How would you like to learn the blueprint for a digital marketing agency that generates over $100,000 in monthly revenue? If you’re nodding your head, then keep reading. In this article, we will go over the steps that you need to take in order to reach this level of success. By following these guidelines, you will be able to grow your business and increase your income!
I know what you came to this article for–you want the money. You want to make more money, and you’ve probably been trying to scale your business and make more money as a creative. You feel like you’ve been struggling, and you’ve probably been so challenged. Well, the good thing is you came to the right article!
In this article, I’m going to show you and tell you how I scaled my business as a graphic designer all the way up to an agency owner. I’m going to give you some practical tips – some practical steps that you can use to implement into your business to start scaling your business today, not tomorrow, not in a week from now, but today.
How I Scaled My Digital Marketing Agency
As a graphic designer when I first started, I was doing night club flyers for my own nightlife business. To make nightclub flyers, do you know how much I was getting paid? zero dollars. I got paid nothing and I’d spend hours and hours working on these nightclub flyers. I wasn’t a good client for my own business right then, but I was starting to get paid by companies to do their flyers for other nightlife events. One of my first projects was with one of my mentors, and he paid me thirty dollars to do a flyer. It took me three hours and I was making ten dollars an hour; I was thrilled.
Then, as my career progressed and I opened up my first brick and mortar printing shop, I moved into the printing industry and started charging more for my flyers. I was charging, at minimum, $50 but over time I ended up charging $150 for that same design that I was doing just a couple of years previous. So I was making a lot more money per hour and I was doing them even faster.
Increase Your Ticket Price
One of the first points I want to make to you guys is that increasing the ticket price or the price that you’re charging for flyers or designs, in general, is not the solution. I get a lot of comments on my video content from people in the US or other countries complaining about people in India doing logos for five bucks. This is not an India-centric problem; it’s an educational problem. Part of why I’ve created my YouTube channel is because they are only hurting themselves and they’re hurting the industry. But they’re more hurting themselves than anybody else, so I really want you to take this into consideration.
By charging more, you’re going to be able to provide a better outcome for your clients. Just charging the least amount possible is not a long-term sustainable strategy. People are going to be used to cheap, and you’re only going to attract cheap clients. So this is the first thing I want you to really take away from this article: raise the ticket price on your jobs from $30-$40 and double or triple the price if you start doing that tomorrow. You’re not going to lose good business over it. If you do lose a few clients, well, those are the people that you don’t want to work with – cheap clients are the worst clients.
Become a Full-Service Digital Marketing Agency
The second thing that I implemented in my business that really helped along my journey is that I started with doing just graphic design and then added on printing. Well, how often do people need to get printing done? Pretty often, in fact, they get flyers, business cards, websites or banners, and vehicle graphics. There are all kinds of printing projects that you can do for people. Increasing the frequency and amount of offers that you can make for your clients is a really good way to make more money and increase the lifetime value of this client.
This is something I really want you to take into consideration and it’s something I implemented into my business. By doing printing and then doing marketing, I’ve increased the frequency more and more and more as time goes on, to get these clients to come back to me for more things. This can be a good thing but it can also be a bad thing if you add too much to your plate then you’re going to become a jack of all trades, a master of none, so you want to be careful about this. But adding on printing or adding on web design are good ways to increase the lifetime value.
Position Your Digital Marketing Agency with Authority
The third thing that changed within my business that I want you to understand before I get into the big tips is positioning. When I first started as a graphic designer, I was just a little mom-and-pop retail shop. You come in, get your stuff done, and walk out; it was a great experience but it was really small. As I’ve continued to grow as a creative, a designer, and as an entrepreneur, I’ve positioned myself as an authority by teaching on YouTube, getting on stages, doing podcasts, and being on a radio show.
All these things I’ve done have positioned me as an authority and an expert in my field and have allowed me to charge higher prices. I can charge a thousand dollars an hour for the consulting that I do. I could never have done that when I had my little mom-and-pop print shop. It wasn’t going to work. So you need to start thinking about how you can position yourself as an authority in your space, maybe by teaching other people in the industry, or teaching your clients. How can you position yourself as an expert? And if you’re not doing that now, I want to encourage you to join our Instagraphics Pro Network group on Facebook, because we’re teaching our people in that group how to become experts as creatives.
Client Selection Matters
The fourth thing I touched on very briefly in my earlier point is the type of clients you bring on board. Your success will be determined by the type of clients you bring on board. If you are bringing on cheap clients and doing it for five-dollar logos, you will get people that use you one time and then go to somebody else. You want to have high-paying, high-ticket, long-term, loyal clients that actually want a relationship with you and see the value in what you do. They’re going to trust you. You’re going to be adding value. You’re going to be educating them, and they’re not going to want to lose you.
I have noticed that the higher I charge for clients, the better clients I attract, and the better clients I attract, the better my business is. So you really need to take this to heart. I want you to take this seriously; you need to work with better clients and understand the type of clients that you have now because 80% of the headaches you have are probably coming from the 20% of your clients that are the worst nightmare clients. You can turn that trend around and actually get the best clients and charge more money, and you’ll have a much happier experience as a creative.
Digital Marketing Agency Documentation
Now, number five, before I get into the meat and potatoes of what you came here for is your systems and processes. This is something that I had to take a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of work to put into my business in order to scale and produce the amount volume of work to be able to handle the volume of work. Just adding more sales is not going to fix your problem. Just increasing the ticket price is not going to fix your problem. Will that help? Sure, but ultimately you need to improve your systems and processes. Your sales, marketing, fulfillment, and finance all need systems and processes that are created and followed. Documentation is important for making sure these systems and processes are followed.
How to Apply These Principles to Your Digital Marketing Agency
Now that we have covered the key principles you need to follow in order to generate $100K monthly revenue as a digital marketing agency, let’s go over how you can apply these concepts to your business.
Identify the Demand
The first thing is understanding the demand. A lot of people are chasing and selling services that don’t have a lot of demand. I’ve made this mistake myself over the years. I forgot that websites were the biggest demand of any other service I had sold. I’ve sold more websites than anything else. This is another important part of my business, and so I need to continue to follow that demand. To create products, create promotions, and educate the market on websites to bring them into my funnel – that is essentially a lead magnet. You need to follow demand and figure out what people are looking for.
If you’re part of a music group, and people are looking for music videos, well there you go – you can fulfill that demand by looking at the marketplace and looking at the problems that are in the marketplace. If you’re seeing a lot of bad logo designs or bad print designs or flyer designs, these are the types of things that you need to create and you need to follow demand because that is what’s going to pay the most and get them as a client into your client list.
Irresistible Digital Marketing Agency Offers
The second thing you’re going to need to implement into it is an irresistible offer. How do you create an irresistible offer? Well, if you’re doing something that you think is worth a thousand dollars, then you need to show ten thousand dollars worth of value. I’m serious – a thousand dollars that you think it’s worth, you need to be able to show 10 000 worth of value. That is what I consider an irresistible offer. Now let me give you a quick example of that.
Let’s say I have a coaching program where I’m going to work with you one-on-one. I’m going to help you scale your business from zero to six figures or from a thousand to ten thousand dollars a month or more. I’m going to show you how to become a better designer. I’m going to show you how to get the best clients you’ve ever had. I’m going to take you through this entire journey over 90 days, and it’s going to add millions of dollars potentially to your income – at the very bare minimum, six figures to your income. I’m going to charge you guys 10 grand for that, but my irresistible offer, if you take advantage of it, is only a thousand bucks today. But you have to do it today – that’s what I would call an irresistible offer.
Now, if I even did one better and said I have a sales trainer that’s going to come in and teach you the best tricks, the best strategy on sales as part of that offer, you’d say, “oh my gosh, I was already sold on it before when it was just you.” Right? That’s called offer stacking. What can you add to your existing service that you’re not getting credit for? Itemize all the things you’re doing: research, project management, content creation, asset research, etc. Add up the value of each and show the grand total. Discount it down to show your actual cost so your client can see everything they’re paying for and how much they would be paying without the offer. That’s a really good way to increase the value and to show what I call offer stacking.
Selling vs Serving
Number three is a big one: serving versus selling. A lot of people are out there trying to sell their services without thinking about how they can help their clients. This is a pitch I see fairly often:
“Hey, I do graphic design and logo design. Do you want to use me? You should use me for graphic design and logo design.”
That is not how you approach selling. That is not selling. Selling is when you’re serving people. Instead, focus on the client’s needs and start a conversation without forcing sales into the frame. If you talk to your clients like they’re new friends instead of new sales prospects, they will tell you what they need and ask if you can help them make it happen:
“Hey, what’s going on? What’s the most impactful thing happening in your business right now?”
“Oh, I just opened up a brand new store and I’m just trying to get it all set up.”
“Oh, wow. Do you have your signage done already?”
“No, I don’t have my signs yet.”
“What are you what type of time frame are you looking at to get your store open?”
“I’m looking at it in the next like 90 days.”
“Okay cool. Have you started looking into graphic designers? Are you making some decisions there?”
“No, not quite yet. I’m going to do it in like two weeks.”
“Wow, okay. So you’re looking to do some research, right? You probably want to find the best designer possible for your signage.”
“Yeah, yeah – I want to make sure because I have really good retail frontage. I want to make sure I get the best design possible so I can attract people to my store. I think that’s really important.”
“What are some of the decision factors you’re looking at when it comes to your signs?”
“Well, I want to make sure that it’s big. I want to make sure I’m not paying too much.”
“Hey look, I understand that you’re looking for something on a budget and you want to make sure it’s highly impactful. Here are some ideas for you that I wanted to share.”
Don’t try to sell them, just share the ideas freely, and they’ll go, “Hey, are you available? Could you do my design?” Voila, success! You want them to ask you. You’re pulling the rope, versus pushing the rope. That’s how you’re serving when you’re selling – you’re going there to serve them, not to sell them. You want to give them the solutions to the problems that they’re giving you.
Digital Marketing Agency Task Delegation
Step number four to scaling your business to six figures a month is to start delegating. You cannot be a one-man show; it would be very hard to be a one-man show and scale to six figures. You’re going to need to start delegating other parts of your business. So what are the other parts of your business? Well, you have sales, marketing, finance, operations, and fulfillment right now. You’re probably wearing all of those hats, which is a lot of work. You need to start handing that stuff off: getting a bookkeeper, getting an accountant, getting a marketer, somebody who can actually do your marketing for you, and subbing that part of it out.
Maybe you’re not good at sales and you just want to do the fulfillment; getting a salesperson like myself or somebody else in our network. And part of the Instagraphics Pro Network maybe you’re just not ready to do any of those things and you just want the business to run itself so you go hire out and delegate to all of those parts. I’m starting to get to that point in my business where I can work myself out of a job. That’s why I’ve scaled to six figures; because I’ve basically created systems and processes that will allow me to do this, and you can’t do that without understanding your business inside and out, and understanding your clients’ problems inside and out.
Nurture Your Client Relationships
All right, the last one. This is one that many people miss, and I think you guys are going to love this. This is number five: how to scale your business to six figures a month. And this is where I get a lot of complaints from other people. They’re not nurturing these relationships; there’s long-term thinking versus short-term thinking.
The short-term thinking people all they do is they want to go in and sell the website, get the monthly hosting fee, and then boom off and they hope they never hear from that client again because they don’t want to do any additional work – they just want to collect the monthly fee. This is a very bad business model, and this is what the majority of the marketplace is doing right now. You need to be thinking long term: are you there to serve them, or are you there to sell them again? Being a giver versus being a taker makes all the difference.
I think this analogy is important to tell your clients that you’ll be with them every step of the way. You need to be with them every step of the way, not just at the beginning, middle, and end. These are important phases because they’ll give you referrals and other projects. I have it set up in my process where I meet with the client at least every 90 days and touch base with them at least once a month.
This is something that you should be doing in your business as well: having more meetings with them. These are other opportunities to serve them, to find out how their business is going. If you’re there to serve them, they’re going to feel that. And when they go, “Oh, I have this problem. Who should I call?” they’re going to think of you. This is what happens to me all the time. This is why I’ve attracted the types of clients that I have. The bigger the clients, the bigger the projects, and the more work—and the bigger the lifetime value becomes for me.
Digital Marketing Agency Blueprint Overview
So these are the five tips that I wanted to share with you on how we got to six figures and how you can get to six figures if you actually apply these. This will be transformational for your business and you’ll be able to start scaling to massive proportions, even beyond six figures a month. Out of all those tips, I want to know what was your biggest takeaway. Join us in the Instagraphics Pro Network and let me know, I’d love to hear from you. Getting your feedback on what worked for you and what didn’t work, as well as things that you’re already doing, is important to me as a teacher.
Scaling your business is not just about bringing in more sales. It’s about serving more people and improving your processes and systems for yourself and your team and clients. The better and quicker and more efficient you become, the better you’ll be able to serve your clients and team. I want you to serve your team first, even before you serve your clients because these are your people that are up behind you that are in the boat with you that are rowing in the same direction that are going to help your business become the success that you really want it to be.
And if you suck at sales, this is something that I can help you with – this is something I’ve been actively working on. It’s probably because you don’t have a solid sales process in place. If any part of your business is struggling, it’s probably because you don’t have a solid sales process. Now, having a process is one thing, but actually implementing it and sticking to it and applying it is another. And you can’t do that without having documentation. Not only do we create documentation for all these processes – whether sales, marketing, fulfillment, or finance – but then we actually take and create video tutorials where we send those to our team explaining those documents so there’s no confusion and no issues and no disconnects in that communication. This is something that will help you scale very quickly if you can document it and create training videos or video instructions for each of those documents.
Final Thoughts
You’re going to be light years ahead of all of your competition, so if you have any questions please feel free to reach out. I’m here to help you scale your creative business, scale your graphic design business, web design business, and motion design business. If you need any support we give a lot of support in our community, the Instagraphics Pro Network on Facebook. All you have to do is fill out all of the questions and we’ll let you in. If you don’t, we can’t let you in. But we love having you as part of our community. We’re thriving as business owners and individuals, working on our health, wealth, and relationships to become three-dimensional designers. I look forward to seeing you there. My name is Adrian Boysel. Until next time, keep looking up!