Step 2: Identify Opportunities by Industry
What if you’re looking for new industries to target, which you don’t already have clients within?
Climb Online looks through the Virgin 500 or 30 Under 30 lists to find young, rapidly-growing companies. You can also discover these fast-scaling businesses and industries by looking at recent accelerator graduates, VC-funded startups, and household brands entering new markets.
These types of clients are in a growth phase (especially if they’ve just been funded) and have the need and budget for marketing efforts to fuel further scaling. It makes them low-hanging fruits for agencies.
Another approach can include analyzing search data to identify industry trends and select the companies that are garnering momentum in that niche, over the last couple of months.
Effective, Agency-Approved Ways to Approach the Pre-Sales Process
Once you’ve figured out your preferred client types, whether by type of business, vertical, or other specific criteria, the pre-sales process continues in a mix of data gathering and highlighting your agency DNA as being the right fit.
Show a Deep Understanding of the Lead’s Industry
That being said, demonstrating knowledge of clients’ industries is crucial to the pre-sales process, too. Mark Wright says that, at Climb Online, “Demonstrating industry insight is the first thing we do.”
Showing business-specific knowledge is crucial for gaining clients’ trust when pitching and nurturing leads. It can make all the difference between a “silent no” and a closed deal.
Here’s how you can go about gaining that understanding (and impressing your potential clients with your insight):
Do Your Homework
If your potential client is in the dental industry, for example, look across all your dentistry clients to present industry-specific results when pitching. Then show how these kinds of SEO efforts can drive results for the client’s individual business goals.
Apart from targeted case studies to pinpoint ways you can help them, deeply understand their KPIs, and don’t hesitate to educate them on each phase of the partnership they’re about to enter.
Weinstein explains that she always starts with listening closely to the client while gleaning data about the business’s pain points and how the customer journey looks. Understanding their language and their problems is a first step in educating them about where SEO fits.
For instance, a client who went through a website redesign came to her because they were losing traffic, so she quickly evaluated the website and identified some of the critical issues – a good start for a productive conversation.
Stay Updated
Read up on the news from the client’s industry as well to understand the types of things that could impact their business goals or campaigns.
When speaking with dentistry clients, Wright says they may ask things like, “Did you see the GDC update from November?” to demonstrate their awareness of these industry-specific changes. Showing this kind of attention to detail goes a long way towards building trust in your agency.
Weinstein adds that having clients from various industries is a constant challenge and the business strategy she chose for her boutique because it means continually learning not just about SEO, but a specific vertical and its current status. For her, as an SEO consultant and trainer, constantly learning is key to closing the deal.
Utilize Available Tools
You should use preliminary keyword research tools to actively look for industry-specific insights, too.
Year over Year search data tools can help identify relevant changes in your lead’s chosen industry. Through collections of keywords that top websites in a specific industry rank for, and their exploding or tanking trends, you can do quick checks on what can be a growth opportunity.
You can also investigate specific client websites or their competition and spot profitable keywords and low hanging fruits. Let’s say you have a potential client in home and decor and you want to see how “outdoor heater“ has shifted in demand. You’ll have a good starting point for your pitch.
To find more untapped opportunities, you can use tools that allow you to look at your keyword alongside other interesting or related queries. This is useful when a client’s current keywords are either shrinking or playing in a competitive segment.
These tools help you create reports that highlight whatever matters most to your client.
Most CMOs have their budgets under strict scrutiny right now. They will keep an eye particularly on their ROI and revenue performance as a result of SEO campaigns, so understanding the nuances of their industry and how these might impact ROI is key when pitching to new clients.
Analyze the Lead’s Competitors
If you ask your leads, they’ll likely say that they know who their competitors are.
However, they might be basing it on things like market share, household penetration, or retail availability – not on the things that necessarily matter in SEO. This is the difference between offline and online competitors. Which may come as a surprise sometimes for decision-makers.
Using competitor analysis and a reliable visibility metric to spot the truth of online market share can also make a case for a solid business proposal. That way, you can look at competitors on a campaign-wide level, as well as sorted by individual keywords, so you can analyze insights as granular as you need.
You’ll be able to spot the differences in desktop vs mobile visibility, know the number of keywords each competitor ranks for, and the percentage of them that are in common for your client or the competitors’ domain rating based on the number of backlinks.
With all these insights ready, you’ll be able to prove that you get their business and vertical.
Train Your Client-Facing Team in Commercial Knowledge
This kind of hyper-targeted, industry-specific approach is made possible by having a strong pre-sales process. Still, there’s another thing that can help set your agency apart when it comes to understanding clients’ needs: commercial knowledge.
Wright says that making business training mandatory for all of their staff is the single “biggest thing” that sets them apart. They give all their SEO staff essential business training through their own Climb Academy and other business know-how courses.
All new hires go through this training during the onboarding process, but employees also continue to receive regular commercial education every week. From understanding profit margins and P&Ls to knowing how to spot opportunities or how to handle a refusal – all the essential parts of running a business are covered.
This process ensures that everyone in Climb Online’s client-facing teams has commercial knowledge. Having their people know the things that matter most to business decision-makers enables them to directly communicate the relationship between the client’s marketing budget and business objectives, and talk in terms of results and financials.
For the same reason, SEOmonitor has developed a module to help SEO pros assess realistic vs. ambitious campaign objectives, and present them to clients in a way that correlates to their overall business objectives. It makes a big difference in how clients see your worth, as they can understand it as a measurable, valuable return.
Instead of hearing about the importance of metadata (something attractive to SEO pros, but not to dentists), they’ll hear about how you’ll increase their revenues (something relevant to all business owners, including dentists).
The numbers won’t be exact, of course, but give them projected percentages based on achieving a specific ranking, and they’ll be able to do the math themselves.
Summary
You need to be thorough with your pre-sales activities and pinpoint the exact offer for the client’s particular business issues. That’s what sets successful, deal-closing SEO agencies apart.
The key to this process is to understand your customer’s needs, allowing you to form and maintain strong client relationships from the get-go.
To do this, you should:
- Know what your agency is good at.
- Show a deep understanding of the client’s industry.
- Analyze their real competitors.
- Identify opportunities in the market.
- Train your client-facing teams in business know-how.
If you want to get started as soon as possible, see whether your potential client’s industry is exploding or tanking with SEOmonitor’s Search Trends – search by keywords, niches, or industries, analyze a specific website or category, and discover its year over year trend.
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