I believe we can achieve all the goals we set for ourselves and our businesses if we just focus Most digital agency owners are forced to compete on price.
Real Talk – most agencies have positioned themselves as a commodity, competing against a global marketplace that will almost always be able to do it “cheaper”.
So stop competing on price.
I’ve found that there are 3 things that you can do to stand out from the competition and win more business while making your business more enjoyable and predictable.
I’ve put together a quick video walking you through each of these strategies.
Transcript / MP3
What’s good everybody. So I want to talk a little bit about how you can stand out from other digital agencies in 2020 and beyond. And what I see happening is that a lot of agency owners continue to go the path of becoming more full service. …They go through certification after certification to say that they can do SEO, web development, conversion funnels, automation, chatbots, and it’s almost like you know, the more certifications, the more likely they’re going to get business and the reality is that that couldn’t be further from the truth and the more likely that you’re actually watering down what it is that you do and your ability to stand out from the competition because when you’re trying to be everything to everybody and be full service and all of that stuff, it’s going to be really hard for you to have powerful and effective marketing to capture the clients that you want to bring in. Right. Outside of referrals and word of mouth and all of that stuff. What we really want to be doing is standing out and being able to automate our own lead generation and have clients coming to us on demand. And in order to do that, you can’t just look like another full service. We’ll do everything agency and I want to share three things that I believe that all agencies should do moving forward if they want to stand out. These are the top three. So let me pull up the old iPad here and the first one, the first step is to visualize their process. So visualize process. What I mean by that, when you want to stand out, you want to tap into something that is proprietary, something that makes you different from all of the competitors. One of the things that we help our clients do is extract from all of their experience and skill skillsets and services and whittle them down into one proprietary process that they know will help their ideal client solve a problem. Really the most painful problem, not all of the problems, the most painful problem. And so let me clean this up a little bit. Visualize the process and being able to visualize what the client experience is going to look like in your marketing, in a sales conversation will really bring to life for that prospect, how you’re actually going to help them. So we’ve talked in previous episodes about how a key for agencies to transform is by adding on a more leveraged revenue streams that solve a problem. This is kind of the, the notion of productizing your service and what you really want to do is be able to show that your clients can, by working with you, have a transformation where they go from problem into solution, right? And all along the way you’re packaging up the steps that you would take them through to make this transformation possible. And once you know what the steps are, you can actually create a visual, and there’s a lot of good books on this, but, um, one thought leader on this is a guy by the name of, of Matt church. Uh, and he has a book on this, I’m blanking on the name, I’ll put it in the comments. And he talks about how to create models and models to help visually sell and demonstrate your expertise and sets you apart from the competition. And really what it pans out to look like is how do you use, you know, circles, squares, triangles, et cetera, to demonstrate your process for solving your client’s problem. Oh my God. Wow. And really what it comes down to is how do you use circles, shapes, triangles to visually represent how you’re going to move your client from the problem to the solution. What this comes down to is the ability to visualize your step-by-step process, the client journey experience that you know a new client will go through through these steps up here into some sort of shape. And there’s a lot of different shapes that you can create just from, you know, circles, squares and triangles. If you’ve watched some of my previous videos, you’ve seen me create kind of a Venn diagram where you say, Hey, this is step one, step two and step three and highlight some of the benefits that are in these areas. You could talk about a ladder and have your process go up a ladder. You’ve probably seen people with a pyramid [inaudible]. You’ve seen people with a matrix, you’ve probably seen a circle, and you could divide a circle into, you know, a visual. And when you start taking your intellectual process, your intellectual property, right, and start to visually represent what a client is going to go through, okay, they’re going to have a better picture as to what it’s going to be like to work with you and how they’re, how you’re going to make this transformation. And maybe it’s a, it’s a process like this. There was a lot of different ways, depending upon how many steps you actually take your client through. But the ability to really start to stand out from the competition is to really package up that intellectual property into a visual model for the experience that a client is going to go on. So that’s the first thing. The second thing that you can do is then to package that into a leveraged offering. I’ll just say leveraged offering, whoever’s offering. And so what I mean by leveraged offering is, um, we’re going from done for you to done with you from one to one to one to many. We’re going from custom to repeatable, so on and so forth. And the ability is to actually now take this result of your, this process, right? So we want to look at Hey client ideal client, you want this, this end result. And historically we’ve done it through a done for you process to reverse engineer that into a leverage program where it’s done with you. You’ve seen high ticket consulting, high ticket coaching, um, group programs, things of that nature. That’s what we’re talking about when I say a leveraged offering and what we’ve seen is if you have, say your done for you service right here, we’ve seen clients that have added it on the front so you have to go through the leverage program and in order to get into the done for you, we’ve seen them put it on the back end where after they go through a specific deliverable, they kind of evolve into like a mentorship advisory type thing. We’ve also seen them add it on on the side, depending upon exactly what that offering is. Ideally, your leverage program can deliver the exact same result as your done for you at a more affordable rate, which will allow you to elevate your prices, have done for you, and then have kind of more of your more of your prospects coming through this done with you vehicle, which is going to make you more profitable because the profit margins on this will be much higher, require less overhead, et cetera. That now you have a really great profitable revenue stream that is okay. Again, in often cases on the front end of your business. But this will allow you to raise done for you rates, make that more of a premium and then you’re done with you becomes a more affordable option and you’re kind of going down, Hmm. The value ladder, so to speak. And obviously at the bottom is is DIY [inaudible]. This is all also amount of access, right? As you go up the ladder, you have more access done for you, et cetera, et cetera. And so first we visualize our process, then we package it into a leveraged offering. I’ve mentioned on another video, just because you’re an agency owner doesn’t mean the only way that you can convey your agency expertise is through labor because over time your clients will devalue your labor and they’ll find a way to get it cheaper. So you can’t just be paid based on labor or at least if you want to have longevity, I believe in 2020 and beyond with your agency, it’s going to be beneficial to add on revenue streams that over time can become more valuable, which is where you go back to selling your knowledge and your experience and go into getting paid for your thinking versus just as we call it your hands to keyboard. So step one, we have visualize the process. Step two, we have packaged it into a leveraged offering and then three is expand revenue. Now if you haven’t done the first two, you’re not going to do this one yet. So you want to stabilize the revenue stream of your first leverage program. I’m not saying go launch all these different methodologies all at once. But if you think about SAS companies, that’s software as a service. A lot of them we’ll uh, make exponential or amplify their profits by adding on what’s called expansion revenue. So you’ve seen the have like a base plan, but then if you add extra seats or you add extra features, your monthly fee will increase. And when I look at agencies and I look at, you know, coaching and consulting companies, expansion revenue to me is if you have this, this proprietary process that you’ve say packaged into, uh, a model, right? You could deliver that through, done for you, that process, you could deliver that or pieces of that through the done with you program that I’m talking about. You could deliver that in two day workshop where you don’t really have to reinvent the wheel every time. So in example, one, you could deliver this whole result through either one of these or you might realize that, Hey, if I just sell this first piece as a two day in person workshop, that I can upsell people into the balance. Now you’ve added a new revenue stream that doesn’t require you to go create a whole new product offering. I want you to all link up in the bottom of this video, the um, a video where I talk about make your business more like Chipola where it kind of breaks down this concept of how you can use the same ingredients in a different wrapper to have a different, uh, essentially give it a different wrapper, but you’re still selling the same result using the same ingredients. You’re not going out and creating something unique every time. So those are the three things that I think any digital agency can be doing in 2020 to start to stand out from the crowd of all the other digital agencies that are the full service is to visualize your process so that you can show your clients what they’re going to go through to package that process into a leveraged offering. And then once you’ve stabilized that, dependent upon where you’re at, um, the bonus one would be expand revenue, which is take that exact same process or pieces of that process and create a whole new offering from that. So hope you found that helpful. If this sounds interesting and you want to add a more leveraged offering to your digital agency, reach on out to us. Um, I’ll put a link below this video where you can schedule a call with myself and or someone on the team to see if it’s a good fit and we’ll chat about, you know, what is your current process look like? Do you have one? Um, and really identify can we help you package this and get your first few clients in the next 90 days. If that sounds like something that would be of interest to you, check out the link below this video. Otherwise we’ll chat soon. If I give you five to 10 new clients, would you or your agency break if so, your current agency model is broken? I struggle with this too, until I found a better way. By adding online programs, training, and coaching to our agency, we doubled profits without adding more hours. If you want to work directly with me and my team to transform your agency, visit my scalable business.com to learn more.
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