Nick Krause Marketing Analytics and Search Enginge Management Lead

The Problem

Those who spent any significant amount of time in the agency space know that a key to success once landing a client is to identify and upsell other aspects of digital marketing.

Not only does diversying what your agency provides mean you have a higher income per client, this strategy allows you to build trust in various aspects of their business. It leads the way for more refferals among their business peers and builds a ton of trust that your services integrate with and compliment their business goals.

It can be advertising, SEO, web devlopment, or content. The terms under which your agency comes into a relationship with a client are often different than the ones you have one, two, or three years later.

With all businessess there are variances in their internal structures, priority on different aspects of digital marketing, policy of use of vendors, and quite frankly, comfortability, with delegating out apsects of their digital marketing out to an agency or any ourside force.

Any agency worth their weight has pre-built mechanisims in place to maximize what services they provide to each client. This way they spread out their value among different facets of their client's business in additon to ensuring that their offerings are working in conjuction with one another as best as possible.

If I build a client a custom dashboard that measures and analyzies the success of a their blog content, wouldn't I also want to have a hand in producing that content?

Having a say in their content production means you can provide relevant high-value keywords and have influence in their content calendar. Then your dashboard is reporting on your very own success with content and you're keeping your client engaged whilist having numerous fresh talking points about another aspect of their business.

Okay, so adding new services to a client's bill is probably a worthwhile investment. The question remains: how do you ultimately convince them that you should be the one to do it?

Directly baking ideas like SEO Due Dillegence into the core of your marketing proceess allows you to find entry points to expand and excite your client base.

Designer Italian Shoes

The Background

One client of mine sold high quality designer shoes for women in three store locations as well as online.

My agency had worked with this business for a few years. They mainly signed on to provide email marketing support, web development support, and creatives for sales/promotions.

The agency had consistently done a fantastic job on these deliverables and the relationship was positive.

As manager of pay-per-click and SEO I didn't have a reason to be involved in these meetings as our offerings were generally outside of my scope. I made my feelings clear that I should sit in on our monthly client call nonetheless in case any questions that pretained to my expertise did arise.

Finding a New Need

After sitting in on a few calls I noticied a drop in excitment levels from our client.

It felt like our relationship was going through the motions. Normally this isn't necessarily a negative thing. However, unless new web development work or promotional work came in, our client began to not fill up our hourly retainer on the occasional month.

We liked working with this client. We appreciated the business owner and we by no means wanted to end our engagement. That said, we had increasing demands from other clients and had to make a decision on how we wanted to move forward.

I always make an effort to run a few reports on a client's current digital landscape regardless of my engagements with them. In my investigative work, one of the tests for this client was a scan of their online directory listings.

This was an easy report to run using one of my marketing tools and right away I noticied something significant that the client would want to know.

Discount vs. Designer

In numerous online directorys in the fashion, retail, and businessess directories that populate the internet, I noticied that the client's business name was shown as including the verbiage "discount shoes".

A little backstory on why this was significant. The business owner had inherited the company from her mother many years ago, back when their invetory was less designer and more discount. The new owner had studied fashion in Italy, fallen in love high-end designer shoes, and worked hard to pivot the busienss to one that sells much higher-end products.

She set-up a store in Paris, New York, and Chicago in high-income areas with a purporse to import and sell designer Italian brands.

The news that her hard work would result in her old "discounted shoes" branding being plastered all over these listings would very much interest her to hear, to say the least.

At our next meeting I brought up this problem. I explained the impact on her hard work in terms of rebarnding the company. I also explained how this impacted things like voice search, as large data aggreators pulled their information from these listings.

Directory Listing Report

The Results

Just a little due dillegence goes a long way. Thankfully we had already worked hard to earn the trust of our client but the revelation of their brand messagning disparities deeply resonated with the business owner.

I asked if we could run some more reports on their organic presence online. From the success of their content and keyword strategies to their visability online among their competitors.

Within the next few months we had signed a deal to take on their SEO needs and since we had worked with them in other sectors of their digital marketing, we were more than prepared to do so.