What makes a great marketing agency?

The success of any agency is dependent on a lot of different factors, but there is one thing that rings true regardless of your unique objectives or best practices: in order to thrive, you need to make yourself indispensable to your clients.

It’s never a good thing to lose a client. And if you lose multiple clients, you may find that your entire operation is in peril. Your best bet is to do everything in your power to ensure that your clients are satisfied, including — but not limited to — providing them with stellar results.

The more indispensable you are to your clients, the more long-term success you’ll have. With that in mind, here are some tips for making it happen.

1. Hire the Best Talent Possible

Marketing is a people-first type of business. While agencies may spend a lot of time wrapped up in numbers and analytics, human-to-human interactions are at the core of what you do, and it’s important that every single person who represents your agency is putting their best foot forward.

When onboarding new talent, pay attention not just to their experience but to how they fit in with your agency’s culture, values, and overall mission. The stronger team you can build, the better your employees will work together — and the better work they’ll provide to your clients.

2. Put a lot of Effort into Your Branding

It’s important that you don’t neglect your own branding efforts while you’re busy working on your clients’ brands. After all, your ability to push the limits in personal branding speaks a lot to your skills, and it’s one of the best ways to maintain ongoing authority in the industry.

Make sure that you’re prioritizing your agency marketing and branding efforts on social media and your personal website, including ongoing content creation efforts and the pursuit of partnerships. In addition to showing your clients you’ve got your fingers on the pulse of branding best practices, this should help you pick up new clients too.

3. Perfect Your Process

Indispensable marketing agencies never settle for “just okay.” From how you create and deliver work to your clients to the results that you net, it’s essential that you iron out as many kinks as possible to ensure that everything moves along seamlessly (or that it at least appears to from the outside).

How you make this happen is up to you. You could survey your clients to see what they love about working with you (and what could use a little work). You can check in with your account team to see how your clients are doing and what about your process they’re responding well to. Whatever your strategy is, strive to ensure that the work you create yields the highest quality output for your clients and that you deliver it in a way that shows your work is high-quality, and your team is invaluable.

4. Incorporate Team-building and Professional Development Programs

If you want to strengthen your business, you have to invest in programs that will strengthen your workforce.

Encourage continued growth among your team members and bake it into your company structure to avoid stagnancy and complacency. One way to approach this: treat your agency like a school, providing plenty of professional development learning opportunities outside of on-the-job tasks. If you incentivize these types of activities and keep them light and fun, you should have no trouble getting your staff involved — and reduce employee turnover in the process.

5. Put Your Clients First, but Put Your Agency Second

A lot of agencies put their clients first. There’s nothing wrong with that; however, along the way, they forget to pay attention to the inner workings of their own agency, including employee satisfaction and company culture. (And as we all know, happy employees equal happy clients.)

If you want to thrive, then you need to dedicate time and effort to internal growth and success. Trust us, even though they aren’t involved in the day to day of your operations, your clients can tell the difference between an agency that’s running smoothly and an agency that’s running on fumes.

6. Have the Right Tools

The world of marketing is constantly evolving, which means that your agency needs to be evolving too. Like it or not, the things that work well for your clients one year might not provide the same results the next year, and you have to constantly be adapting in order to keep meeting the mark on performance.

Always be on the lookout for the latest marketing tools, features, and platforms. The tools you use, like marketing automation, social publishing, or content editing, not only benefit you, but they benefit your clients. The better the tools are that you use, the bigger the edge you’re able to offer your clients and the happier you’ll be able to keep them.

Is Your Agency Indispensable?

There are some common markers to indispensable agencies. These include the practices above, but they also go a step further. If you truly care about how your clients perform — not just because it keeps them around but because it speaks to your own integrity as an agency —  then chances are high you have plenty of happy customers to boot. Always strive to do your best, and you can be confident that sustainable success will follow.