Since 2017, we have published a popular annual report titled State of the cell phone number list Digital Marketing Agency. Every year, we survey our cell phone number list agency clients (there are many) to find out what types of services they offer, how they charge their clients, how much expense they manage, how they win new business, and more. If there's one key insight you can take from three years of reporting, it's this: The cell phone number list biggest challenge digital marketing agencies tend to face is acquiring new customers. Why verticalization helps your agency grow Another key insight from years of surveying our agencies' clients is that earning referrals from current clients is still the cell phone number list most common way to acquire new clients. It's not surprising. For a small cell phone number list business owner, outsourcing their digital marketing efforts – whether in one area, like paid search, or in every area – is a huge decision. No one hands over the responsibility of filling their funnel and driving sales cell phone number list to an agency they don't trust. And nothing gets one business owner to trust your agency like another business owner's stamp of approval. Typically, the cell phone number list well of customer referrals is a sinking well. More than likely, your digital marketing agency can't always rely on referrals alone. At some point, you have to prospect. Prospecting - which refers to the cell phone number list process of actively finding and presenting potential customers - is hard enough. You need to convince the cell phone number list skeptical business owners we just talked about (1) that there's room to improve their digital marketing and (2) that they should trust you to make those improvements. Again: this is not an easy thing to do. The cell phone number list issues of representing clients from all sorts of verticals don't stop at the prospecting stage either. When the time comes, you know, to manage the digital marketing campaigns of these companies, you're going to implement very different strategies for each. While your SaaS customers will need you to nurture their leads through an exceptionally long year-round sales cycle, your brick-and-mortar cell phone number list customers will need you to really speed things up in Q4.