I’ve observed a troubling trend in the Search industry over the past few months: many agencies are facing significant challenges. Friends and colleagues in the field report losing clients and having difficulty signing new ones. While the reasons behind this could be economic or other factors, I’ll refrain from speculating. Regardless of the cause, it’s clear that numerous agencies are struggling. Here are my thoughts, recommendations, and potential solutions to help navigate these tough times. Here’s a list of 10 different options to consider if your digital marketing agency is struggling right now.
Background
For some background and transparency, I’ve been involved in SEO since the late 1990s, creating my own websites and achieving high rankings when AltaVista and Excite were the primary search engines. I started as an in-house webmaster and SEO specialist before transitioning to the agency world around 2004. I co-founded the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (now known as State of Search), worked in SEO and PPC for several agencies, ran an agency, and launched my own consulting business in 2016.
Having experienced the ups and downs of the digital marketing industry, I can say this isn’t the first time I’ve seen agencies facing challenges, and it likely won’t be the last. Historically, the industry has gone through cycles where agencies struggle with payroll, lay off employees, merge with other firms, or shut down entirely. Currently, I’m noticing another downturn, with layoffs beginning and many agency owners struggling to keep their businesses afloat.
What Are the Options?
Let’s take a look at some of the options for agencies at this point, and I’ll offer some recommendations as to how to continue to make payroll so to speak. These aren’t in any specific order of importance, and some may or may not apply to your particular situation. But all are worth mentioning, in my opinion.
- Concentrate on the clients you currently have.
- Cut back on the reporting.
- Make your own agency one of your clients.
- Start your own agency-owned websites.
- Work on partnerships with other firms, agencies, providers
- Start hitting the pavement, get out there and network.
- Start offering one-time services.
- Change how employees are paid.
- Merge your agency with another.
- Sell your agency.
The Specific Details of Each Option
Concentrate on the clients you currently have. You may be losing some clients or have lost some clients, but take a look at the current clients that you DO have. Look at what’s making them money and what’s converting for them. If SEO isn’t doing very well for them but PPC is, then put more efforts and assign some SEO employees to help with PPC. Or vice versa. There may be some ‘menial’ tasks that can be done in either area that could be done. This could be writing more ad copy, writing content, creating more versions of the current content and posting it on other sites. Some digital marketing employees tend to specialize in one particular area, so have them cross-train in some other areas and help where it’s needed. The focus should be on what is working well for clients. You should already know how they’re getting leads and sales–you just need to scale it.
Cut back on the reporting. Over the years, I’ve seen so many digital marketing agencies spend way too much time creating “pretty looking reports” for clients and not spending valuable time and resources actually producing results. Some account managers just create reports all day. Stop that. Inform the client that you’re going to be shifting a bit and not producing as many reports for them and having the account managers do more marketing work rather than producing reports for them. Tell them that you’re going to focus on getting them more sales, leads, and traffic to their websites rather than producing reports. They’ll still get reports, but it will be limited. My point here is that agencies spend way too much time producing reports and a lot less time producing actual results for clients. You can easily cut back in the reporting area as long as the client is informed that they’re going to see less reporting.
Make your own agency one of your clients. If you’ve lost a few clients, take the time that would have been spent on those clients and make your own agency a client. You should be doing this already, but you could assign a few employees to ONLY be working on your agency as a client. For example, they should be producing content for your agency site, optimizing your agency site, making appearances on podcasts, writing content for search industry publications. Creating videos for your agency and posting them. Starting an agency podcast. If you really kick up the content generation for your own agency that will bring in clients. It may take some time, but when it gets busy again you’ll be very thankful that you spent this time now creating content for your agency.
Start your own agency-owned websites. Are a lot of your clients in one particular niche? Do you have more travel clients or legal clients? Start a few travel websites that are content-rich. Start a few legal websites. We all know that it may take some time to get traction, but later on you could use those websites to link and promote some of your clients who are in the same industry. You’re ultimately building assets for your agency, though. Websites in certain niches will always be valuable. The content is valuable, the domain name and content combined has value, and you will always be able to sell a domain name and website in the future.
Work on partnerships. A lot of agencies tend to specialize in one particular niche or type of service. Do you specialize more in SEO than PPC? Then find some agencies that are heavy on the PPC side of things and see if there’s an opportunity to help that agency with SEO. Same goes for social media, paid social, web design firms, and even PR agencies. PR agencies generally don’t do SEO or PPC. Your clients need PR, their PR clients may need SEO or PPC, or even social media services. Your agency can get clients through partnerships with other firms that don’t offer your specific services.
Start hitting the pavement. get out there and network. One particular agency owner who I’ve known for years built his agency through in-person meetings and attending local events. He literally started attending every local meeting he could, such as local BBB events, Chamber of Commerce events, and other meetings of local associations. Sometimes he attended 2 meetings every night, Monday through Friday. This form of old fashioned networking worked for him, and it can still work.
Start offering one-time services. I know that digital marketing agencies love to get a client into a contract for 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months. That recurring revenue is great. However, there’s a lot of business available for one-time services as well that can bring in some quick revenue if that’s what your agency needs. For example, start offering SEO audits as a one-time service. There are actually SEO freelancers that offer SEO audit services that you could offer where you could simply outsource the audit and mark it up. Or, just have your current employees provide these services:
- SEO Audit
- Content Audit
- Social Media Audit
- Google Ads audit
- Google Analytics Customer Reporting Setup
- Local SEO Audi
- Link Audit
- Website Migration services (new web redesign)
- Domain Migration services (moving to a new domain name)
In a lot of cases, providing a one-time service such as the ones I’ve mentioned above will ultimately lead to that client wanting ongoing SEO services. But right now, when some clients are cutting back on their marketing budgets, they’re more willing to pay one-time for a service such as one of these services, as they don’t want to commit to ongoing monthly services.
Change how employees are paid. Currently, you may be paying your digital marketing agency’s employee on a full-time basis. They may be full-time W2 employees. Explain to them that the agency is struggling, and rather than laying them off, you’re going to convert them to independent contractors (1099 employees). This will allow them to not lose their jobs completely, but still have work to do with your agency. This option would essentially convert them to hourly, where they would bill you for the hours they actually work. For some this can be seen as a benefit, as they will be able to take on other work at the same time. For example, I am essentially a freelancer, as my “one-person agency” gets hired frequently by other agencies to do work. For example, one agency just hired me to do 4 SEO audits for 4 of their clients. These are one-time audits where I’m charging them an “agency rate”, but getting paid well for the audits.
Merge your agency with another. You may be able to merge your agency with another agency. Typically this can become a win-win for two agencies that are struggling, especially if those agencies are in the same city or location. I’ve seen agencies merge with PR firms, and others who have merged 3 agencies all into one new agency or brand. Another agency merged with 2 other agencies in the same city, and they ended up keeping the name of the strongest, more well-known agency.
Sell your agency. There are agencies out there that continue to grow, and they are looking to get into new markets. An agency in California might want to grow into the Dallas market because they have a few clients based in Dallas already. But rather than establishing a new Dallas office, it might be easier or them to just acquire an agency in Dallas that already has an office. Even at a time when digital marketing agencies are struggling and when business is down, this is still an option to merge or sell your agency. For example, I know one particular digital marketing agency that is growing and actively acquiring agencies all over the United States.
Right now it seems as though a lot of agencies are struggling. This also goes for freelancers, as well. There’s still plenty of work out there in the search industry–sometimes you have to look for it and become a little bit more creative to keep the money coming in. But what’s worked for me is to always be willing and able to ‘shift’ the strategy a bit. Sure, that recurring revenue from an ongoing client is great. But when that changes and you lose some of that recurring revenue, be willing to change the services that you’re offering. That goes for agencies and freelancers like myself. And that’s what I love about the search industry and digital marketing industry–it’s always changing, and there’s always a challenge.
