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How to Sell Digital Marketing Services to Local Businesses

The art of selling digital marketing services

There are 10s of thousands of local businesses still in need of digital marketing services.

Despite its prevalence over the past 15 or so years, digital marketing is still growing at a rapid rate.

The average business owner still has little to no knowledge of internet marketing. This is both a good thing because it pins you as the expert and a bad thing because it means you’ll have to sell companies on the value of online strategies.

Yet, our goal isn’t to sell digital marketing to resistant individuals.

In fact, this article will show you how to sell digital marketing to local businesses in a way that is easy for both you and your prospects.

No longer do you have to grind your teeth talking to uninterested, uninformed, and unprofitable companies that waste your agency’s resources.

There’s a better way…

 

Lead Generation

The digital sales process begins at the conception of your company.

Most people want to jump straight to promotion and neglect the entire structure of their offer.

How are you different? What is your irresistible offer? These are the questions most agencies neglect to answer.

However, I won’t dive into the details of your offer as we’ve already written about that here on this blog. Instead, we’ll jump straight to the juicy info everyone wants to hear about: lead generation.

The fastest way to produce leads for your digital marketing agency is likely through some form of cold outreach.

Cold calls are not dead! (if you know what you’re doing)

The effectiveness has decreased though with the emergence of number blocking technology and saturation in the market.

Businesses have been getting bombarded with cold calls for so long now that they rarely penetrate habitual awareness.

Instead, we now have to invest more resources into alternative paths to maintain the lead flow previously experienced.

video audits to sell marketing clients

Video Audits

Customized prospecting and outreach are the future of digital sales.

There are countless ways to customize your approach and automate the entire process with the help of internet technologies.

One growing trend, still highly underutilized in sales, is video.

This strategy for digital lead gen. consists of cold emails and video audits.

The idea is to send initial emails to potential prospects adding value and mentioning an audit you performed around their existing internet marketing presence.

The catch here is that you don’t create the video until the prospect expresses some form of interest.

Then, you can produce a short 4-8 minute video going over whatever aspect of their digital marketing that could use some help.

Add as much value in this presentation and embed the video on a landing page you send the lead.

Your landing page should have testimonials, trust signals, and process information about your services.

Lastly, make sure to have some form of call to action (CTA) for the lead to setup a consultation call with your agency.

 

Content Creation

Another highly underutilized strategy is to take advantage of traffic already existing on social media sites.

Dominating a social space is generally far easier than search marketing nowadays so this is a great strategy for stealing customers from larger agencies who lack social presence.

The first strategy that comes to mind is leveraging interviews to provide value to your target audience.

There are 1000s of local businesses already succeeding that have loads of information to share.

Instead of attempting to be the expert you can showcase businesses as the experts.

This strategy achieves a few goals…

  1. It builds a passively growing audience that sees you as an expert in your field
  2. It builds reciprocal altruism from your viewership that will eventually come back to you
  3. It builds relationships with the successful companies you interview for which you can eventually pitch on your services and continue to showcase to your audience.

 

Networking

Depending on the industry, it can be quite difficult to get in contact with decision makers at larger corporations.

Networking is perhaps the best way to get in front of these highly-profitable clients.

There are countless strategies to build up lucrative networks but the first to note is a simple Google search.

Search for “your niche” “event/conference/groups/magazines” and build a list of events to attend.

Some of these conferences require payment to attend but there are still ways to find free events.

States, cities, and towns usually will have a chamber of commerce that local businesses attend for training and networking. These are generally free so look into attending one of these in your local area.

selling digital marketing over the phone

Discovery Calls

It’s usually best to sell digital services face-to-face as these situations usually have more emotional impact for prospects.

In person meetings are not always viable for all agencies so it is likely you’ll want to thoroughly understand phone sales.

I highly recommend pushing leads to video conference software calls as this will help you build connection faster than a phone call. However, this can sometimes be difficult with small business owners since they often prefer using the phone (it’s more comfortable to them).

Secondly, depending on your offer, you may choose to have a multi-step sales process rather than a single call.

It turns out that most clients aren’t ready to buy on the first call anyways so it will likely be the case you need several calls before making a sale.

Treat the first call with a client as a discovery call where you learn more about their business.

This call is mostly about determining needs of the prospect but still includes a pitch if they fit your criteria.

I won’t go into the structure of a digital sales pitch here but we highly suggest checking out that article to get a feel for the flow of an average sales conversation.

 

What Most Agencies Neglect

As mentioned, most of your sales won’t happen on the initial call.

Most sales reps forget this fact and end up burning bridges with warm leads that just need more time.

Think of your sales process in terms of a marketing funnel.

The leads that don’t buy can still be remarketed to.

Build value over a long period of time and you’ll etch your agency’s name in the back of your audience’s minds.

 

Summary

Of course, there’s much more to selling digital marketing than what we have space here to go over. For this reason, we created an entire guide on how to get digital marketing clients that breaks down each aspect of selling and fulfilling on marketing services.

As you iterate through the process, the intricacies will become more defined and you’ll be able to scale your entire operation.

For more information on the exact phrasing of your sales pitch presentation check out the article we wrote on Kotton Grammer and how this digital sales titan closes deals.

http://clicksgeek.com

Ed Stapleton, Jr is a ‘Google Partner’ marketing expert who’s sold over 1,500 Google Ads clients and managed millions in ad spend. He heads up the front of the house at his marketing agency Clicks Geek where he manages sales and strategic relationships.


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