The essential guide to developing effective agency skills

Marketing agencies play an important role for businesses of all sizes by helping them identify solutions to their pain points and centralizing access to tools and expertise that aid in running their business more efficiently and profitably. More than a middle-man, agencies are often seen as integral partners by their clients. 

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But to earn the position of a valued partner, sharpening the right agency skills is a must. In this blog post, we’ll go over the most critical competencies that startup agencies and seasoned pros should develop in the areas of business development, project management, creativity, financial management, and performance tracking.

Business development skills

Business development abilities are non-negotiable when it comes to the roster of agency skills needed for success. Without them, you won’t be able to boost your agency revenue, no matter how great your solutions or team are. These refer to the ability to identify new opportunities, attract clients, and maintain those relationships long-term. Let’s break these down into specific skills you can practice.

Networking

Effective networking gets you in front of prospective clients and collaborators. Attending or speaking at industry events, engaging in online communities, and fostering relationships with influencers in your market can help you broaden your reach and make new connections.  

Lead generation

Masters of business development should be adept at using different channels to generate high-quality leads and assess their potential value. This can include a mix of digital marketing techniques, content marketing, and old-school outreach.

Strategic planning

Any good marketing strategy begins with research to understand your niche and target audience. It also encompasses understanding your specific clients on a granular level by learning their needs and pain points. Finally, with this information, you can align your agency’s strategy with the opportunities that exist on the ground. The key to this agency skill is to respond to current demands and have your finger on the pulse of new developments and trends on the horizon.

Client relationship management

Every successful agency understands the importance of client satisfaction and loyalty. Fostering these two aspects is having exceptional client relationship management skills. Without them, you’ll always feel like you’re running on a hamster wheel trying to get new clients to replace existing ones that are being hemorrhaged.  Client relationship management involves ongoing communication, the ability to adapt to their changing needs, and consistent, high-quality results.

Project management skills

The orchestration of many tasks, resources, and timelines is an unavoidable part of running a digital agency. This balancing act demands a strategic approach to ensure that client expectations—and your agency goals—are met efficiently and on deadline. There’s only upside to honing these project management agency skills.

• Learn to set clear objectives. Both internally and externally, your projects and goals should be clearly articulated and measurable. That way, all parties involved will be on the same page about what success looks like. It also ensures that everyone involved in a project can align their efforts instead of working in a disjointed, ineffective manner.
• Master the art of planning and sticking to a project timeline. The key to creating project timelines that help you succeed is being realistic. This doesn’t mean you can’t set challenging goals, but it does mean they should be achievable. Break down tasks and set milestones based on the resources you realistically have available.
• Allocate your resources effectively. Your resources as an agency can include your staff time, the white-label digital marketing agency you work with, your operating budget, and your software solutions. Effectively managing these resources is an agency skill that project managers require for optimizing efficiency, maintaining the quality of your services, and avoiding burnout.
• Implement a reliable system for managing multiple competing deadlines. Juggling multiple projects simultaneously is the norm in agency life. Project managers should have a system for prioritizing, delegating, and checking on progress across a variety of clients and initiatives at once.

Use the right communication channels. Project managers should foster an environment of open communication. This can include regular client check ins, feedback sessions, and internal brainstorming meetings. Using channels or platforms that centralize communications and make it easy to refer back to past correspondence can also help projects stay organized and on schedule.

Creative skills

Clients want to work with agencies that think outside the box and bring a unique flair to their campaigns. Creativity is often what sets an expectation-smashing campaign apart from one that simply gets the job done. The digital world is crowded and distracting, so creatively crafted brand identities, content, and campaigns are needed to stand out and capture the attention of audiences.  Focus on these agency skills to level up your creativity.

Ideation

All the best campaigns begin with a good idea, and the more you practice generating ideas, the likelier you are to land on a winning one. Brainstorming and ideation sessions should be a regular practice. Similarly, carving out time to stay current on interesting campaigns and approaches by other agencies can sharpen your creative skills.

Graphic design

We live in a visual culture, with endless stimulating images and videos coming across our screens daily. That’s why the visual side of digital marketing can deliver such impactful results. Graphic design skills include branding, social media and marketing collateral graphics, website mockups, and more.

Copywriting

The flip side of living in such a visually saturated culture is that attention spans are limited, and copy has to get its point across quickly and effectively. Crafting persuasive and engaging copy, often while being brief, is a subtle agency skill that can take campaigns to the next level. 

Storytelling

The creative skills we’ve discussed so far—ideation, graphic design, and copywriting—should all work in service of a compelling brand or product story. This ability to tie together disparate components of a creative campaign can set your agency apart by making your campaigns extra memorable and emotionally evocative.

Financial skills

Growth can be costly, and successful agencies manage the balance of growing their business and signing new clients while keeping costs and profit margins in check. These financial agency skills can help you do just that.

• Master budget creation and management. Agencies can allocate budgetary resources judiciously across projects. This requires a strong understanding of fixed costs and variable costs, as well as a good model for predicting—and growing— your agency’s profits.
• Learn to analyze data and apply the insights you glean. This applies both to internal data and metrics and to those relating to client campaigns. A data-driven approach to financial tracking promotes informed decision-making over guessing or wishful thinking, allowing you to maximize how far each dollar goes.
• Stay focused on profitability. Keeping an eye on performance metrics is important, but make sure that vanity metrics aren’t prioritized over the bottom line. You should always ensure that your efforts—both internally and on client projects— stay on budget and deliver healthy profit margins. 

Performance tracking skills

Data is more plentiful than ever today, and knowing which data to focus on is a powerful agency skill that will help you maximize the outcomes of your campaigns. Measuring and optimizing digital marketing data lets you take an iterative approach to your client campaigns, regularly improving the value your agency delivers. The result is satisfied, long-term customers: the key to any successful agency.

Here's a breakdown of the key skills that empower marketing agencies to become top-tier performance trackers:

• Define the critical key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketing software today provides access to a wide range of KPIs, and it’s important to know which ones to focus on for each campaign. There isn’t a single bundle of KPIs that are always appropriate. Instead, these should be defined based on your client’s campaign goals and objectives. For example, a digital ad campaign focused on brand awareness might prioritize campaign views, while one focused on selling a new project might focus on cost per acquisition (CPA).
• Use the right analytics tools for the job. You don’t need to manually crunch the numbers to arrive at your KPIs. Instead, make sure your agency has the right software tools on deck to easily and quickly pull the relevant KPIs and track campaign performance.
• Employ sophisticated data analysis techniques. While analytics tools can give you all the data you need to make decisions, it takes some data analysis know-how to get the most out of the information. Think about how you’re interpreting the data: for example, are you effectively breaking it down by audience segment or marketing channel? Like all things digital marketing-related, data analysis is part science and part art, and developing this agency skill can help you create next-level campaigns.

Conclusion

Running a successful digital marketing agency is no cakewalk. Competing against other agencies requires a wide range of skills that include: 

• Developing the business and landing new clients 
• Managing a range of complex projects
• Producing creative campaigns
• Staying on top of finances 
• Tracking performance both on the agency side and the client side 

By honing these agency skills, you can make yourself an indispensable partner for your business clients, by making their lives easier by providing comprehensive, effective solutions to their marketing needs.