Digital marketing is one of the fastest evolving industries out there.
Driven by economical instability and fast-emerging technology, digital marketing is changing every year.
Is your marketing agency keeping up with all those changes or are you providing the same service you did 10 years ago?
Don’t get me wrong: It is perfectly ok to be good at one specific thing and have years of experience doing that. In fact, it is probably the best kind of marketing agency: One with very narrow specialization.
Yet, innovation can enhance even that one service you are good at.
Here are three ideas for your marketing agency to innovate this year to help you create new revenue streams as well as fine and retain more clients:
1. Take Your Customer Relationship Building to the Next Level
Customer support is no longer enough these years, no matter how efficient and prompt it is.
In business-to-business (B2B) marketing, decision-making units are becoming bigger and more versatile to the point that you never know who exactly your next phone call is going to be with, even if that’s a long-term client.
In most cases, it is not even about the quality of the service you are providing but whether those new people in your client’s decision-making unit (DMU) understand what it is you are doing and why – that defines the lifetime of that client.
Keeping on top of all those DMU changes means keeping that client for longer.
A platform that helps small businesses to manage their appointments, payments, and customer relationships, vcita now allows agencies to set up a co-branded app to offer to their clients on a subscription basis. This allows clients to streamline lead nurture flows via email and SMS, and see them through to sales conversion and revenue, further driving home the business value of your agency’s activity.
What’s more, seeing your logo in the digital environment they use to manage their businesses will certainly help keep you top-of-mind as an essential partner.
vcita offers a free demo to anyone willing to better understand if their business will benefit from the solution.
2. Embrace Marketing Automation
Back in the early days of digital marketing, automation was the way to scale a task to the point when it becomes spammy. Marketers used automation to automatically generate content that sounded weird and submit those articles to hundreds of low-quality article directories.
These days automation means enabling you to do what you could never have done before. This includes:
- Being instantly alerted of a possibly looming reputation crisis (even before anything happens),
- Being able to solve your site user’s problems right away and turning them into a customer without ever involving a human being or hours of waiting for a reply
- Being able to reach a customer exactly at the moment they need your product (using automated workflows)
- Being able to predict trends, ups or downs in a demand for a certain product or feature, etc.
3. Examples of Innovative Marketing Automation Solutions
WebCEO offers a solid SEO tasks automation platform that automates rankings monitoring and alerts, regular SEO reporting, and competitor monitoring. It offers a white-label option allowing your agency to easily include SEO reporting into your current marketing offering:
WebCEO offers a 14-day free trial which you can use to make sure the platform works for you!
Find an AI-Driven Technology Partner
Put simply, artificial intelligence (AI) is an ability of a machine to think and react as a human being would. Naturally, it also comes with an ability to self-teach itself to react differently to similar situations based on various criteria (like past experiences with the situation, emotions involved, etc.)
Artificial intelligence is taking digital marketing by storm making lots of tactics possible and accessible to small businesses, those that previously didn’t have budgets to embrace high-end technology.
These days AI is widely used for lots of purposes, including:
- Intelligent product recommendations (think: Amazon) that rely on what a customer is likely to buy in the future rather than what they bought in the past. In other words, AI-powered product recommendations “guess” what a person may want prior to that person knowing that.
- Intelligent cybersecurity software that analyzes your digital footprint and identifies unusual activity
- Intelligent customer support bots that communicate with your site users on your behalf promptly helping them to successfully follow down your sales funnel.
- Intelligent ad targeting that captures data about each user, learns their needs and likes, and serves them personalized ads that are bound to trigger clicks and conversions.
- Intelligent exit-intent technology that utilizes AI to teach the algorithm to serve a special offer to a user just when they are about to leave.
Innovative Examples of AI-Driven Solutions
There are lots of examples of marketing tools that utilize AI. My most recent finds use AI in a more unexpected way.
- Narrato Workspace uses artificial intelligence to organize and enhance a business’s content creation process. It is a great tool for marketing agencies that are looking for ways to better organize the content creation process for their clients. The platform utilizes AI to generate search-optimized content briefs based on SEO data (i.e. keywords). Narrato offers a 30-day free trial which is enough to understand the platform and figure out if it works for you.
Get Started With Narrato Workspace
- Namify is another interesting tool that utilizes artificial intelligence to understand the essence of what the user is searching, and accordingly suggests brand names that are meaningful and usable. If your marketing agency offers pre- and post-launch marketing roadmap development, this tool is a great one to start with. Namify is free and requires no registration.
Start Building Your Brand With Namify
- Finally, Awario is a social media listening platform that utilizes AI to prioritize brand mentions based on how urgent they need to be addressed. If you are managing reputations of multiple clients, this is a great way to promptly alert your clients if something crucial is going on. Awario offers a free demo as well as a 30-day free trial.
Schedule A Demo Or Start Your Awario Trial
Technology is disrupting the way consumers discover, research, compare, and buy products online. Obviously, digital marketing needs to keep up with those changes in consumer behavior and be able to adapt.
The above innovation ideas will get your agency started but it is in no way an exhaustive list. Every agency is unique and the innovation process is never-ending as your clients need to adjust to their fast-changing customers’ expectations.
Innovate your agency every year. Include innovation in your yearly marketing and technology budget.
Disclosure: Martech Zone has updated this article and included affiliate links on several of the tools in this article.
