Progressive agencies are constantly looking for ways to drive better results for clients. This multifaceted challenge almost always falls on agency owners, who know that the secret agency growth is client satisfaction and client retention.
To ensure that, agency owners have to find team members who know how to look at marketing program analytics and optimize results for clients: getting fast results and building on them month over month. That takes a skill set not everyone has.
Technology Is Now Available To Help
More and more tools are coming out to help marketers improve performance of their programs.
Generally, these tools are aligned with specific tactics. For example, Seventh Sense helps with email marketing performance, Atomic Reach helps with content marketing performance and Databox helps with visualizing program performance.
Unfortunately, none of these tools – or any of the other readily available software solutions – helps holistically across your entire portfolio of marketing tactics. And none of these tools provides insights based on the performance of your specific marketing tactics, nor do they give you actionable recommendations based on the performance of your specific marketing tactics.
For instance, Seventh Sense gives you data on the performance of your program and works behind the scenes to deliver emails at times that will improve performance, but it won’t help you with segmentation, copy development, link strategy or ideas to improve open rates.
Databox gives you data on program performance, but it doesn’t tell you how to improve that performance. That has always been up to the agency owner, the consultant handling the client, or the internal marketing team tasked with improving program performance. And historically, the track record on that hasn’t been great.
Qualitative And Quantitative Data
You can argue about whether people know how to improve marketing, sales and revenue generation, but the data shows a very clear picture.
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HubSpot Research reported that only 23% of companies surveyed are consistently exceeding their revenue goals.
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CSO Insights found out that only 57% of sales reps hit their quotas.
Last year at Inbound 18, I asked over 500 people attending my session to remain standing if they were able to consistently hit their revenue goals. Only 22 people remained standing. That’s just 4.4% of that audience.
In addition, I talk to agency owners every single week and almost all of them ask similar questions.
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“How do we get clients better results?”
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“How do we know what tactics to build into their program to get them better results?”
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“How do we prioritize what we’re doing for them, so we get them better results?”
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“How can I teach my team to be smarter around client recommendations and producing better results?”
It’s pretty clear to me: Revenue generation (marketing, sales and customer service) has become so complex that most people are simply doing the best they can to keep up, without any clear direction on what to work on and in what order, and what kind of results to expect.
The combination of a lack of strategy, a random approach to tactics, an overwhelming amount of data and way too many technology options has produced a mess for most marketers.
Companies continue to invest more and more in marketing, sales and technology, but the data shows the business outcomes are not following.
But there is a solution to make sense of all this mess. MAXG can help. Following these steps can help your agency produce better results tomorrow – not in six months.
How To Use MAXG For Your Agency
What if your agency had a data analyst on the team? What if that senior data analyst were constantly reviewing the performance of all your client’s marketing tactics and providing you and your consultants with insights and recommendations on how to improve client program performance?
I know that sounds like nirvana. I also know that few agencies can afford the costs associated with a data analyst. They typically command compensation plans north of $100,000 a year and are some of the most desirable candidates on the planet right now.
MAXG is a tool that does what a data analyst does. I’ve given it to all of my client-facing team members, who use it to get detailed insights and recommendations for all of our clients.
No more working through dashboards and analytics to uncover the insights and create the recommendations. Now they are skipping the dashboards and getting right to what they need to do to drive results.
Better yet, with MAXG’s soon to be launched Chrome extension, once the account is hooked up, we can go through the prospect’s website page by page and see MAXG’s recommendations right on the screen. Easy, fast and always results oriented.
We also use MAXG for prospects. During the sales process, we get permission to connect MAXG to a prospect’s HubSpot portal and quickly get data-based insights and recommendations for our proposals. Before MAXG, it took hours to wade through all the data to come up with smart insights and recommendations.
Finally, once a new client signs, we use MAXG to identify quick wins that will produce results early in the engagement. We also use it to do more in-depth audits to use as the basis for website optimization, content strategies and more.
How To Use MAXG For Your Agency Clients
Here’s how we recommend operationalize using MAXG.
Step 1: Consider how you want to cover the software costs.
You can cover the small monthly investment associated with using the software as an agency operating cost or you can transfer the fee to the client.
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If you’re using points, it’s easy to charge the client (transparently of course) for this extra expense, along with other administrative line items such as SEMrush or Databox.
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If you’re not using points and you’re charging clients for other software, you can simply add MAXG to their tech stack invoice line item.
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If you’re not charging clients for the other software you’re paying for – you should be. Consider making that change immediately.
Step 2: Hook up all your client accounts on HubSpot or Google Analytics to MAXG.
This takes seconds.
Step 3: Check out the dashboard for each client account.
Each dashboard will include lists of insights, recommendations and performance benchmarks covering email marketing, website pages, landing page performance, CTA button performance, list quality, blogging and more. You’ll find plenty of areas for your team to dig in and start working on the recommended course of action in the software.
The MAXG team is adding new areas for insights and recommendations weekly, so the number of recommendations for your team to act on is only going to increase.
Step 4: Look at industry benchmarks.
Since MAXG provides benchmark performance data, we recommend looking at how your client’s program is performing compared to other companies in their industry. The site might be outperforming the benchmarks already!
Step 5: Use MAXG’s prioritized recommendations.
MAXG dashboards prioritize insights and recommendations based on what’s going to have the biggest impact for the least effort. You should consider using this prioritization methodology to assign work to your team.
Step 6: Assign recommendations to team members.
MAXG will alert your team members, who can see the insight and recommendation assigned to them directly in MAXG. You can have as many people on the platform as you want. Pricing is based on portals and websites under management, not people on the platform.
Step 7: Use MAXG for planning.
If you work in sprints, either weekly, biweekly or monthly, you’re going to want to use MAXG’s recommendations to plan them. Recommendations might involve minor adjustments that you can make immediately, but the more important benefit will be the list of prioritized recommendations, which you can use for sprint planning.
Before you lock in the work planned, checking in with MAXG is a great way to ensure that you’re directing your team to do the right work, in the right order. This will immediately improve program results, team efficiency and client satisfaction.
Step 8: Use the new Chrome extension to review each client’s website.
The extension (illustrated in the picture above) allows you to visit your client’s website and see what adjustments should be considered. As you move through each site, you’ll see recommendations on pages, pillar pages, blogs, landing pages and more.
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If you’re working on site optimization, this is a great way to know where to start and to optimize site performance quickly.
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If you’re working on specific campaigns and you have campaign-specific pages, this is a great way to optimize campaign performance quickly.
Step 9 – Check MAXG according to your planning cadence.
Because there are always areas for improvement, consider checking MAXG as frequently as you plan work. Our team checks MAXG daily, as well before meetings for weekly and monthly planning.
The other time to use MAXG is right before client program performance reviews. Because it provides insights and recommendations, your team will come to that meeting armed with the latest insights and prepared to impress your clients.
Once your client services and account teams start using MAXG daily, they’ll become more efficient in driving smart insights and results-producing recommendations for your clients. In turn, your clients will see improved results.
The bottom line is happier clients and lower churn, two aspects of agency life that every owner is trying desperately to deliver.
