Have a steady stream of leads but trouble finding good clients? If you’re struggling to win RFPs, have clients with unreasonable expectations, or clients who are unwilling to pay you what you’re worth, you might have a lead generation problem.

Let’s dive into four ways to find amazing clients for your agency.

Define Your Best Client

You may whip out buyer personas for your clients – but are you using them for your agency? Make sure you know who you’re chasing so you can bring the right client in the door.

Start by looking at your favorite clients. What do they have in common? Maybe it’s the type of projects you’re working on for them, the client’s size or that they generate the most revenue for your agency. Use these details to flesh out what an ideal client looks like so you can be intentional about finding more clients just like them.

Need a bit of inspiration? Our Buyer Persona Workbook can help you identify your ideal client in a jiffy.

Look Into Your Lead Sources

Now that you know who you want to attract, you can get better at driving quality leads for your agency. Take an audit of all of your digital channels to make sure your marketing efforts sync up with your target client.

Organic Traffic: Are you hitting the topics that resonate with the type of clients you want? Revisit your website and blog and make sure your content is in line with your target client. Maybe you have the bases covered on broad, top-of-funnel topics, but need to bolster your content strategy with content that solves unique problems your target clients are facing.

Online Advertising: The money you put into your digital advertising efforts today won’t be there tomorrow. Once it’s spent on acquiring a lead, it’s spent. So don’t spend on bad leads that won’t convert – or that will be a headache for your agency. If you’re having a hard time finding good clients through paid channels, try adjusting your targeting criteria. Or, even jump to a new channel if your current paid mix isn’t getting the job done.

Social Media: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can be valuable tools when attracting clients – but not if you’re spending time in all of the wrong places.

Browse through your followers. Are you attracting businesses in your target niche? Or just other like-minded agencies?

Take an inventory of the groups you participate in. If engagement is high, but the types of clients you want to work with just aren’t there, consider adjusting your strategy or even putting your time and energy into a different social group or platform.

Social Ads: Once you’ve optimized your followers and groups for quality leads, you can be even more successful at leveraging the power of social ads to target your ideal client. Targeting rules can target your followers and tap into “look-a-like” audiences that match the same criteria, expanding your reach and driving higher quality leads to your agency.

Share Your Rates

Tired of getting cheap clients that don’t want to pay you what you’re worth? You might want to experiment with sharing your rates on your website. This way, you can weed out leads who aren’t really serious about paying you market price.

You can even test different pricing structures to see what resonates with your ideal client. For instance, maybe you can make your service offering more attractive by packaging services and technology together. Or, perhaps add-on services can increase customer lifetime value for every client you sign.

Set up a Qualification Process

Not every lead is going to be your ideal client. Even as you tighten up your channels to bring in better leads for your agency, you still don’t want to spend a lot of time chasing clients who aren’t going to be a good fit.

Come up with a few qualifying questions to help you determine if a lead will be a good client before you go through the work of meeting with them and designing a proposal.

Marketing automation software can help you set the process into place. From your lead intake form, you can easily set up campaigns and workflows to deliver ideal clients to your desk, while nurturing leads who may not be quite ready for your process, and gently letting down those who just aren’t a good fit.

There’s nothing more frustrating than working with difficult clients who don’t value your agency or who weren’t a match to begin with. So carve out some time to nail down your radical buyer, optimize your lead channels, experiment with pricing and automate lead qualification so you can work with the clients and projects you love most. Your team and your bottom line with thank you later.

March Madness is just around the corner. The annual NCAA basketball tournament is one of the biggest events in college athletics, averaging around 12 million viewers per game in recent years. Big games and hot rivalries can net nearly 30 million viewers in some cases.

In 2018, over 97 million people watched the tournament from the First Four to the Final Four. For anyone who’s ever wondered why so many businesses seem to flock to March Madness each year, these numbers are your answer.

As a marketing agency, your company should be invested in March Madness as well. Whether you’ve been riding the wave of March Madness for years or are just starting to look for ways to use the tournament to boost your agency and clients, here are a few tried-and-true suggestions for how you can make the most of the annual tournament.

Online Bracket Contests

Social media is a great tool for companies wanting to increase their contact and brand awareness with consumers. This isn’t always easy to do, but March Madness gives you an amazing opportunity to increase social interactions without a significant investment. Creating tournament brackets is a popular fan activity, and bracket contests are pretty common these days. By leveraging the power of social media, you can take the standard bracket contest and make it even better.

Hosting an online bracket contest and promoting it through social media reduces the cost of the contest and makes it accessible to a larger number of potential customers. Your primary costs will be the cost of prizes that you give out, as your social media platforms and fans sharing contest-related posts will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Basketball-Related Promotions

During March Madness, a lot of NCAA fans have basketball on the brain. You can incorporate this into your advertising and promotions to encourage sports fans to engage with the clients you’re promoting. While there are countless ways to pull this off, here are a few suggestions:

• Create basketball-themed emails and other advertising
• Design basketball swag for giveaways (like printed foam basketballs or small items like keychains)
• Sponsor basketball trivia nights at local sports bars
• Sponsor spring youth sports events or high school basketball tournaments in the lead-up to March Madness

Just be careful not to take too many creative liberties while creating promotions; March Madness and its related properties are all trademarked terms, so using them without proper licensing could get you in hot water with the NCAA.

Follow the Trends

Every year, #MarchMadness and similar hashtags start trending on social media as fans connect and discuss the games. This is a great time to promote any online contests or other promotions you’re holding, adding the hashtag (and other trending tags) to ride the trending wave to further exposure.

Depending on the relevance to the company you’re representing, you could even offer insights or commentary about recent games so that your posts don’t seem like empty promotion. Even if the post is from a company that doesn’t directly relate to college basketball, a post that shows someone actually watches the games before getting on social media could go a long way toward getting attention in the trending lists.

Adapt with the Action

One of the big challenges with marketing around March Madness is that there are a lot of teams that go through a bracket in a fairly short period of time. The games are often unpredictable, with quite a few major upsets and surprises popping up each year. It’s difficult to come up with a marketing plan that covers the entirety of March Madness just because you never know how things will go until each game is underway.

If you’ve got someone in your office who is really into NCAA basketball, though, it’s possible to stay on top of the latest changes and post about them as they happen. If you wait until the next day or just jump on the biggest trends, your marketing might fall flat. But if posts and adaptable promotions reflect the fact that someone is right there with the fans as the action unfolds, more fans will embrace your content. That’s great for you and your clients, since it means your message really has fans’ attention.

Promote Around Local Teams

March Madness includes a lot of teams, and not all of them are from big-name schools. You’ve got big names like the Kentucky Wildcats and the Michigan Wolverines that everyone knows, but also competing are teams like the Bucknell Bison, the Cal State Fullerton Titans and the Murray State Racers. Is a local college team getting a shot at March Madness this year? Focus your promotions around local pride instead of trying to target the whole tournament itself. You’re sure to get a great response from the surrounding community.

Host Viewing Parties

One last way to capitalize on March Madness is to partner with bars, local restaurants and even event centers and try to organize viewing parties for some of the big games. Fans (and even potential clients) will come together to join in the fun, and you and your clients will reap the benefits of sponsorship.

It’s a great place to hand out swag and tie in other promotions as well. While some of these parties may take a bit of effort to pull together, the end result is generally well worth it.

March Madness is one of the most anticipated sporting events of the year, and incorporating it into your marketing strategies can energize your message. Keep the promotions and tie-ins natural, and you can harness the excitement of the tournament to bring more potential customers to your brand.

As a growing agency, it can be difficult to balance lead generation with client deliverables. In order to deliver top-notch work, you may not always be as focused as you should on drumming up new business.

And when you do have the time to focus on finding new leads, it’s confusing to know where to focus your efforts. Want to know what the most under-tapped lead generation method is?

Your existing network!

This is a snippet from my weekly Mastermind sessions I host for my Remote Agency Society members.

As entrepreneurs, we’re so busy being pulled in a million directions that we tend to underestimate the power of our existing networks. Many of the contacts in your network include relationships that you’ve been building for years. With people who know and like you! A lead really doesn’t get more qualified than that.

You never know who can introduce you to your next dream client. We all have so many overlooked connections we aren’t leveraging such as:

• Former clients
• Past bosses and co-workers
• Vendors
• Tradeshow or conference attendees
• LinkedIn connections
• Mentors

Keeping in touch with these connections is a simple, free way to fill your sales pipeline.

By periodically reaching out to let people know what you’re up to and who you’re focused on helping, you’re increasing your chances of receiving referrals. And we all know that referrals are the easiest types of clients to close.

So why aren’t you keeping in touch with them?

As an entrepreneur, you don’t have enough time in the day to constantly be sending email after email. That’s where a CRM and marketing automation tool comes in handy. It’s simple to leverage a tool like Hatchbuck to send out personalized emails to your closest connections.

The beauty of a CRM is that you’ve got all of your contacts at your fingertips and personalization can happen at scale. You can easily send bulk text-based emails that are personalized with their first name, company name or other personal information you’d like to include so that the recipient really feels like you’re speaking directly to them. And unless they’re super savvy, they won’t realize your emails are even coming from your marketing automation platform.

A simple “Hi [first name], how have you been? I wanted to say hello and tell you what I’ve been up to recently. I’d love to see if there is anything I can do to help you.” is more than enough to re-engage old connections. And you’ll be able to keep tabs on who is opening your emails even if they forget to respond!

So before you spend your hard-earned money on expensive lead generation channels, take a look at your existing network. That old co-worker or former client may be the key to winning your next big account. You’ll never know until you ask!

If you’re looking for more ways to attract NEW clients for your agency, I reveal my simple process for attracting high-paying clients with ease in my free masterclass.

Author Bio

Mandy McEwen is Founder & CEO of Mod Girl Marketing, a digital marketing agency based in California. She is the creator of 8+ digital marketing courses where she helps marketing consultants and startup agencies scale faster. She was listed by Search Engine Journal as a top 12 SEO expert and was named a top 10 agency growth coach by BloggerLocal. Mandy’s Facebook group, Mod Agency Insiders, was named a top marketing group to join by Inc.

Time management is important for any business, but it’s especially important in the agency world where time is money. Making effective use of time helps to ensure that client campaigns and deliverables are finished on time, which in turn ensures that clients are happy and likely to offer up repeat business.

Even knowing this, however, many agencies have problems managing time and keeping things progressing at an even pace especially as client counts ebb and flow.

While there are a lot of ways to approach the time management issue, it typically doesn’t require any drastic changes to your workplace. Instead, you can implement strategies to improve time management little by little. Here are just a few ways that you can improve time management in your office and get everything running much smoother in no time.

Set Goals Every Day

There are few things that will get your employees on-task faster than having them set goals every day before they begin working. These don’t have to be large, far-reaching goals. Instead, have them set goals for just what they want to accomplish that day. Each goal can be broken down into milestones, giving the employee achievable steps that will move him or her toward that daily goal at a reasonable pace.

Use a Timer

Setting a timer can really help your employees stay on task, provided that the timer is set for reasonable time increments. This can be any sort of timer, from a standard kitchen timer to productivity-focused timer software or apps. The goal is to block off small periods of time that the employee can devote to a single task, helping them to avoid distractions by making it easier to put the distraction off until the timer runs out.

Try an Activity Tracker

If you really want to get a handle on time management in your office, it’s important that you learn where the most time is being lost. Activity trackers are great at that. There are a number of smartphone activity trackers, though you can also use activity tracking software like Toggl and Clockify on your agency computers. Regardless of the route you choose, the programs will help you determine exactly when and where time is being lost and what it’s being wasted on.

Consider the 1-3-5 Rule

One problem that many agencies have is figuring out how to prioritize different tasks among their employees. The 1-3-5 rule is a potential solution to this. The rule is pretty simple:

• Choose 1 big task to tackle each day
• Choose 3 medium-sized tasks to work on each day
• Choose 5 small tasks to work on each day

This rule works well in an agency environment as each employee can headline a different task as his or her “big” item for the day, then assist with other projects to fill out the medium and small tasks. This creates a collaborative environment where your employees brainstorm and help stoke each other’s creative fires, while still allowing everyone to take the lead on certain aspects of the workload.

By prioritizing the various common tasks of your agency in this way, everything will get done faster without having to worry about who’s going to be assigned which tasks.

Take Breaks

In some offices, the culture dictates that breaks should be minimized to keep everyone more productive. If you want to get the most out of your employees’ time, however, the opposite is actually true. Frequent short breaks actually improve productivity by giving the mind time to relax between periods of focus. Once the break is over, the employee can return to work with a renewed vigor and will likely get more done during the day as a result.

Cut Out the Multitasking

Here’s another one that might sound counterintuitive at first. If you want to get more done at work, get rid of the multitasking mindset. But haven’t we been told for years that multitasking is the way to become more efficient on the job? Yes…but it turns out that that’s actually some bad advice.

The human brain just isn’t wired for multitasking and trying to tackle multiple things at once largely just ensures that everything takes longer to complete. Instead, focus on a single task until completion and move on to the next task once it’s done. If a task is too large to finish all at once, break it up into milestone segments and focus on completing a segment before moving on to the next task.

Establish Accountability

If every day starts with setting goals, every day should end with reviewing what was accomplished. This doesn’t have to be a public accounting of goals met and missed, but each employee should at the very least send an email or write a note detailing anything that they had on their goal list which just didn’t get done. This will show you what your employees were working on while also showing them which parts of their workflow might need adjusting in the future.