: Kick off call, Week 2-3: Keyword research and strategy. Week 4: You'll receive your first blog posts."

Once you've done so, it's time to build confidence to actually go and attract those clients (easier said than done, I know!)

Here are a few elements you can review:

• Your marketing -- Are you able to attract qualified traffic to your website?
• Your website and case studies (more on this later) -- Does it speak to the pain-points of the client you want to attract?
• Sales -- Are you able to identify decision makers, handle objections, and close them?

Start from there. Try to see how you can position your service and messaging to attract better, higher paying clients that will stay with you for 6 months, 12 months, or even longer.

2. Delegate more

Service-based businesses can be intensive. Doing everything by yourself will cause you to burn out!

Start listing the things you've been doing yourself:

• Service fulfilment
• Marketing
• Hiring
• Admin

Can you delegate some of these tasks?

3. Get that client portal up and running

I am biased here but here at ManyRequests, we've built a client portal specifically for agencies.

Having a client portal for your agency has multiple benefits:

• Everything will feel more organized (requests, clients, reports, files in one place)
• Smooth onboarding of new clients
• Clients communication will be streamlined
• It looks more professional
• Pay for one tool only instead of 4 or 5 different tools
• Embed your existing tools (SEO reports, trainings) with our new extension feature

If you're still unsure to use one, check out this video review by Dave Swift (who uses it for his Website agency).

4. Update your Agency website

A high impact project you can do for your agency is to improve your agency website.

A better agency website = a higher conversion rate = more demo calls and more clients.

We wrote a complete guide on how to build the perfect agency website. Have a look at it here.

5. Publish more content

Content is a great way to generate leads.

It's free, and it compounds.

You can also repurpose content (one blog post = 1 newsletter, 1 twitter post, 1 LinkedIn post, etc)

Here's some examples of content you can create for your agency:

• Case studies
• Demo and sales decks
• Thought-leadership LinkedIn/Twitter posts
• Templates
• Work showcases
• Newsletters

In 2023 you can also take this one step further:

I've also seen some agency owners doing is turning their agency into a media company.

Take this example from Flowout (one of our customers), they recently launched Flowcast where they interview SaaS founders and entrepreneurs (their target market!) :

This is a smart way to connect with your audience and get your name out there.

6. Launch a more valuable service

Sometimes raising prices is not always an option.

A great way to grow the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is to launch a more valuable service for your agency and upsell your existing clients to it.

Instead of finding more clients, sell more to existing ones.

For example:

• Create hybrid packages.
  
  Example: If you're offering SaaS blog posts writing, can add link building and PR outreach too?
  
• Create a higher / enterprise tier.
  
  If you've been serving smaller sized business, what type of package would suit bigger, more established companies?

7. Keep momentum

Momentum is key to grow an agency.

Focus on stacking small wins - they compound over time (Marc Thomas who works at PoweredBySearch recently sent me this!)

Some examples:

• 15min podcast conversation with an ideal client > An hour long video
• 4-5 Short case studies with your work > Long e-book that takes ages to release

Don't forget to make progress on big projects that really move the needle (setting up a CRM system, finding a new marketing channel, ...) but stack daily wins to keep motivation going.

8. Test a new marketing channel

Another high impact project you can do is to tap into a new marketing channel for your agency.

For example, take a few weeks to run an experiment on outreach.

• Are you able to connect with your ideal clients (Are prospects opening your email or accepting your LinkedIn invite?)
• Does the messaging and offer resonates with them? (Do they reply?)
• Are you able to book calls and close them?
  

Track a few things:

• Invite / open rate % = if it's semi-decent, it means your offer and targeting is on point!
• # of Demo booked = How many demos are you able to book a month?
• Close rate = Are you able to successfully close prospects after a sales call?

Once the experiment is successful, decide whether to continue it or push harder on it.

9. Keep going!

Remember, keep a long term view on your agency.

Content, your clients' word-of-mouth, these things compound and will grow your agency over time.

If you need to get motivated, make sure to check out our community of 6500+ agency owners.

Good luck, and all the best for 2023!