Are you having trouble handling your day-to-day agency operations while also growing your digital agency? Looking for an easy solution to management issues? Need a strong social media strategy? It might be time to hire a CEO. Wait. What? That’s right – hiring the right support as part of your leadership team can actually help transform an owner’s role enough to grow the agency easier and faster.

In today’s episode, we’ll cover:

• Why it might be time to hire a CEO.
• Why your agency needs a social media funnel.
• 4 steps to creating a killer social funnel.

Today, I talked with Audra Brehm founder and CEO of Brehm Media — a social media agency with a focus on health and beauty brands. Audra is also a member of my Digital Agency Elite Mastermind and she’s here to share some tips and strategies she has used to realize some amazing growth at her agency. She’s one of the few agency owners who actually hired leadership a CEO for her agency. She’s also a guru at social media and gives us some golden nuggets on using social channels to find agency new business prospects.

Is It Time to Hire a CEO?

Being an agency owner is tough…  And, it’s all much tougher when you’re trying to handle everything yourself. The entrepreneur mindset attracts hustlers, movers, and shakers. We often think we can handle everything ourselves. But, the really smart ones hire and outsource for the things they don’t enjoy or are not good at.

That’s what makes Audra such a smart cookie. She didn’t love handling the day-to-day employee stuff, setting the culture, putting out fires, etc. Admittedly, it’s just not her thing. As I like to say, “whatever you suck at – eliminate, delegate or automate.” So Audra hired a CEO to handle all that stuff she doesn’t enjoy and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Now she can focus on things she enjoys and is really good at.

Instead of constantly tending to crises, managing the team, or monitoring financials she has the space to grow the agency and take the business in the direction she wants, on her terms.

Just because you’re capable of doing certain things within your agency doesn’t mean you should be doing them. There are ways you might be spending your time that could be spent more effectively, or more enjoyably. Celebrate your strengths and stop worrying about your weaknesses.

The lesson here is to get out of your own way,  leverage your strengths, and hire for your weaknesses.

Why Your Agency Needs a Social Media Strategy

One of the biggest issues with social media is that too many marketers approach it without a plan. Audra says social media is actually more of a funnel. We should be developing a social media strategy with our channels that takes our prospects through the stages of the funnel.

You have to plan ahead, develop a strategy, and constantly monitor results.

Have a plan but also be patient and let the funnel do its job.

4 Steps to Creating a Killer Social Funnel

Audra shared her 4 steps towards creating a lean, mean, conversion-machine social funnel.

1. Know your mission, vision & why. Whether you’re creating social campaigns for you or your clients, you have to know who you (or they) are. What’s the purpose of your brand? Don’t just copycat other people’s social campaigns. You have to create campaigns that reflect your brand and your purpose. From the tone, voice, imagery, and colors — your social content should reflect who you (or your clients) are and what you (they) stand for.
2. Have a strategy. Meaning, benchmark your goals so you can measure your progress. Consider how many sales do I want in 6 months? What about in one year? How many new clients? How much in revenue? A social media strategy helps you develop the social media funnel and tweak if you aren’t hitting those benchmarks.
3. Execute. It’s so important not to just throw stuff out there on social media without any sort of call-to-action or next step. Are you driving to landing pages? Are you retargeting effectively? Retargeting is key and it’s often a missed step or executed poorly. Remember who you’re going after and why. Continue to speak their language even in your retargeting efforts.
4. Analyze. Analyze. Analyze.  Are your campaigns working? Look at your numbers regularly and figure out what’s working, what’s not working. Numbers don’t lie. If your analytics are in the red or flatlined that means people don’t know, like, and trust you as much as you think. So it’s time to change things up. If you’re constantly in the green that’s great but are those numbers consistent with your new business? Is your growing social popularity translating into sales?

We all know a lot of this, but we don’t do it for ourselves as much as we do it for our clients. Treat your agency as well as you treat your clients 🙂 Don’t just execute without a strategy.

Looking for a Payroll and HR Solution for your Agency?

Payroll and benefits are hard. Especially when you’re a small business. Gusto is making payroll, benefits and HR easy for small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits and great service to take care of your team.

For a limited time, Gusto is offering a deal to Smart Agency Master Class listeners. Check out Gusto.com/agency for 3-months FREE once you run your first payroll with them.