Why You Must “Become Your Own Client” If You Want To Grow Your Marketing Agency

Becoming your own client is one of the highest value things you can do in your agency that will ensure growth for years to come.

Why You Must “Become Your Own Client” If You Want To Grow Your Marketing Agency

Becoming your own client is one of the highest value things you can do in your agency that will ensure growth for years to come.

Let’s face it, growing an agency month over month on word of mouth alone is downright hard. You’re never sure of where your next client is coming from, and when. Not feeling in control of your agency’s revenue growth is tough.

What’s worse, you know you’re not getting the amount of clients your agency deserves. You seemingly do everything “right”. You have great communication, produce great results, and have amazing relationships with your client roster. You put in the extra hours to ensure your clients are happy.

Neglecting Your Agencies Own Marketing Efforts

Except most agencies do this to a fault, and don’t bother to spend any time marketing themselves. This would be like expecting one of your clients to grow their revenue without doing any marketing…chances are you’d laugh at them if you heard them say that.

What most agencies don’t realize is that’s EXACTLY what they’re doing right now. We hear things all the time like “there’s never enough time to do it” or “all our time is taken up by client work” and marketing/branding themselves is never a “priority”.

According to DataBox, only 10.5% of agencies are satisfied with their sales & marketing efforts for their own agency and is listed as the #1 area of needed improvement.

Are you part of the other 89.5% who is unsatisfied & tired of feeling like your agency is living in obscurity?

So How Can You Start Marketing Your Agency Differently?

As marketers, we get so wrapped up in getting our clients results (which is still necessary to keep clients, don’t get it twisted) that it often comes at the expense of our own marketing efforts and we neglect our own deal flow.

So how do we break this cycle?

You should become your own client.

This means you’d do the exact same things for your agency as you would any client.

Meaning, if you make content for e-com brands? Get used to ideating, scheduling, and making content for your own social channels (Instagram Reels, TikTok, LinkedIn video, YouTube Shorts, etc.)

Email/SMS Agency? Cool, have a weekly email newsletter that goes out breaking down email/SMS flows you like/don’t and what you see working & not.

SEO agency? Prioritize your writing resources to write content for you to attract clients. Build valuable links for yourself.

Committing To The Process Of Agency Growth

And, the hardest part of it all is committing to it consistently and actually doing it. The reality is, I know the vast majority of readers won’t take this information and implement it, but the ones who do will enjoy higher profits, more consistent client acquisition, and more satisfaction as a founder.

So what does it actually look like in practice?

Documenting In A Project Management Tool

This includes slotting your agency into the project management tool as a client in a platform like ClickUp, Monday, Asana, etc. and listing out all the tasks, subitems, etc. of marketing yourself.

It might be helpful to actually just clone one of the boards you use for one of your clients, and edit it to suit your own agency.

Assigning Who’s Owning It

You need someone who’s going to hold the rest of the team accountable to actually implementing this, even when schedules get busy. Make sure you don’t skip this step or the whole project is sure to fall to the side.

They should be delegating roles & responsibilities around this project to the appropriate team members.

Setting Goals & Tracking KPIs

Setting goals & tracking KPIs…

You wouldn’t have a client that isn’t interested in the actual results produced from your efforts, and you shouldn’t be any different.

Before starting the efforts for yourself, define what success looks like for you.

What are your goals?

What revenue threshold do we want to be at?

How many leads do you need to get to that revenue threshold?

Then reverse engineer the numbers from there. In fact, we’ve made it really easy to do this with our 7-Figure Agency Tool.

You can make a free copy of it here, and plug in your numbers to see where you may end up at the end of the year revenue wise.

Tracking Time

Just like with clients, it’s important to know how much time is going where. This would be a non-billable project given that it’s for your own agency. We always want to be cognizant of where our time resources are going.

Make sure your team knows they’ll need to do this as well. Ideally, you wouldn’t want this to take up more than 10% of your team's monthly utilization.

You get the idea.

Actually Do It

This is one of the best investments you can make for your future cash flow - and while efforts might start off slow, time and compounding efforts are on your side. If you do this consistently, you have a lot of new revenue to look forward to!

Every successful agency we’ve seen & worked with has their own marketing down to a science, and I look forward to you operating in the same way.

If you liked this read and want the next level of insights to scale your marketing agency, book a quick call with us below where we’ll go through our 20-point agency audit and see where you’re at in the agency growth journey, and exactly what you’ll need to do to get there.

Start Scaling