How Marketing Agencies Can Deliver Value That Extends Well Beyond Lead Capture

Over my years working on marketing teams, it’s become abundantly clear to me that marketers might be able to promote a client’s product or service effectively. However, we’ll often still struggle with marketing ourselves as professionals. 

Unfortunately, I’ve also seen this happen on a marketing organizational level. One of the things that has stuck with me from working in the marketing agency setting, is how easy it is for agencies to forget the need to demonstrate their own value. 

When you’re immersed in the marketing world, its value seems obvious. You see the line that connects audience members with lead capture conversions and nurture processes with closed deals and banked revenue. But that’s not always clear to your agency’s customers. They might know that their agency generates leads, but they can also easily get distracted from what those leads represent. 

You end up with agencies patting themselves on the back for delivering so many leads that are so qualified while their customers wonder what they’re paying for. 

They might feel disenchanted by your services, and then they’re more likely to churn. In my current work liaising with agency partners, leaders always talk to me about feeling stuck in this perpetual struggle to prove their value.

What can agencies do to make their value more clear? Lead generation is the basic offering of many marketing agencies, so that alone won’t make yours stand out. 

Here are some ways I’ve seen agencies differentiate themselves, attracting and retaining clients by delivering more than just captured leads.

5 Ways Marketing Agencies Deliver Value

There are plenty of ways marketing agencies add value to the performance of their clients that extends well beyond simply capturing leads.

1. Optimizing lead delivery
2. Identifying returning customers
3. Furthering the use of CTAs
4. Streamlining lead flow
5. Taking on payment processing

Digital marketing agencies that choose to focus and invest in these areas will be able to add more value to current clients while attracting prospective ones. 

1. Optimizing Lead Delivery

Optimizing lead delivery is my favorite way to think about adding value. I’ve seen too many agencies send leads in spreadsheets that aren’t easy to read and respond to and arrive too late for effective response. Instead, send leads in a way that makes it easy for your customers to convert them immediately. 

Email alerts sound awesome, but it’s where leads go to die. Your typical busy small business owner doesn’t live in their inboxes. By the time they open an email, days might have passed. That lead who urgently needed a roofer to fix their leaky roof or a beautician to touch up their outgrown manicure has already found someone who responded way faster. Push notifications or text messages are a lot more likely to reach SMB owners during their coffee break, when they have a couple of minutes to call the prospect. 

Better delivery increases conversions and therefore enhances perceived value, so just this simple tweak can help open your customers’ eyes to the value you’re providing. 

2. Identifying Returning Customers

What are you doing to enable your client to know their customers and make the most of each deal opportunity? 

New leads are great, but we all know that returning customers are better. They are many times cheaper to obtain, convert faster, spend more, and they’ll come back again (and again). You need to step in and help your clients distinguish between brand-new prospects and customers who already have some relationship with their brand. 

Many tactics allow you to reach this result, but your goal is to connect the dots for your client so they know who this customer is, which services they prefer, and what they discussed in their last meeting or appointment. In this sense, finding the best ways to integrate new inquiries with existing CRM records is the key.

3. Taking CTAs a Step Beyond

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen “contact us” as a call to action (CTA), I would not be sitting here writing this article; I’d be on the beach. My own private beach.

It’s the easiest and most common CTA, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to optimize lead generation. 

Sure, you’ll grab leads, but you won’t be able to give clients an idea of what those leads are looking for. Other ways to harvest leads use that moment of micro-conversion to move them further towards a sale, not just to gather their name and email address. 

CTAs like “request an estimate” result in warmer leads. Imagine what would happen from a “book a free consultation” or “schedule an appointment” CTA, which takes the lead straight to a calendar to book their slot. 

4. Making the Flow Happen

You may be churning out leads like a machine, but can your clients follow up on them? If not, then it’s no wonder they aren’t sure those leads are useful. At the end of the day, your clients want the income those leads could bring. 

You can help make that a reality by providing them with the tools they need to convert leads into real opportunities and closed deals, and upsell to boost deal volume from existing customers. 

Think about the effect it would have if you could tell clients that you can help maximize deal potential for existing customers too. Assisting clients with nurture flows like email sequences, audience segmentation, and targeted SMS promotions can do so much to create more value and help your clients bring in more revenue.

5. Deliver the ‘Fourth Pillar’

Most agencies work with the “three pillars” of marketing: lead generation, lead nurturing and lead conversion, but we see a lot of partners go a step beyond to help with the “fourth pillar” of payment collection. They provide digital tools for clients to receive payments online and speed that money into their bank accounts. 

This ties into a growing trend of tech adoption among small businesses. At vcita, we’ve seen that small business owners are eager to implement tech tools that automate tasks like payment collection or invoicing. Almost a third adopted online payment collection, and they get paid an average of 300% faster. 

So your clients are going to process online payments with someone – why should that someone not be you? I work with agencies that have launched their own white-labeled payment processing services, delivering great value to their clients and enjoying a nice revenue boost from payment processing fees.     

Capturing Leads is Just the Start for Marketing Agencies

Lead generation is the baseline for marketing agencies. The key here is to optimize lead delivery, supporting clients’ efforts to push leads through their funnel, and delivering digital tools that help them with other aspects of their operation. By going beyond simple lead capture, you’ll prove your value and ultimately minimize churn rates.