If you own a marketing firm, SEO consulting firm, or an agency, then you know that competition is fierce for signing up new clients.  All you have to do is go to an industry trade show in your area to realize just how many competitors you have right in your geographic area.

The way to stand out from the crowd and get noticed by highly qualified prospects is to create a unique position for your firm.

There are three huge benefits to position yourself:

First, you will know exactly who your ideal is so that you don’t waste time with individuals who aren’t a good fit for your services.

Second, you will establish yourself as an authority figure in your niche or domain.

And third, your firm will realize extremely fast growth.

Below are four ways that your agency can position itself so that you can experience fast growth.

Solve a single problem

It’s very tempting to be everything to everyone.  How many firms tout themselves as a “one stop shop for all of your social media needs” or a “full service marketing agency”.

Zack Linford, the founder of Conversion Voodoo took the exact opposite approach.  Instead of doing everything, his company does exactly one thing:  optimize landing pages.

In order to build a fully optimized landing page, you need a team of at least four specialists:

• A designer who understands how to lay out the page and which colors to use
• A copywriter who can get visitors to take action
• A software developer
• An analyst to ensure that the landing page is optimized and can run the appropriate tests

With that kind of talent on his team, Zack can do pretty much any type of marketing that he wants.  But there are a couple of advantages to only specializing in conversions.

It’s more cost efficient:  Sure, Conversion Voodoo can also build websites, or blogs, or Web Apps, but specializing in landing pages keeps costs down.

By only doing one thing, the team becomes skilled at it.  They know the intricacies of building great landing pages.  And the better they become at building landing pages, the quicker they can crank them out.  So each page becomes cheaper and cheaper to build, increasing their profit margins.

Become an authority:  If your business is struggling to convert traffic into sales, who would you turn to:  The full service agency that also does SEO, Facebook marketing, blogging, and website design or the company whose entire staff is dedicated to converting traffic into sales?

It’s a no brainer.  You are going to hire the company whose entire focus is solving your specific problem.

Your Take Away

By focusing your talent on solving one unique problem, you will be able to keep costs down and become an authority in your domain space.  This will lead to more clients at a much higher profit margin than being yet another full service marketing agency.

Serve a specific niche

It’s really hard to serve everyone.  Even just narrowing it down to B2B or B2C is still a bit too broad.

For instance, in the B2B space, it takes two different skill sets to sell a $100 item and a $10,000 item.  If you are a marketing agency, you need to have a great understanding of the sales cycle involved in both of these transactions.

Likewise, it takes two different skill sets to help an ecommerce site sell more products and help a Dentist grow his practice.

When you work in one specific industry, you will know exactly who to target when you are prospecting for more clients and you will know exactly how to help them.

This will drastically reduce your learning curve when you are trying to get brought up to speed with the intricacies of their business and their customers.

Your Take Away

Find a specific niche where you can leverage the skill set of your team.  This will help you understand exactly where you should be spending time trying to sign up new clients.  For instance, the folks at DDS should hit every dentist trade show that they can find.  Why?  Because that’s where Dentists looking to grow their practice will be.

Guarantee

Guarantees have long been a staple of positioning companies, but in the marketing space, it seems far too rare.

The above image was taken from the Conversion Voodoo website as was the following quote:

“If you don’t see at least a 15% rise in your online profits… we work for FREE. We don’t get paid until our services pay off for you! So we both win!”

As a marketing agency, you might not be able to make a performance guarantee like an increase of online profits.  At times, you simply have no control over your client’s sales process, or the quality of their products.

But there are other guarantees that you can make.  For instance, my company guaranteed sales leads in 30 days.  At the beginning of the working relationship, the client and my team agreed on what was a sales lead.  However, we never put a specific number on the amount of leads we would get for them.

If your company makes Facebook fan pages, you can guarantee a fully customized fan page in 2 days.  Or you can guarantee that you can get the client at least 100 fans using the Facebook advertising platform.

Your Take Away

A money back guarantee of some kind always eases the barrier to getting someone to work with you.  Any time an agency or consultant can use a guarantee to position their company, they will immediately stand out from the crowd.  Most of the time the prospective client is more concerned about wasting their money on bad marketing than they are about the price of your service.

Free Trial

Working for free for a month like Quick SEO Results does is an obvious option to attract prospects, especially if you have a retainer based service like SEO.

So instead of trying to sell you on this, let me talk a bit about the pit falls.

When we were looking for clients to try our Sales Leads in Thirty Days marketing system, we offered free thirty day trials.  We were able to get quite a bit of traction and did quite a few free trials.  The problem was at the end of the month, many of the “prospects” never signed up for the second month.

In other words, we did all of that work for nothing.

It wasn’t necessarily that the work we did was bad, it was that we did a poor job qualifying the individuals who we gave free trials to.

It turned out that our Sales Leads in Thirty Days process was great for higher end software, technology, and service offerings, but not so much for everyone else.  The company selling a $10 per month software wasn’t really interested in paying for a $7,500 per month marketing service.  They just couldn’t justify the cost.

So, my warning is this:  Make sure that you know exactly who your ideal customer is, and make sure that you fully validate a prospect before offering them a free trial.

Your Take Away

A 30 day free trial is a great way to position yourself and sign up new prospects.  But you need to be careful that you don’t waste time doing free trials for prospects who have no intention of paying you after the free trial is over.

Conclusion

In conclusion, these are four strategies that your marketing agency can adopt today position itself to sign up new clients.  I have no doubt that there are other ways to do this, but just make srue that your firm or agency doesn’t sound like all of your competitors.