13 Best Marketing Agency Client Management Tools For All Your Needs

Consider that you’ve just landed a big new client and are excited to begin your partnership. But, as you sift through your onboarding checklist, you realize the client is looking for something entirely different than what you offer, and their expectations are far from realistic. What do you do? How do you manage this awkward situation without ruining your reputation or the working relationship? Client management can be tricky.

But with the best agency management software, you can automate and streamline many marketing agency client management processes to make your life much easier. In this guide, we’ll share some valuable insights to help you get organized, set clear expectations, and improve onboarding for your next client so that you can avoid the pitfalls of misaligned goals.

One of the best tools for achieving client management goals is Orchestrа’s solution, which is to grow your productized service. This all-in-one toolkit will help you improve your marketing agency’s client management processes so you can focus on what matters most: delivering fantastic client results.

Importance of Client Management For Marketing Agencies

Clear communication, transparent reporting, and consistent results build trust. Clients feel more confident about an agency’s capability when informed about progress and results. This trust leads to client loyalty, which can also lead to referrals and positive testimonials.

Achieving Client Goals through Insightful Communication  

Regular communication lets agencies fully grasp a client’s business objectives, target audience, and industry trends. By understanding their needs, agencies can tailor marketing strategies that drive impactful, measurable results, increasing satisfaction.

Improving Project Efficiency and Quality  

Effective client management helps keep projects on track, meets deadlines, and prevents misunderstandings. Frequent check-ins allow for early feedback, minimizing costly revisions and ensuring the work meets client expectations.

Boosting Client Retention and Lifetime Value  

Satisfied clients are likelier to continue their contracts, renew services, or expand their projects. By focusing on solid client relationships, agencies can boost client retention, which is often more cost-effective than acquiring new clients.

Enabling Strategic Growth for the Agency  

Long-term clients who trust their agency are more likely to experiment with new marketing approaches, allowing agencies to showcase creative strategies and gain insights that can be applied to other projects.

Proactive Problem Resolution  

When agencies maintain close client relationships, they can identify and address issues early. This proactive approach builds goodwill and demonstrates a commitment to client success, reducing the chances of conflicts.

Related Reading

• Agency Collaboration
• Best Agency Management Software
• Avoid Common Challenges That Agencies Face
• Marketing Agency Client Management
• Agency Metrics
• Agency Operations
• How To Productize A Service
• Agency Client Relationship
• What Is an Agency Management System
• What Is A Productized Service
• Agency Clients
• Productized Service Examples

14 Tips On How To Efficiently Manage Clients For A Marketing Agency

1. Optimize Client Management with Orchestra

Orchestra is an efficient client management tool to help marketing agencies scale their productized services. Acting as a centralized hub allows you to quickly launch your services and manage all the moving parts from one place. This way, you can keep everything organized and tidy before delivering it to clients. Orchestra helps launch your productized service with a fully customizable, white-labeled portal.

You can organize the entire service under this client-facing dashboard, making it easy for customers to access their files and data whenever they want. Inside, you can also set up task lists so clients can see what you’re working on and when you expect to complete each item. This helps you communicate and manage client expectations more effectively.

Another helpful feature of Orchestra is its ability to help you track your service’s performance over time. With real-time analytics, you can create reports to share with clients to show them the value of your work and how their business is progressing.

2. Value Your Client’s Time

Time is of the essence in client management, both for you and your clients. The longer you take to deliver on your promises, the more likely your clients will become dissatisfied with your services. Marketing agencies should always respect their client’s time and work to foster positive relationships by delivering on their promises quickly and efficiently.

As Sarah Franklin, the co-founder of Bluetree.ai, says, it’s best to underpromise and overdeliver to maintain positive client relationships. It is an adage but a true one. Respect each client’s time. Making them feel rushed, unimportant, or taking up too much of their time can disintegrate your relationship. Offer face-to-face time and create a human connection.

Attempt to know and problem-solve their needs and concerns before they arise. I use scheduling software that allows me to access my calendar and appointments remotely, and I make myself accessible to my clients via personal and timely communication. Be relevant, accurate, and realistic with your clients.

3. Establish a Standard for Project Planning

Once you have a new client, crafting a project timeline that breaks your vision into targets and deadlines takes time. You can map your plan here using Gantt charts, Kanban boards, Monday boards, spreadsheets, or simple checklists. Find a solution that captures the entire scope of your project, including the tasks you’ll be doing and when you intend to complete them.

Be sure to define project milestones ahead of time and create a clearly defined change request process that you can introduce to new clients. This process should include a way to assess the impact on project timelines and budgeting (such as how many hours, days, or weeks the change will set you back and what that will cost). This way, you can quote the changes in your invoice instead of absorbing the costs.

As a rule of thumb, you should always expect the unexpected. Give yourself enough of a buffer in your timelines should you need to make a strategic pivot, and consider as many possible scenarios as you can before they arise. For instance, should you continue to work if clients don’t pay on time? What happens if your client gets sick for a prolonged period? And what if your client goes bankrupt while working with you? Have a contingency plan before things go south so you don’t get caught off guard.

4. Keep Client Relationships Positive

Jennifer Phillips, the VP of Marketing & Client Services at Traktek Partners, believes it’s all about maintaining positive relations. She says maintaining a positive client relationship is crucial for the success of any agency. In our experience, communication is critical.

In addition to the standard practice of open communication, responsiveness, and flexibility, we utilize Basecamp for project and client management. This helps significantly with managing multiple clients. We use Basecamp for an online repository of files, messaging, contact information, and requests. This allows our clients and anyone within the agency to access project details anytime.

5. Communicate Often and Effectively

Clear and transparent dialogue around clients’ expectations is critical for avoiding scope creep before it happens. Set realistic deadlines and achievable results, then regularly update your client with status updates and progress reports during scheduled check-ins. That goes double when talking about money. Offer clients reminders of their upcoming and late bills, and consider flexible payment options to take the financial burden off your client’s shoulders.

Of course, the best way to ensure long-term satisfaction is to work with your clients, not just for them. Create open lines of communication, be it Slack, email, or WhatsApp, to address concerns promptly. Leverage collaborative tools like Orchestra to customize client permissions and provide smooth client handovers.

Remember, be easy to reach when things go wrong and even easier to work with to make things right. While even the best agencies can’t avoid making mistakes, you can always control your response to unintended outcomes. Do your best to provide exceptional services to your clients, but also be the agency that leans into the client-designer relationship and picks up the pieces when mess-ups happen.

6. Educate Your Clients

Shaheen Najeeb, a digital marketing analyst at Fingent, believes in a two-pronged approach. They use the following strategies:

Educate Clients Through Outbound Campaign 

Clients love to know about product updates, changes in your business, new trends in their industry, etc. We have to educate them through these campaigns to keep them engaged.

Periodical Client Service Team Reach Out

Once in a while, ensure your client service team schedules a call with the clients to learn more about their issues. The primary purpose is to get the client’s responses to these questions, empowering the service team to triage the customer’s needs/wants and suggest solutions (up-selling). It will also allow them to understand any potential issues faced by the client that they have to address.

7. Respond to Crisis with Grace

Luck favors the prepared agency. While you can’t predict a pandemic or sudden economic downturn, clients pay attention to how you handle significant setbacks. Take steps to recession-proof your agency, and lead with humanity where possible. In the macro, bake a way to identify potential issues in your work processes. That could look like conducting quarterly risk assessments, subscribing to channels that cover global business news, getting the proper insurance, and hiring consultants who can provide outside perspectives to mind gaps in business you’re unaware of.

Should an issue arise that evades your radar, have rapid response teams ready to handle client questions (and any potential PR backlash) and offer opportunities for collaborative problem-solving sessions to get the relationship back on track. If the mess-up is yours, acknowledge it, own up to it, and chart your customer win-back strategy. If the client routinely fails to provide their end of the bargain, take a moment to assess whether or not this is the right relationship.

Should you commit to resolving the issue together, both parties must learn from challenges for future improvements. This goes back to communicating frequently and effectively, creating continuous improvement initiatives, and making time for regular feedback sessions and post-project reviews.

8. Assign an Employee to Advocate for the Client

Joe Youngblood, the founder of joeyoungblood.com, says, "Effective client management and reporting are something we’ve spent years working on and tweaking. In our process currently, a sales representative for our agency is given a role to act as an advocate on behalf of their client.

This means they can view all relevant data to the client, including current projects, conversations, goals, and metrics." The sales representative is also responsible for acting in the client's best interest by asking the fulfillment team questions about any slowdowns, delays, or other project issues. This process occurs internally outside the client.

It provides a mechanism for account executives and team leaders to realize a client might be unhappy with progress, spurring them to communicate better regarding these issues. This process is not perfect by any means. However, we’ve measured a statistically relevant increase in client retention because this advocate process helps our internal teams polish up their client-facing communications, addressing their concerns before the clients themselves ever express them.

9. Become a Thought Partner for Your Clients

Your clients don’t just want to work with someone who can ‘do the job.’ They want someone who brings a new perspective to the table. Be an indispensable agency by guiding digital solutions and sending clients industry trends (i.e., keeping them informed on AI digital marketing trends).

You offer workshops and webinars to train clients on your services. You can take it a step further by creating guides and user manuals to walk clients step by step through a problem asynchronously. If you have the bandwidth, consider starting a newsletter for your client segments catering to their interests. This builds your authority by demonstrating subject matter expertise, a great way to deliver insights at scale.

10. Learn to Manage Time

Shiv Gupta, the CEO of Incrementors Web Solutions, believes respecting the client's time is paramount. He says that time management is the most precious and finite resource you and your clients have when managing multiple clients. If you want to build healthier relationships, you have to respect their time.

You should set deadlines to complete projects critical to marketers and clients. Clients may sometimes have unrealistic expectations and demands about timeframes, but you must also be realistic when estimating how much time you need to complete them. Moreover, you must set clear deadlines so your team members know how much time they have to complete specific tasks.

11. Learn Their Communication Patterns

Duckpin's Marketing Strategist, Andrew Clark, says clients have different communication patterns. This applies not only to how they receive information but also to how they share information. Is your client expressive, amiable, passive, or even dominant? Likewise, how do you communicate? It is not your client's responsibility to adjust their communication style; it is yours.

More tactical questions: Does your client prefer long phone calls or short emails? How diligent are my clients in their schedules? Understanding this factor allowed me to schedule future meetings more efficiently. In the end, be patient and kind, and regardless of how different communication preferences may be, you will get to the sweet spot with your client.

12. Involve the Client in the Process

Djordje Milicevic, who works with StableWP, says, " Before starting any work, get your client involved in the goal-setting process. This way, you both stay on the same page. I like to use Pipedrive to manage both leads and existing customers. When we set goals initially, I make a sequence for every stage of customer relationships. This tool helps me track communication, automate repetitive administrative tasks, and help me make reports with their dashboard. Following this work method, I see and address clients’ needs before they know they exist.

13. Expand Your Toolkit

The best tools can help you provide the best services. That includes:

• A robust CRM system to track and utilize client data to personalize your services,

• Automation tools to streamline communication and collaboration where possible,

• Collaborative design tools

• In your progress reports, you can provide your clients with analytics and reporting tools for data-driven decision-making and performance metrics.

14. Understand Their Needs

Mitchell Kelly, the director at Pathfinder Alliance, believes it is all about understanding your client’s needs. He says, I had three clients to start with, and I knew everything about them from top to bottom: their business, their products, their goals, and what they needed to do to achieve them. However, when the client book started to grow, and I needed to bring in outside help to manage things, things began to get out of control very quickly. Scheduling client meetings was sometimes forgotten, missed deadlines, and results suffered.

This forced me to get better at a few basic strategies. Get the right project management system – We use Trello, which allows us to assign tasks to employees and build out templates for any repeatable tasks (i.e., onboarding). Develop a watertight onboarding process – We send new clients a Google Form which gathers background information on the client (goals, KPIs, etc.), facilitates them providing us access to everything we need (ad accounts, analytics accounts, CMS access, etc.) and allows us to hit the ground running with minimal back and forth.

Process everything – We use Trello card templates so that any repeatable task has a documented process, and VAs and new hires can step in and immediately be productive in our business. Schedule reporting and meetings – Clients need transparency to know what we are working on and what results we bring. We use Datastudio with Supermetrics to schedule monthly performance reports and meet clients in person quarterly to review progress and strategy.

13 Best Marketing Agency Client Management Tools For All Your Needs

1. Orchestra: Your All-in-One Growth Tool

Launch your productized service effortlessly with Orchestra's all-in-one growth toolkit. Designed for creatives ready to scale, Orchestra provides a branded, white-labeled client portal, task management, and real-time analytics, with no coding needed, just your Stripe account.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, or copywriter, Orchestra streamlines your workflow. It lets you collaborate with clients seamlessly while maintaining a private workspace with your team. Add integrations like Slack and webhooks to customize your setup and deliver a branded experience. Elevate your service with a platform built to grow alongside you; try Orchestra for free to develop your productized service today.

2. Salesforce: The Client Management Powerhouse

Salesforce Cloud CRM is a fantastic piece of client management software. Although it has a wide range of functionality, including a huge number of integrations, one of the areas where it truly shines is in managing communications with existing clients.

Regarding contact management, Salesforce provides a clear overview of your clients, including activity history, key contacts, customer communications, and internal account discussions. It’s easy to access critical customer data, such as their communication history, to gain a complete picture of every client.

It’s also easy to pull in relevant social data from LinkedIn and Facebook so your company can gauge customer sentiment. The Salesforce CRM also recognizes that we live in a mobile-first world, and business can be conducted anywhere. That’s why Salesforce Cloud CRM is accompanied by the Salesforce Mobile App, which means you can quickly access critical data before you enter a client meeting - wherever you are.

Pros

• Total sales pipeline management.

• A high number of integrations are available.

• Advanced reporting and customizable dashboards.

Cons

• Expensive in comparison to competitors.

• Limited customer support.

3. Hubspot CRM: The Growth Platform for Businesses

HubSpot CRM is a customer relationship management platform designed to help businesses grow. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools to help teams manage client relationships and interactions, from tracking leads and deals to managing customer data. It also features automation capabilities to help streamline workflows for sales reps, customer service agents, and marketers.

The platform’s integration capabilities allow businesses to connect HubSpot CRM with various third-party tools, such as email marketing platforms and payment processors. With its intuitive user interface, comprehensive suite of features, and integration capabilities, HubSpot CRM is an ideal tool for businesses of all sizes.

Pros

• Contact and pipeline management

• Email and prospect tracking

• Contact website activity

• Email template builder

• Landing page builder

Cons

• Expensive pricing plans compared to other client management software

• Lacks intuitive tools for workflow automation

4. Apptivo CRM: The Affordable Customizable CRM

Apptivo CRM is an affordable and highly customizable platform that aims to be a one-stop solution for all your business software needs. In addition to essential CRM functionality, it includes tools for accounting, invoicing, and project management tasks. It's easy to use and supports Android and iOS mobile devices.

Pros 

• Comprehensive feature set with various customization options

• Outstanding mobile applications, granular security controls, and 24-hour support

Cons

• Performance can feel sluggish

• Could use extended APIs

5. Zoho CRM: The Omnichannel Client Management Tool

One of the areas where Zoho CRM stands out as a client management tool is its omnichannel approach. This allows firms to engage with clients via whichever medium they prefer, whether email, telephone, or something else.

Zoho CRM has made a great effort to become an all-in-one platform. It allows businesses to monitor lead activity and customer buyer preferences and view price lists or documents without changing applications - everything your company needs for client management is right here. Given that AI is such a hot topic right now, it should come as little surprise to hear that Zoho offers users its assistance.

You won’t find ChatGPT levels of intelligence here, but personal assistant Zia Voice can retrieve information, update accounts, and generate performance reports. It’s certainly a handy addition that improves Zoho’s ease of use. Although there is no free tier with Zoho CRM, a free trial is available. Given that the platform is currently used by more than 150,000 businesses across 180 countries, a free trial may be all you need before you’re convinced this is the right client management software for you.

Pros

• Workflow automation

• Customization

• Email marketing

Cons

• Steep learning curve

• Limited customer support

6. Freshworks CRM: The Customer Management Solution

Freshworks CRM makes it easier for teams to track leads, automate marketing campaigns, segment customers into different categories, manage customer data in one place, and quickly build customer relationships. Features like contact management, lead scoring, customer segmentation, task automation, and customer insights allow businesses to increase revenue and better understand their customers.

The CRM tool also helps teams stay organized by providing detailed reporting on customer interactions and allowing users to set up rules-based workflows to automate repetitive tasks. Additionally, Freshworks CRM integrates with popular third-party applications like Google Apps, Zapier, and Mailchimp, making it even easier for teams to get the most out of their customer data!

Pros

• Pipeline management to visualize the entire sales process organized by stage

• Sales Goals to set and track goals based on revenue or the number of deals

• Filter, sort, and search functionality on the mobile app

• Deal performance dashboards

• Drag-and-drop interface

Cons 

• Project management features are only available on expensive plans

• Limited reporting capabilities to customize key metrics

7. Creatio: The Flexible CRM

Sales Creatio has undergone several name changes, but it remains a top CRM choice. Its specialty is larger sales organizations, and it excels at catering to their needs. Creatio also offers tools for business process management (BPM), marketing automation, and help desks, enabling customers to address multiple business objectives in a unified way.

Pros

• Multifaceted and highly customizable unified business solution

• Rooted in solid CRM functionality

• Creatio CRM helps SMBs streamline processes from lead management to closing

Cons

• Relatively short trial period

• Hefty feature set

• Customization can be daunting at the outset

8. Monday Sales CRM: The Flexible CRM

Monday Sales CRM is customer relationship management (CRM) software that assists sales and marketing managers manage their employees. It is best suited for small to medium-sized organizations. It has various features to control the customer journey and is simple to use and intuitive.

Additionally, Monday Sales CRM is adaptable, enabling you to change the program to meet your needs. Email sync, which allows users to send and receive emails, record meeting minutes, and monitor all communication in a single timeline, is one of Monday Sales CRM's capabilities. Additionally, it features the crucial feature of contact management, which groups customer and prospect information into a single database and supports an unlimited number of contacts.

Furthermore, it supports email, and its templates allow users to create personalized emails that are automatically complete with contact information, sync emails sent and received, record meeting notes, and view all communication in a single timeline. Additionally, there is two-way email integration for both Outlook and Gmail.

Pros

• Well-designed interface

• Good feature set

Cons

• A little pricey

• Some may be disappointed in features at higher price points

9. Pipedrive: The Sales Focused CRM

Pipedrive is a CRM system designed to help sales teams increase productivity and close more deals. It offers various features that help streamline the sales process, including contact management, email tracking, call logging, lead scoring, sales forecasting, and automated workflows.

With Pipedrive, a sales team can quickly organize their leads, contacts, and deals to stay focused on essential tasks. The client management app allows users to easily create custom pipelines and automated emails to nurture leads and increase conversions.

Pros

• Segment leads to create personalized, targeted communication

• Drag-and-drop interface to quickly update deal statuses

• Activity reminders and team collaboration

• Customizable web forms

• Revenue forecasting

Cons

• Limited customization for user permission settings compared to other free client management software

• Project scope and document management tools are paid add-ons

10. Insightly: The Customizable CRM

Insightly delivers a lot of bang for your CRM buck. It's one of the easiest to use among the tested systems, even if it could be more feature-rich. Importing data is a smooth process. Insightly's built-in reporting engine is AI-powered, providing one-button data export to Microsoft Power BI.

Pros

• Smooth data input and sharing

• A slick interface that's consistent and easy to pick up

• Highly customizable

• Easy integration with Unsightly's help desk and marketing apps

Cons

• Expensive high-end tiers

• Lacks advanced features like custom workflows

11. Bitrix24: The Collaboration Tool

Although Bitrix24 may be outlined as a CRM tool, it is also fantastic client management software. The solution is a well-designed collaboration tool for communication and project management.  Beyond lead generation, Bitrix is a valuable tool for customer support, making it ideal for client management.

The platform has its own Customer Contact Center, so you can answer client queries and solve problems in real-time, whatever channel they come through. Bitrix can also help businesses set up automated support if needed, and offers help with creating company websites or setting up a chat network on your homepage.

With AI tools becoming mainstream news thanks to the release of ChatGPT, Bitrix knows that businesses are increasingly expecting AI to play some part in client management. Here, the platform employs AI to help with customer troubleshooting. Still, if human support is needed, a chatbot can gather the relevant customer information before passing it on to a real-life agent.

Pros 

• Comprehensive business suite

• Affordable pricing

• Unlimited contacts with all plans

Cons

• Very steep learning curve

• It doesn’t support chatbots for sales or support

12. Airtable: The Flexible Collaboration Tool

Airtable is a cloud-based collaboration and project management tool that combines an easy-to-use spreadsheet with the power of a database and the flexibility of custom applications. With Airtable, small teams can create highly collaborative workspaces to work together on projects.

The platform also integrates with other apps and services like Slack, Zapier, and Dropbox to provide a complete client management system for customer management.

Pros

• Actions to goals linking functionality to streamline reporting

• Shareable forms to populate records into the Airtable base

• Timeline View to track events, resources, and projects

• Automation with Javascript functionality

• Form View for contact management

Cons of Airtable

• Limited sorting and filtering options compared to other client management software tools

• Limited customization options for workspace appearance

13. Less Annoying CRM: The Budget-Friendly CRM 

Less Annoying CRM is an affordable turnkey system for small businesses and sole proprietors. It offers a good collection of essential features and flat-rate pricing, making it among the cheapest products we tested. Its key selling point is ease of use, which is excellent for companies with limited CRM experience. Its user interface is straightforward and approachable. Also, Less Annoying's responsive web UI works on mobile devices and desktop browsers.

Pros

• One affordable plan

• Plenty of support and help options

• Looks great on mobile

Cons

• Limited reporting capabilities

• No way to add dedicated leads

Related Reading

• Marketing Tools For Agencies
• Creative Agency Project Management Software
• SEO Agency Management Software
• Advertising Agency Project Management Software
• Marketing Agency Process
• Agency Client Management Software
• Digital Marketing Agency Management Software
• Agency Resource Management
• Productized Services
• Ad Agency Project Management Software
• Productization Framework

How To Attract Clients For A Market Agency

1. Blogging Isn’t Dead – It’s Essential for Attracting Clients

The blogging phase of Internet marketing may be over, but that doesn’t mean blogs aren’t still relevant. A recent survey by Semrush found that 86% of marketers use blog content in their strategy. Additionally, according to marketing consultant D. John Carlson, 77% of internet users read some form of a blog as part of their online consumption. When well-written and informative, blogs accomplish two important things: They demonstrate thought leadership.

A good blog, updated regularly, allows you to show how much you know about your client’s industries and priorities without explicitly asserting your knowledge. They maximize SEO and drive traffic. Incorporating keyword strings that sync with your clients' common questions will help you break the clutter. What are your ideal clients actively searching for? Get SEO right, and you’ll pop up on the all-important page of search engine listings.

2. Use LinkedIn to Share Helpful Content with Potential Clients

LinkedIn is a great way to reach a B2B audience through content organically. This could be in the form of short posts, carousel images, or video content. The latter can be repurposed for different media channels, ranging from Instagram reels to TikTok videos. You can’t count on virality on LinkedIn, but you can give yourself the best chance of success by composing helpful, insightful articles your clients will love.

For B2B clients, LinkedIn is the place to be, and you’ll soon find that impressed potential clients reach out with questions, feedback, or inquiries. The key here is to be consistent in your posting schedule and create valuable content about what you know the most about marketing. For example, if you run an SEO agency, you give free value by posting SEO tips for business owners. This will help you get people to like and share your content, ultimately helping you reach more people through the LinkedIn algorithm and building trust with your target audience.

3. Start a YouTube Channel to Attract Marketing Clients

Another great way to reach potential clients organically and show your expertise is to start a YouTube channel. You can then embed some of these YouTube clips in your blog content, which helps maximize SEO and rank your page higher in Google searches. When designing content, simply ask what the issues your clients are wrestling with, then do your best to offer solutions (while leaving them wanting more).

Both short-form and long-form video content perform well on YouTube. However, the proven video topics that usually work include product explainers, how-to videos, reactions, and thought leader interviews. However, it’s important to note that YouTube, as a marketing strategy, should be used for education. You'll build trust with potential clients by providing free education to your audience and not sounding sales-y. Avoid making your video content too sales-y, and remember that YouTube is primarily an entertainment site.

4. Start a Newsletter

A newsletter is another great way to reach people through written content, but it has one significant advantage: readers have actively signed up for it. This means two things. Firstly, you have (at least) their email address. Secondly, they have proactively engaged with your content and are self-qualified leads. Most newsletter platforms make it relatively easy to integrate a pop-up on your site to capture emails from website visitors.

According to research by HubSpot, 81% of B2B marketers report that newsletters are still their most used type of content. Your newsletter needs a thematic focus, educational, about news in your industry, or just for pure entertainment. Combining all three can help you build a strong brand and nurture leads that may become paying agency clients.

5. Run Google PPC Ads to Get Clients for Your Marketing Agency

Pay-per-click (PPC) Google ads are a great way of getting specific about how you target your advertising. By researching what terms your ICPs are Googling, you can bid on ad placements for those same terms. This means your ads will be positioned within the search results of potential clients proactively looking for your services. For example, let’s say you provide social media services to real estate agents.

You might bid for keywords like "real estate social media marketing" or “social media realty advertising,” to create a synchronicity between your campaign and what your ICP is looking for. If you have the capital to invest, this strategy is great because people searching for agency-related keywords in Google are already in the mindset of looking for an agency. It can potentially make for great conversion rates if you catch their attention during this late buying stage.

6. Do Cold Email Outreach to Find Marketing Agency Clients

Email marketing is still a prevalent prospecting method despite predictions of its demise. The medium of email allows for two things above all: creativity and automation. You have the freedom to craft the perfect drip campaign and automate delivering those messages at the optimum time. However, a word of caution: send too many generic emails, and you might push away the clients you’re hoping to attract.

However, this is avoidable if you’ve correctly identified your target audience and shaped messages that address their needs and interests. The key is to personalize your messages as much as you can. Tell a potential prospect precisely what they can do to improve their marketing. Maybe even offer free tips tailored specifically for them and ask if I can hop on a call to review them. This is how I landed some of my largest clients to date.

7. Create Case Studies

Once you have some satisfied customers, get their permission to turn their success story into a case study demonstrating your approach and expertise. Keep these case studies punchy and include metrics to prove your outcomes.

Structure your case studies to include an overview of the client’s challenges, your solution, and the outcome. If your clients don’t want their relationship with you in public, you can keep these case studies anonymous by referring to “a major high street retailer” or “a financial services start-up.” However, don’t be tempted to make them up since you might be asked for a client contact for a testimonial. Combined with other strategies, case studies can often prove the clincher that turns interested parties into clients.

8. Sponsor Newsletters

In addition to creating your newsletter content, you can offer to sponsor newsletters your clients might already be consuming. Sponsor newsletters that your target audience might be consuming. You can use platforms like Paved.com to do this. This might mean contributing to the newsletter’s costs in return for a positioned ad or providing guest content. These sponsorships are usually well-integrated, so they seem less commercially driven than other forms of ad placement. Plus, they often reach massive and highly targeted groups of subscribers you might not otherwise quickly access.

9. Productize Your Services

A relatively recent innovation is the move towards the productization of services. This means you package an aspect of your service delivery, such as social media posting or content writing, and then sell that as a finite product. The significant advantage of this approach is that it protects you against “scope creep” — it allows you to specify precisely what I will and won’t provide. It also lets you offer limited services suitable to startups with finite marketing resources. You can then list your agency’s site on listings such as ProductHunt, effectively turning a service business into a product one.

10. Ask for Referrals

Word of mouth will always be one of the best ways to find new clients. Never ask existing clients to refer you to their colleagues, suppliers, or sister companies. So long as you’ve provided them with an excellent experience, they should be happy to spread the word. You can incentivize these referrals by offering existing clients, or even people on your email list, a commission or discount on your services. However, if you focus on providing an outstanding client experience, satisfied clients will be happy to refer your agency for free if you simply ask.

Try Orchestra for Free to Grow Your Productized Service Today

Orchestra is an all-in-one toolkit to help creatives productize their services, onboard clients, and streamline operations. The platform features a white-labeled client portal to help you launch your productized service with a professional, branded experience. You can manage tasks easily, communicate with clients, and track essential metrics without coding skills. Just connect your Stripe account to get started.

Why Use Orchestra? 

Orchestra is built to help you grow. The streamlined interface makes it easy to work with clients and maintain organization as you scale. The dashboard even lets you track key analytics to help you improve your service over time.

Related Reading

• Agency Resource Management Software
• SuiteDash Alternatives
• Digital Marketing Agency Workflow
• Productized Service Software
• Service Provider Pro Alternatives
• ManyRequests Alternative
• Marketing Agency Management Software