The pandemic has devastated businesses, and client retention has emerged as the biggest challenge for entrepreneurs post-COVID-19. Clients are leaving businesses for multiple reasons, but some major factors behind the declining demand are fast-draining resources and recession-prone market conditions hitting revenues hard.

In these tough times, agencies should proactively try to retain as many clients as possible because that is much easier and more cost-effective than acquiring new clients. This article will discuss some crucial client retention strategies.

6 Strategies to Help Your Agency Grow in the Post-pandemic World

Agencies can use the following six techniques for client retention during tough times.

1. Use of Social Media

According to a study by loyalty 360, more than 27% of businesses admitted that social media marketing is the most effective channel for customer retention in the pandemic-hit market.

Customer loyalty is directly linked with retention, and boosting customer engagement can be the most favorable strategy to ensure long-term business. Since we spend more time online in the post-pandemic world, social media is the strongest channel to boost customer loyalty and engagement.

Social media gives you the best opportunities to interact with your clients and engage with them. Instead of a single-minded sales approach, try to discuss the problems and challenges they are confronting, and they would be more than willing to join the conversation. It will boost your brand image as a sincere partner concerned with the well-being of its customers rather than simply a business hardballing their products.

Here are a few techniques to boost customer retention through social media:

A. Use Effective Social Media Listening and Monitoring Tools

You can use social media monitoring tools such as Hootsuite, Google Alerts, Sprout Social, or AgoraPulse to help you with client retention.

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Social media listening tools allow you to keep a tab on customer conversations about your brand anywhere on the web. They will provide instant notifications if a customer mentions your brand or uses key phrases.

So, these tools offer crucial insights about your customers and opportunities to participate in hot conversations.

B. Use Relevant Hashtags and a Consistent Username

Make your brand accessible to your customers across different social channels. You can use relevant hashtags and an easy-to-remember username for that.

C. Publish Platform-Specific Content

Learn about customer psychology and share platform-specific content to engage your customers. Some brands use social media publishing tools to replicate similar content everywhere, but that is not a good practice. The content that succeeds on Twitter greatly varies from the content you should post on Facebook on Instagram. So, keep that in mind while curating branded social media content.

D. Hire a Dedicated Executive/Team for Social Media

A dedicated social media team is necessary to ensure timely responses to queries and complaints. Be attentive and highly responsive to customer feedback on social media. It boosts customer loyalty more than any other tactic. Try to minimize your customers' pain points and be reactive to their struggles with your products/services to earn their unmitigated loyalty.

E. Make Heavy Use of Social Media Advertising

Social media ads are highly visible, and consistent advertising increases your visibility on social channels. You can use these ads to promote your products, create awareness, and educate your customers. Social media advertising, for this reason, is well-known as a precursor to online action.

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F. Use Social Media Metrics

Use popular social media metrics to get deeper insights about your customers for better engagement.

G. Use Referral Programs

Leverage social media's powerful reach by running referral programs. Let your audience share your products on social media to amplify your brand's reach. It will not only boost your sales but also enhance customer retention. Don't forget to reward your customers for their referrals.

2. Improve Your Brand Perception

According to a Science Direct study, "The hospitality industry's strategic response to the COVID-19 pandemic & customer retention," the brand image of a hotel chain plays a big role in the hotel selection process in the post-pandemic world.

As described earlier, focusing on existing customers and retention are vital to succeed in the current market scenario. Hotels are counting on increasing revisits by existing customers as it's crucial to survive in today's highly competitive market.

Several revisits are directly influenced by brand perception, and brand image is a function of customer experience. So, if an agency wants to retain its existing clients, it should focus on its customer experience and brand image.

For example, to boost their brand image, hotels are taking many preventive measures, such as contactless services, QR-code-based entry logs, regular disinfections, and mandatory enforcement of mask mandates for the staff.

3. Offer Innovative Products

According to a study compiled by Sprout Social, a social media management platform, Alpha | BRAVO, a social agency, revamped their social media strategy in 2020 in the wake of the increasing challenges their clients face.

Since small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) were the hardest hit in 2020, struggling with slashed sales volumes and dented marketing budgets. Clients were getting impatient to see the results, but delivering results wasn't a cakewalk for the agencies those days.

But economic downturns always carry a seed of enormous growth. So, Sprout Social launched a new program that enables small and medium-sized companies to take control of their social media campaigns. The program was christened "aB Op.ti.mate," which gave the clients full access to Sprout Social dashboard.

As a result, clients could upload images, create and schedule posts, and monitor reviews and mentions, whereas Sprout Social provided all the strategic & consulting services. SMBs also got access to Sprout Social's creative team comprising writers, designers, and social media strategists for their needs.

Op.ti.mate program witnessed immense success and helped the social platform add new clients and retain existing ones at the peak of an economic meltdown caused by the pandemic.

4. Offer the Right Support With the Right Technology

DashClicks, a white label digital marketing service based in Florida, Miami, launched DashClicks 2.0 in 2021. It's a digital marketing platform aimed toward agencies.

DashClicks 2.0 is a white label platform that allows heavy automation through different applications. It has apps to generate performance reports, build bulk websites, perform analytics, manage projects, create forms to generate leads on the website, and much more. Besides that, DashClicks also launched its fulfillment services for the agencies that did not have sufficient staff or expertise to accept new digital marketing projects. DashClicks 2.0 became an instant hit in the market, and the white-label company saw huge growth in six months.

5. Deepen Your Relationship With Clients

Businesses are deeply hurt in the post-pandemic world, and many are vulnerable because of weak demand and poor marketing strategies. In such a scenario, you should deepen your relationship with your clients and look for their special needs to survive. Agencies should leave their comfort zone and provide the right support and assistance to their distressed clients. This practice alone can make you a winner while implementing client retention strategies. If your clients struggle with the strategy, you can immediately arrange a meeting and ask your experts to help them formulate a new strategy.

6. Be Flexible

Try to find out your clients' issues and alleviate their burden, even if it means going beyond your contract terms. You can decrease your fees or provide value-added services if needed to help your client survive. Being flexible will fetch you unmatched rewards in terms of client retention. Strictly following your contract terms may lead to a huge churn. Consider providing specialized training, webinars, or consultancy contracts to help them survive in the new market conditions.

Final Thoughts

Client retention is a much more powerful and cost-effective way to survive as an agency than adding new clients to your portfolio. It became even more prominent in the post-pandemic world. Everybody talks about customer-centric businesses, but very few companies go out of their way to help their customers and build long-term relationships.

So, the big question looms here: How to improve client retention? The best way of client retention is to focus on your customer's needs and problems. The competition is heating up, but it's never too late.

Hiring a digital agency can be your most significant investment in a business; ensure you are getting the best out of it. Also, remember that hiring an agency does not guarantee success, so check that your business fundamentals are strong and you have a robust business plan.

Furthermore, it is imperative to keep logical expectations and not to get disappointed or drive the agency owners crazy with your unrealistic expectations.

To ensure success, you should know what to expect from a digital marketing agency.

Here are the 11 tips to consider when engaging a digital agency to drive the best results -

1. Do Your Homework First

You can't expect your agency to do everything for you. So, before you hire an agency, do your homework and finish the prerequisites. For example, before hiring an agency for a paid advertising project, build a website with all the necessary landing pages. Conduct on-page optimization to easily convert customers when running paid campaigns.

Similarly, while onboarding new clients, your responsibility is to provide your credentials, such as logos and business information, give access to software, create customer profiles, and so on. Also, be ready with high-quality product photos, niche keywords, USPs, previous ad clips, and the terminology used in your industry.

2. Conduct a Business Feasibility Study

Before hiring a digital agency to promote your business, check your business fundamentals. If you don't have a business plan and haven't performed market research, you are doomed for failure. Assess your market size, competition, and people interested in your products or services. The lack of strong demand and a large targetable market indicate that your business has weak fundamentals. It can be risky to invest in marketing for such a business.

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3. Evaluate Your Agency's Expertise

Signing a contract without due diligence and evaluating your agency's capabilities and expertise is like jumping into a dark well. You will engage with the digital agency to assign them the crucial task of your brand's marketing and conversion. You should get some upfront value in exchange for the money you will invest in the services.

So, it is a good idea to check their proposals. A professional agency would always share a well-prepared presentation highlighting its strategy and execution. You can also give them a test project, but it doesn't work with every service, especially SEO, because search engine optimization doesn't yield any results in the short term.

Some agencies also offer a free website audit and plan to improve the SEO and web design for improved visibility and user experience. It proves that the concerned agency is serious in its approach.

4. Assess Your Agency's Work Culture

There are no standard benchmarks for digital agencies, varying according to their work culture and processes. You must also understand that they work with multiple clients, so they can't entirely focus on your project and might not use all of their resources and tools for your project.

So, you should have at least one person to manage your project in-house who knows the nitty-gritty of the project and monitors the results delivered by your agency. This ensures that both of you are on the same page. Make sure that the content and graphics your agency provides are as per your branding and convey the right messaging to the audience.

5. Stop Taking Daily Feedback and Doing Micromanagement

Marketing takes time to deliver results. So, stop pricking agency owners daily, as it can be counterproductive and annoying. Similarly, micromanaging everything is certainly not a good business practice.

Be focused on the results and avoid interfering with the tasks assigned to your team members. There should be just one point of contact in the agency, most preferably the account manager, so you don't have to contact random people about your queries.

Your point of contact should be an expert in the field and have access to your project's real-time updates so that they can provide satisfactory answers to your queries and clear confusion if any.

6. Make Sure That Your Agency Specializes in Your Niche

If you have worked with a specific niche earlier, you would be familiar with its nuances, such as the product life cycle, market trends, and customer psychology & preferences. Similarly, different marketing channels require different kinds of expertise and strategies.

If your agency hasn't ever dealt with your niche, it can be a red flag because they'll likely not be familiar with the channel-specific strategies needed to succeed in the tough marketplace. So, prefer an agency that's experienced in your niche and adequately understands your market.

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7. Check the Contracts

To prevent nasty surprises and unpleasant experiences, you need to be careful about the legal side of your relationship with your agency.

Here also, a few things can be a red flag. As nobody can commit to a contract with guarantees and own responsibility for any damage to your brand, you need to be doubly cautious about your agency choice.

Choose a prudent and competitive agency and go for a time-bound contract.

8. Estimate the Project Costs

Hiring an agency is technically much like outsourcing. However, cost-cutting is not always the objective behind outsourcing. Quality products and services are necessary to compete in the market, and they don't always come at a low price.

You might hire agencies who will charge less for the same project, but you can't be sure of the quality they will deliver. There must be indeed a logical reason if someone demands a premium amount in this tough marketplace.

To decode this problem, you need to do some math. Calculate and compare the price difference between setting up an in-house team and hiring a premium and experienced agency. Research the salaries experienced professionals charge in your field and what it would cost you if you hire an agency. Here is an example of price difference

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9. Identify Project Scope

All projects are not the same. Some are longer and more complex; in some projects, you get the actual picture only after working on them. For example, you received an SEO project, but soon it dawned upon you that you need more quality content on your client's website first. So basically, it's content marketing plus an SEO project focusing on content marketing.

So, you need to clearly understand your project before you decide to hire an agency. It includes the timeline of the project, its evolving needs, and how far its budget can stretch.

SEO projects normally take longer to achieve any concrete results regarding search engine visibility, but paid ads or PPC projects provide immediate results. However, paid advertising is considered extremely risky. So, you must be very careful about your paid advertising projects because the budget may soon skyrocket.

10. Be Realistic

Marketing has many more variables than other business processes, such as design, development, and operations it is not easily predictable.

Given the competition and the market dynamics, things change rapidly, affecting the results. Furthermore, the first few months are the testing phase in every business relationship, which may last even longer. The agency business is no exception. Be ready to face this, and keep patience.

Failure is also an integral aspect of marketing; failure management takes time. If such a thing happens, get in touch with your agency and try to understand the underlying reasons. Bigger successes stem from failures. We need to learn from our failures rather than get disappointed and quit.

11. Hire Multiple Agencies if Needed

Adding multiple agencies is not bad because every agency specializes in one area. If we focus on delivering the best results to our clients, we may consider hiring various agencies.

For example, if a digital agency is proficient in SEO and another is popular for paid advertising, you should hire both for hybrid projects. Sometimes it is difficult to manage different agencies, but the rewards far outweigh the hard work. If you can't handle more than one agency, stick to one only.

Final Words

Having realistic expectations is crucial when engaging a digital marketing agency. It will help you get the best results and maintain an excellent relationship with your agency.

You should know what an agency is capable of and what it is not. Despite their proficiency and expertise, they can't ensure success with a poor business plan and weak fundamentals.

Once you are ready with a business plan and demand forecasting, you can hire an agency to scale your business.

Agency business is risky, but there are ways to identify and minimize these risks. Some red flags are so impactful that you need to fix them immediately.

So, as soon as you receive such objections or complaints from your prospects, you should immediately take action.

Although all of your prospects' or stakeholders' objections can't be that serious or consequential, some of them can spell disaster for your agency business.

Different clients might have various reasons for deciding not to choose your company at any point in time.

So, you should consistently evaluate and analyze your products and services and keep an eye on the red flags to prevent any unexpected developments.

The Top 8 Red Flags for Your Agency Business

We used our 10+ years of agency business experience to list the eight key factors and red flags that may scare your clients away from you.

1. Overpromising Results

People forgive, but they hardly forget. Over-promising and under-delivering in all walks of life are usually despised and derided. It hurts your reputation and is a big red flag for your clients. You may try to justify it using strong arguments, but it's seen with scorn and leads to prevailing negative sentiments. You can temporarily quash the complaints and dissatisfaction, but just one more mistake by your agency can prove to be the last nail in the coffin of the ongoing contract.

Overpromising and under-delivering is a sure-shot way to client dissatisfaction that kills your business prospects. A simple apology doesn't work here.

Regardless of the size of your business, just one or two unhappy customers can make everything come tumbling down.

If you can't meet the deadlines, be upfront, and they'll take their project elsewhere. At least they will score you positively on the values scale and will not post any negative feedback about your services. Bad news spreads rapidly on social networks, so try to guard your reputation at any cost.

Pro Tip: Set clear expectations. Nothing kills trust faster than false promises and poor delivery. Do a SWOT analysis and promise what you can deliver per your skills, experience, and capacity.

2. Lack of Openness and Transparency

Some agency owners deliberately put a veil of secrecy over their project details. Nothing can be more disastrous than a lack of transparency and openness in the service industry.

A large chunk of the business worldwide is conducted through the precious currency of trust. Failure to update your clients about the forthcoming hurdles and an attempt to cover up your mistakes may backfire on you severely.

Pro Tip: Things don't always happen according to a plan. So, keeping your clients in the dark about a project's issues can be fatal. Maintaining transparency boosts trust and prevents messy situations.

3. Ineffective Communication

Smooth and consistent communication is the root of a strong relationship between an agency and its clients. Since digital marketing is dynamic, an expectational mismatch is quite common, but sometimes, people from other industries don't understand the ever-changing nature of online marketing. To avoid it, you need to add reporting to your workflow.

At any point in time, your client must be aware of the deliverables of the week and well-defined expectations. Things can get messy after a communication breakdown. Nothing can be more frustrating for a client than missed deadlines and poor communication.

Ambiguous expectations can also blow out of proportion in no time. These issues can completely jeopardize your project and may lead to your client slipping away from your hands.

Ineffective communication may lead to:

• Misunderstandings
• Conflict
• Missed opportunities
• Mistrust
• The dissemination of misinformation
• Poor customer satisfaction and unhappiness

Here are some important tips you can follow –

• Clearly define tasks and set logical deadlines. If there is a delay, update your client immediately and explain why.
• Always maintain a constant line of communication to prevent second-guessing, confusion, and mistrust from beginning to stir.
• Schedule weekly meetings on a specific day to keep the agency employees and the clients on the same page.

Pro Tip: Use DashClicks' white label platform to share real-time updates and reports about your projects.

4. Hurried Onboardings and Rushed Interactions

Have you ever worked with a demanding client? They won't tolerate a single copy or graphic that doesn't align with their branding. And if it happens a few times and they are not happy with your deliverables; they will soon press the pause button on the project and go elsewhere. It is, therefore, important to understand their vision and branding needs.

Pro Tip: Spend more time on client onboarding. Automatic onboarding will save you time and energy. You can use DashClicks' onboarding features to automate the whole process and save time.

Pro Tip: Onboarding is crucial to understanding the scope of work and branding guidelines. It also includes learning the common terminology to be used so that working with your client is a smooth experience for your team.

5. Pushing for Long-Term Contracts

Chad Kodary, CEO, DashClicks, clearly warns agencies about forcing long-term contracts on clients. It is the easiest way to lose your clients. The best way is to go for a step-by-step value-based sales plan.

Here is the Step-by-Step Formula to Sell Your Digital Marketing Services.

The idea is to offer value starting from low-value products, deliver results, and subtly pitch for the services up the value ladder. Give them the freedom to choose the tenure to build long-term relationships.

Pro Tip: Start with short-term engagements and give your client the time to evaluate your services before you go for long-term contracts.

Apart from that, there are many other red flags you should be careful about.

6. Negative Reviews

Bad reviews can seriously hurt your reputation and scare your prospective clients away. You need online reputation management to neutralize the impact of bad reviews.

Pro Tip: Use DashClicks' reputation management software that helps you offset the impact of negative reviews and posts. Manage your reviews across multiple sources from one dashboard and win more customers.

7. Lack of Testimonials

It can act as a red flag if you don't have genuine testimonials and case studies on your website. The informed customers look for testimonials, case studies, and online reviews before they choose an agency to work with.

Here are some tips you should follow –

• Ask your existing clients to leave positive reviews if they are happy with your services. It will increase your online real estate.
• Invest in content marketing and create impressive case studies to prove your expertise in your niche.
• Use actual data and Google Analytics screenshots to support what you claim.
• Use DashClicks’ white label content marketing service to create high-value marketing content for your agency and clients.

8. Poor Business Processes

If your customers need to interact with a different individual every time they have a query, you don't have the right business processes. Poor business processes may also result in asynchronous services, missed deadlines, and lots of back and forth.

Pro Tip: Use DashClicksā€™ project management software that is crafted for agencies. Our project management app provides the easiest and most powerful way to manage your projects, teams, customers, and more.

Final Words

Businesses do a thorough investigation when hiring an agency. There are many red flags and warning signs that can scare them. As an agency owner, you must know these red flags and how to fix them to improve your deliverables.

But, beyond everything else, you should come out as an authentic, transparent, and honest agency. Maintain robust and consistent communication, both with your clients and internal teams. You can use a software platform such as DashClicksĀ to implement that.

Don't provide an experience to your clients that may frustrate them. It not only dims your prospects but also pits you against the entire industry. In the end, focus on your services and keep your clients happy and satisfied because they are the ones that will keep you in business.

“Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” Dwayne Johnson.

Brand consistency is the ultimate objective of any business because of its enormous benefits. It is the positioning that showcases a brand’s values and identity. It’s crucial because if you practice brand consistency, your audience can recognize your brand’s characteristics through your brand’s messaging.

What brand elements do the companies want to engrain in the minds of consumers, so they can remember their brand? These elements are as follows:

• The tone of messaging
• Logo
• Visual brand elements, such as colors and themes.

Together these elements help people easily recognize your brand across different marketing channels.

It’s crucial to differentiate your brand by practicing brand consistency, so it stays top of mind even amid growing competition. It will also boost customer loyalty and brand authority.

So let’s discuss how to practice brand consistency.

Is it as simple as that sounds? No way, it can be quite challenging!

What Is Brand Consistency?

Brand consistency is maintaining communication and marketing positioning according to your business values. It also involves the elements that create its identity.

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What if a Coca-Cola ad looks like this?

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Does it even look like a Coca-Cola ad? It seems more like a Pepsi ad and can confuse its loyal customers. That’s what makes brand consistency so crucial.

Now, look at the following ads for Nescafe. Look at the brand colors, themes, and tone in their messaging:

• Recharge yourself
• Charge your brain
• Warm up to the rains with Nescafe
• Enjoy a cup before the chaos

All the ads point to its basic appeal “To recharge and refresh yourselves for important occasions.“

The target audience is tired people looking for a little caffeine to refresh them.

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Importance of Brand Consistency

Coke and Pepsi have been arch-rivals for more than a century, but Coke dominates the soft drink market. Many people think Coke is an older brand, but that's not true. Pharmacists launched both brands in the US in the late 19th century. And you'll be surprised to know that even though Pepsi tastes better, the brand value of Coke is $33 billion against Pepsico's $18 billion.

Coke's market domination can be attributed to its ability to weave its way into our lives. Look at the way the brand communicates with consumers and the way the brand stays true to its values and mission. Their logo and brand color instantly create a feeling of warmth, feeling better, revived, and energized.

The secret to their success is brand consistency. Coke has kept its brand identity and product consistent for over 130 years.

How DashClicks Helps You Manage Brand Consistency?

DashClicks' white label dashboard allows you to customize your reports, websites, emails, and communications with your clients. And we are not talking about the logo or the brand name; you can customize virtually anything, including the background colors, fonts, messaging, and reports, through various tools and templates.

What's DashClicks?

DashClicks offers a white label platform and software to help agencies conduct their day-to-day operations faster and better.

DashClicks' marketing agency software and ecosystem can make life easier for agency owners. It simplifies and streamlines everything, including marketing, selling, fulfilling, and servicing. The built-in apps will help you structure, create and automate. The biggest advantage of using the DashClicks platform is that it enables you to scale your business.

Here are the four ways we can maintain brand consistency using DashClicks -

1. Dashboard App

Our reporting dashboard is the one source of truth for all your data. It allows you to use dozens of pre-built widgets across all your apps and pull your data into one unified client dashboard software.

The Dashboard application acts as the home page for your entire platform experience. This is a fully customizable page so that users can personalize their page view.

Watch this video to learn how you can customize everything on the Dashboard as an agency owner to maintain brand consistency while sharing reports and data.

2. Sites App

The strongest armor DashClicks white-label platform offers you is their Sites App. The App gives you the freedom to create the website of your dreams. Create and manage your websites using our white-label drag-and-drop website builder for agencies. It means you can fully customize it as per your branding needs. The website builder allows you to take control of your website without any coding knowledge and change the background colors, fonts, images, messages, content, headers, and footers, whenever you want. Our custom content management system (CMS) makes editing your website a breeze.

Watch this video to learn how to use Sites Apps -

3. Analytics App

DashClicks' Analytics App brings real-time marketing reporting software to your fingertips. With this App, you can monitor and report on all of your marketing campaigns in one place.

Apart from that, it's also a powerful branding tool that allows you to customize your reports with your logo, brand name, colors, and fonts. With this App, you can easily share reports with your clients highlighting your branding elements and keeping your agency top of mind.

4. Templates App

It is another powerful app from DashClicks that helps you manage brand consistency. With the Templates App, you can stack your templates and unify communication.

It allows you to create custom email and SMS templates and start unifying your messaging across your entire organization. To manage brand consistency, you can use custom SMS templates throughout the agency ecosystem.

Final Words

DashClicks ecosystem offers many apps that helps you manage brand consistency. We have already discussed how crucial brand consistency is for business growth and customer loyalty.

The templates app allows you to keep your communications consistent across the entire agency ecosystem. So, if you want to keep your agency top of mind, and manage brand consistency, use DashClicks' white label platform. Moreover, it comes with powerful automation tools.

If you want to make a sale, then you need to know your customer better than they know themselves.

Pushing a product onto someone rarely works. We exist in a time when consumers feel bombarded by hundreds of solicitations a week about a new good or service. They're likely to avoid you because, more importantly, you don't know them.

To increase your returns, your brand needs to know the customer down to the individual. This is what we call a buyer persona.

In this article, we're going to clearly define buyer persona, the benefits of creating one, and how to research yours effectively.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a profile based on all of the attributes that would make the ideal customer for your business.

The buyer persona contains all of the demographic data that distinguishes one social group from another. It should include details such as age, gender, occupation, location, and income.

In addition to personal or career attributes, buyer personas also highlight customer needs, wants, and pain points. In short, your brand should be able to imagine a somewhat-real idea of what this customer experiences on a daily basis. With this knowledge, you can posture your marketing and sales efforts to have a greater impact.

Buyer Persona Examples

Finding the right buyer persona for your brand is critical for creating successful sales. Everyone has a unique profile, but your brand needs to be able to meet their needs and pain points effectively. Let's take a look at a few examples of imagined buyer personas for a digital marketing agency targeting automotive companies.

Buyer Persona Example 1

Buyer Persona Example 2

Buyer Persona Example 3

Buyer Persona Example Analysis

Based on these three example profiles, we can already uncover commonalities that will be vital in guiding our marketing and sales processes.

First, we see that our target customers at these automotive brands are not gender or race-specific. There isn't enough data to suggest that leaders in these automotive brands favor one gender over another. Therefore, our attention rightly focuses more on their occupation within the company and their ability to implement our services.

Second, the age group appears to have a pattern of including individuals anywhere from 30-40. Because leadership positions tend to trend toward older individuals, we may want to continue research to either extend our range or make it more precise.

The responsibilities of these personas differ within their companies. However, there is a common thread in that these leads play a role in helping the company close sales with the right customers. Employing effective marketing tactics and managing leads effectively is the challenge they face regularly.

Finally, we benefit from knowing how these individuals spend their time online at work and at home. Some seem to be more social-savvy than others, but there is a throughline in using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in both scenarios.

With this data, our buyer persona starts to look like this:

While our example individuals had their differences, there are enough shared attributes for us to begin realizing a more effective pitch for our agency's services. We know who to target, where to reach them online, and what problems they face.

Now, we use this data to position our services as the solution to those pain points.

Benefits of Targeting Buyer Personas

Targeting carefully-crafted buyer personas is key to improving your marketing efforts.

Customers now demand a personalized experience when shopping or receiving advertisements. A survey study by Segment featuring 1,006 respondents concluded that an overwhelming 71% feel frustrated by impersonal experiences with brands.

When you deploy personalized content to audiences, you're doing what is now expected of companies to remain competitive in the industry. Buyer personas are your ticket to achieving this.

Here is a list of everything you can benefit from by targeting buyer personas with your marketing campaigns and content creation efforts.

1. Improved Targeting

It helps to know who you're talking to before you initiate the conversation.

Without understanding your buyer persona, you find yourself talking to everyone, and, therefore, no one at the same time. Compare this to blindly approaching every customer that comes by on the sales floor. Not everyone has the same needs, and you'll never know who will be receptive based on a blind guess.

When you begin compiling important qualifiers regarding your customers, you become more efficient in your sales approach. You spend less time and money going after those with zero interest and focusing your efforts on those that matter more to your company.

2. Improved Content Creation

If you know who you're targeting, you immediately gain a better understanding of how to approach the conversation.

This applies to not only in-person or phone conversations but should influence your website copy, blogs, paid ads, landing pages, and more. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping for the best, you're now prepared to tailor your offers and messaging to those who are most likely to engage with you.

Furthermore, improving your buyer personas and creating new ones offers compounding benefits. When you're creating the right kinds of content for your audience, the performance data becomes even more meaningful. You'll know what works, what doesn't, and what you can do to get consistent results moving forward.

3. Improved ROI

The positive benefits continue to snowball into what matters most - your bottom line.

When you create buyer personas, you know who to speak with and how to speak with them. Now, you can start pushing toward closing more successful deals and boosting your ROI.

Businesses and marketers alike don't want nonqualified customers entering their doors. It costs time and money for a person's attention, and attracting the wrong leads is a poor investment. Instead, you'll now focus heavily on the audiences with the strongest interest and purchase intent, even if it means less traffic overall.

You'll spend less time chasing vanity metrics like overall clicks or daily traffic to make your agency look better. Your brand will benefit more from closing more deals with qualified leads that align with your buyer persona.

4. Better Consumer Feedback

Finally, interacting with your buyer persona gives way to more actionable feedback. In our always-online world, everyone has an opinion. But, which opinions about your brand really make a difference?

Opinions and feedback from engaged and paying customers are critical for growth and success. They've already committed to interacting with your brand, but now you can discover how to make your offerings even better.

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You can get better feedback and improve your shopping experience by doing your research ahead of time. Let's dive into how to do buyer persona research so that you can start finding better leads today.

How to Do Buyer Persona Research?

If you're a currently operating business, you likely already have data on hand that's valuable for building buyer personas. However, more information will only further improve your efforts.

Your marketing efforts might prove rough at first. But, by employing these tactics, you can use your buyer persona research to create better customer profiles.

1. Evaluate Your Brand

This should be the first step in creating any type of business. It's the reason why companies typically state their mission, vision, or goal by existing.

A successful business does not exist simply to sell a product or service but to provide actionable solutions to customer pain points. In the process of defining these goals, you should naturally begin to consider who will benefit from your offerings.

As a white label digital marketing agency, we know that our mission is to serve other agencies and entrepreneurs. We strive to complement their business efforts and provide fulfillment services to cover any gaps in their own business offerings. For these reasons, we know we want to focus on B2B buyer personas that work in the digital marketing field.

You should apply the same thought process when establishing your buyer persona. Understand who you want to reach, but leave an open mind for the various audience segments that make up that broad spectrum of potential clients.

2. Survey Your Existing Customers

Unless you're a brand-new agency with no clients, you already have research options available.

Brands of any size will benefit from interviewing their customers directly. Your audience interaction shouldn't always be entirely focused on a sale. Building rapport with your existing customers and maintaining their satisfaction is crucial for growth and scaling.

Check-in on your customers and ask how your product or service is treating them. This not only shows that you care but invites them to speak honestly about your strengths and weaknesses. You might discover concerns about price, quality, or customer service, all of which speak to customer needs and pain points.

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You can also obtain information by sending our customer surveys. Take the opportunity to curate a series of questions for your newsletter subscribers or your previous customer list. If you're an e-commerce brand, invite them to leave reviews on any products they purchase shortly after they complete their transaction.

Brand questionnaires need not only apply to the actual transaction and experience with the service. Ask your customers what type of content they like to see, where they spend their time browsing, and how you can improve their browsing experience. Any feedback you receive simultaneously builds out your buyer persona and helps you improve your marketing efforts.

3. Collect Information from Your Prospects

Many marketers, particularly in PPC areas, leverage their content to collect lead data.

These initial campaigns are known as discovery campaigns and exist to help with lead segmentation. While boosting sales should always be a focus, taking the time to learn more about your audience is beneficial for long-term results.

Your ads and landing pages for these types of campaigns should reflect this. However, this is still a transaction and your average web user is not going to relinquish their data for free. You can offer incentives, otherwise known as lead magnets, to encourage users to provide some personal data.

Lead collection forms on your landing page can give you the attributes you need to qualify who's reading your content. You can ask for as many qualifiers as you want. Just be mindful that many users are hesitant to give out anything too personal, nor do they wish to spend too much of their free time helping you out.

Finally, the paid platform you're using likely offers a tracking pixel to assist with collecting some of this data automatically. You can install a Facebook or TikTok Pixel on your site to track users that click on your ads on those platforms. Then, you have information about who they are, how they found your content, and how they spend their time on social before they reach your form.

4. Create a Negative Buyer Persona

If your buyer persona is your ideal customer, then the negative buyer persona is the individual that you do not wish to attract.

While scaling and growing your sales is the goal, some people will never be the right for your product or services. You can give yourself an edge in crafting your buyer persona by defining criteria that would rule out a potential lead.

For example, a business that sells garage door repair services is interested in home or business owners. Individuals that do not fit those categories, like apartment renters or those that live at home, are not ideal for their company. They do not have a garage door and cannot benefit from their service in any way.

Other negative criteria might not be so clear without research. Price is often a tricky factor to consider as you need to balance the cost of business, build quality, and accessibility to customers. Once you decide on a firm price point, you'll want to rule out customers outside of a certain income level as they likely cannot afford your premium product.

Knowing what to avoid is just as essential as knowing whom you wish to target. Take the time to evaluate your brand, consider your customer base, and define the attributes that make up your negative buyer persona.

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How to Create a Buyer Persona?

Armed with a library of research, we can now begin the process of creating a buyer persona.

Let's start by reviewing our research.

1. Analyze and Segment Your Data

In our earlier example, we created three basic customer profiles. After performing your research, you likely have information from dozens, if not hundreds, of customers that you need to consider.

We recommend compiling your audience data in spreadsheet software like Excel. You can also utilize form builder and tracking software like DashClicks to quickly organize your information. Then, you can download all of your collected data in a CSV sheet to use in other applications.

Segment your data for easier browsing. Some categories you may want to implement include:

• Sex
• Age
• Location
• Occupation
• Income Level
• Interests
• Social media profiles
• Housing

Your criteria will differ based on your brand’s unique needs and requirements.

Then, start to highlight the most consistent attributes shared across all of your surveyed leads and customers. Add each of these qualifiers to your buyer persona profile until you start to form a clear picture of your average ideal customer.

Do not necessarily rule out any qualifiers that aren't ranked at number one. There may be a significant enough number of customers that can benefit from your brand to consider making additional buyer personas.

2. Rule Out Any Negative Buyer Persona Qualifiers

Our earlier process of creating a negative buyer persona will help us in eliminating unuseful information. Some of your surveyed leads might have tangential interest in your brand, but do not make for worthwhile prospects based on your previously established reasoning.

You'll now have a list of buyer persona attributes shared among your viable audience. You've eliminated any unworthwhile prospects and can now move forward in building and sharing your buyer persona with your team.

Note that ruling out certain leads now does not necessarily mean you should forget them for good. Some of your most interested leads might only have one or two factors going against them right now. Oftentimes, you can use this data to consider proposing new goals that can help you extend your offerings to new audiences when it comes time to scale.

3. Start Implementing Changes to Your Strategy

With your initial buyer persona(s) created, it's time to start utilizing them in your marketing efforts.

Buyer persona-focused content should not apply only to new efforts. You should communicate with your SEO, content, and social media teams to revisit existing plans and previous content. Revisit your work and consider how effective it is in addressing your new ideal buyer persona.

This process should prove educational. Take the opportunity to tweak content as necessary to begin addressing your ideal customer. Use a daily task tracker to write daily notes and provide feedback to your team as you come up with new ideas for better content moving forward.

Your entire team must be on the same page in understanding your buyer persona. Consistency in your message is key to building trust. With persistence, you can begin to establish your brand as a household name with your new target audience.

Buyer Personas Lead to Better Marketing

Creating a buyer persona is essential for improving business efficiency.

Your company needs to be aware of its audience and important customer pain points. Simultaneously, those prospects are demanding personalized content from brands that want their business.

The buyer persona helps aid both in meaningful content creation and accurate campaign targeting. Your team focuses on how to deliver the right message while ensuring that those words reach the most ideal ears.

Finally, it will provide you with meaningful, actionable feedback. You'll interact with genuine customers and learn how you can improve your experience from discovery to the final sale.

Do you know one of the most effective ways to successfully build your business?

It's keeping an eye on your competitors. Yes, you read it right! In order to create smarter marketing strategies, you need to know your competitors really well.

Now, we all know that there are plenty of ways to spy on your competition. You can check their activities on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms. You can even subscribe to their digital newsletters in order to stay abreast with the latest updates and promotions.

But all of these methods are extremely time-consuming and don't offer in-depth data on what your competitors are doing to increase their customer base and build their business.

So here's what you can do instead!

Stop wasting your energy on methods that don't offer enough output and take the route of technology. What we mean is ā use the best tools for spying on your competitors. Some of the tools out there also tell you if your competitors are spying on you.

In this post, we discuss the list of 19 best tools you need for the purpose of monitoring your competitors closely. Let's discuss each one of them in detail.

How Can I Spy on My Competitors?

As you operate in a competitive landscape, it's important to analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Here's a list of the top tools you can use to get a comprehensive view of where you competitors stand:

1. SEMRush

SEMRush is a famous SEO tool that helps you:

• Know about potential competitors
• Gather data on the marketing strategies of other businesses
• Analyze the paid traffic of your competitors

You can also use the tool to improve your current campaigns by recognizing content gaps and researching keywords. SEMRush also helps you perform competitor keyword research.

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As far as the pricing is concerned, SEMRush offers different packages between $119 and $449 a month, based on the number of brands you want to track. You can also check the broad range of add-ons they offer, such as market research tools, leads channel, etc.

2. Ubersuggest

Backlinks are crucial for any winning SEO strategy. Ubersuggest is a free tool that sheds light on how your competitors fare in this regard.

But why should YOU use the tool?

The answer is simple ā To build a foundation for a link building strategy that gets you ranked. Here's how you can leverage the tool for the same:

• Type in your competitor’s URL and click “Search.”
• Choose “Backlinks,” located in the sidebar.
• Go through the overview of the link profile of your competitor. Also check detailed data such as URLs, domain score, referring pages, and anchor text.
• Choose the “Traffic Analyzer View” to view domain score, number of incoming backlinks, and so on.

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After viewing this information, you can also make a list of sites that link to your competitors. Then, you can target these websites to get backlinks to your content as well.

3. Buzzsumo

One of the most popular tools for spying on your competitors is Buzzsumo. It provides you with some incredible ideas for your content marketing strategy by keeping a track of your competitor's content. It shows what content has gained popularity among your competitors' audiences.

Now, how to use it?

Simply open the tool and type in a URL in the search bar. It will display the most popular content for that website. You can even filter down your results by content type, date range, etc.

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After you use this tool and get to know what's working for your competition, you can adapt the same for your own target audience.

4. SimilarWeb

You also require a tool that effectively gauges the overall web performance of your competitors. SimilarWeb is one tool that offers you an overview of your competitor's traffic analysis. With the help of this tool, you are able to find out their monthly traffic, where these visitors come from, and which channels bring in the most visitors.

Here's how you can use the tool to spy on your competitors:

• Open the tool and enter a website of your choice.
• An overview of its traffic will appear. Here, you can check the traffic sources. Looking at the information, you will also come to know which is the most impactful channel for them.

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Another great feature of this tool is that you can compare traffic for different competitors.

5. Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma is a tool that allows you to track social media activity of brands on a simple-to-use dashboard. With the help of the tool, you can dive deeper into your rival's social strategy as you get to measure their engagement, response time, growth, and much more.

Another noteworthy feature of the tool is that it allows you to measure the success rate of the social media campaigns of your competitors. You can even view the posts that increased their followers.

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6. Adbeat

Adbeat is one of the best tools for spying on your competition. It helps evaluate the digital marketing strategy of any brand. Here's how the tool can benefit you:

• You can check which ad campaigns of your competitors perform well with their customers.
• You can learn how much your competitors spend on advertising.

The tool is perfect for brainstorming ideas for your future ad campaigns as well.

When it comes to pricing, Adbeat offers a standard package for $249 a month and an advanced package for $399 a month.

They also offer customer-tailored enterprise packages, which they provide to big companies that have specific business needs.

7. PlagiarismCheck

PlagiarismCheck.org is an easy-to-use online checker that helps you know if your rivals copy your content. In other words, you can use this tool to check if your competitors present your writings as their own.

Basically, this tool finds rearrangements in word order, poor paraphrasing, and any indirect matches of your content. All in all, it's a great tool to have in your arsenal.

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8. Copyscape

Copyscape is another effective tool that checks if someone has stolen your content. It even checks if your content is original enough to publish.

If you choose the premium version of the tool, you gain access to more powerful detection. This version even provides extra services like API, private index, batch search, and copy-paste checks.

Another noteworthy thing about the tool is that it scans the internet on a day to day basis and emails you in case it detects copies of your content.

9. Followerwonk

Next in our list is the Twitter research tool called Followerwonk. The tool offers you insights into the kind of audience your competitors have.

Now, you may be wondering how the tool can benefit you?

It lets you access demographic data about your competitor's followers and helps you find new followers. You can also use the tool to understand how to create content that strikes a chord with your customers.

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10. Hootsuite

While researching different ways on how to spy on your competitors, we recommend you use a popular tool called Hootsuite. It is considered as the best tool for tracking social media analytics.

The incredible thing about this tool is that it integrates with more than 35 social media networks. Pretty cool, isn't it?

To use the tool, set up streams and follow your competitor's activity. You can also track specific hashtags and keywords.

11. Moat

Moat Ad Search is a tool that helps analyze the ad creatives of your competitors. You can call it the largest digital-ad search engine.

To use the tool, open it, add a brand, and check and analyze the ads they have used in the past.

Here are the results when you search for Coca-Cola.ā

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Also, when you hover over a particular ad, you can know the dates during which it was active and its dimensions.

Note: The tool also allows you to create deals alerts every time your competitors create a new ad.

12. Sprout Social

When you talk of the most famous social media spying tools, Sprout Social deserves a mention. It monitors your competitors' campaigns and helps you improve your social media strategy.

Here's what you can do with the help of this tool:

• Know the recent changes/trends in your industry.
• Get valuable insights from your rivals.
• Research upcoming trends and sharpen your marketing plan.
• Manage your social campaigns from a single platform.

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When you talk of pricing, Sprout's premium packages start at $89 a month, enabling you to monitor five social profiles. If you need to track more accounts, you can choose their enterprise packages for $149 and $249 a month.

13. Ahrefs

Next on our list of tools for spying on other brands is the widely known tool Ahrefs. You can use it for every aspect of competitor analysis.

It provides you with all this information on your competitors:

• Referring domains
• Domain authority
• New referring domains

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Armed with this information, you can check how long it is taking for your competitors to gain new links. If they are gaining 90 links in a day, for instance, then you can set your own goal accordingly.

14. Kompyte

Kompyte helps you learn about any changes on your competitor's website. It also enables you to know about their ads and digital marketing campaigns.

If you go ahead and register for this tool, you will get an alert every time your competitor puts up a fresh banner, posts ads, or makes even the smallest modification on their site.

Another noteworthy feature of the tool is the hidden updates a feature. It monitors the changes that aren't even visible on your competitor's site. An amazing feature, isn't it?

Note: The pricing of the tool is not known, but you can always request a demo to know more.

15. Ontolo

While looking for effective ways on how to spy on your competitors, consider using a tool called Ontolo. It provides useful graphs and reports to let you easily understand the information it shows.

Essentially, Ontolo is a tool that lays key focus on content marketing. But, it's also a helpful backlink tool. With the help of this tool you can:

• Prioritize your content and get improved results
• Discover authors who link to your content
• Get tips and recommendations for link building opportunities

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16. SpyFu

SpyFu offers you detailed insights into the marketing campaigns of your competitors. For instance, you get to look at their Google Ads activity. This means, you can see every ad variation, every organic rank, and all the keywords they bought on Google Ads.

If you want to get a detailed rundown of your competitor's Google Ads campaign, all you need to do is open the tool and enter the brand you want to analyze.

This helps you check what they are doing correctly. You also get to see any improvements that they need to make.

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All in all, SpyFu offers you some great ideas you can use to improve your advertising campaigns.

SpyFu packages start from $39 a month. They increase according to the number of keywords you need to research.

17. iSpionage

iSpionage is one of the most powerful competitor analysis tools for spying on your competitors. It helps research keywords and examine your competitors' marketing campaigns.

Basically, this tool helps you dive deeper into the marketing activities of your competition. You can use it to obtain data on your rival's paid advertising budgets and check the keywords they are using for their pay-per-click ads.

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When you talk of pricing, iSpionage packages are priced between $59 and $299 a month. Companies requiring advanced competitor reporting features can contact iSpionage for custom subscriptions.

18. Serpstat

Serpstat is a highly reliable SEO competitor tracker tool out there. Top brands such as Shopify and Samsung use it to keep a check on their rivals and hone their SEO strategies.

Apart from this, businesses also use the tool to keep a check on their competitors content strategies. One can even access it to know any upcoming keyword trends.

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As far as pricing is concerned, Serpstat's packages are priced from $55 to $399 a month, based on the number of daily searches you require.

19. KW Finder

KW Finder helps you carry out competitor analysis on the SEO strategies of other brands. All you need to do is type in the domain of a brand, and the tool will present you a breakdown of its top-ranking keywords. This data comes in handy to produce SEO-driven content that helps in getting more users to your website.

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When it comes to the pricing of the tool, packages fall between $29 to $79 a month, depending on the brands and number of keywords you wish to research.

Wrapping It Up

In this day and age, you need to stalk your competitors to find out ways to outsmart them. The tools we've discussed will allow you to keep an eye on your competition more closely. All these tools offer quick and smart insights, giving you the latest data on your rivals. Use the valuable insights you gather from these tools to create a plan that sets your business up for success. Ensure you use a combination of the tools we've discussed to connect the dots and view the bigger picture.

Now that you are armed with the knowledge of the top tools for spying on your competitors, you are in a well-informed position to move ahead in the game.

Get cracking!