This is not an easy year when it comes to agencies who specialise in marketing, social media, PR or SEO. Why?

• Many of our target audience/potential clients could be struggling this year and slashing their marketing budget to get through the lockdowns and restrictions

• This year’s plans simply out of the window in many cases

• Hiring agencies won’t be many brands priorities

Anyway, here’s some ways you can gain new clients in 2021:

Promote Yourself - Push your agency wherever you can

Partner Up – Even with the Competition - As a marketing agency, you can partner up with non-competing companies and organisations that are complementary to your business and whose target audiences are similar to your own.

You can even partner with other agencies. An agency that’s much bigger than you can refer clients with small projects that are below their usual scope and vice-versa.

Build More than Campaigns – Build a free product to help your customers in order to generate leads.

Don’t Wait for Referrals – Asking for referrals is a certainly nothing new. But ask yourself, when was the last time you did so? People are four times more likely to buy when referred by someone they know.

Don’t Give Lost Clients the Cold Shoulder - This should be obvious but we often hear the opposite. A simple way to get a quick boost in new business is to simply to keep ex-clients in your good booked and re-approach them by keeping them updated with your agency.

Revive PR to Build Inbound Links and Brand Awareness - Using tools like pr.co or HARO, you can easily connect with journalists and pitch them your feature or simply contribute to article they’re writing with a quote or statistic. If your agency has valuable proprietary data, a compelling brand story, or industry news to offer.

Warm up to Cold Sales - If you’re not doing cold selling, you may want to consider it. Some of the recently available tools, such as Prospect.io, make it much easier to build clientele this way.

As Steve Jobs famously said in a 1994 interview: “Most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act.”

It’s rare for an agency to reach out to prospective customers cold, but there may be local customers who need your services and would rather work with someone in their community. We all know that cold calling can be a nightmare, but there are ways to do it right.

Diversify Spend with Offline Ads - Direct marketing and offline advertising is considered obsolete, but it can work. Also, it’s cheaper than you’d expect and allows your agency stand out in the crowd. Why not separate yourself from all of the internet noise with a billboard or radio ad in your target market?

Be smart about it. Set out a small budget and experiment. Track your results and see where the business is and what works and what doesn’t.

Tap into Social Capital - Using tools like BuzzSumo, Brandwatch, and Twitonomy will help you identify people with reach and influence.