As A Digital Agency Owner, It’s Important To Create Meaningful Partnerships For Growth!
There are many different ways to sell, market, and pitch your brand or service. As you’ve learned with Lee, there are fundamental strategies that work well for lead generation. Creating meaningful partnerships is a core part of the growth process as well!
We are going to cover the ten steps to building meaningful partnerships as a digital agency owner:
- Link your website to your social accounts
- Use the “70%-30% Share Rule”
- Follow like-minded people
- Share other content before your own
- Create and share valuable content
- Host events with social media partners
- Refer others often
- Use lists, hashtags, and tags
- Create private groups to build community
- Post positively during negative times
Let’s dig in!
Step 1: Link Your Website To Your Social Accounts
No matter what CMS you use, it’s important to build partnerships through the right channels. Whether you are building a website, maintaining one, or relaunching a brand - your site should be linked to all social channels to bridge the connection.
This can be done in many ways! We suggest that your landing pages include a footer link to all social channels for starters. These links can be customized to fit your branding.
A few other places you can link to your social channels are your blog page, contact page, and about page. It’s important that your audience feels like they’re able to connect with you and that you’re available as a resource.
Don’t be afraid to use your social media profiles in lead generation pop-ups as well! You can use social invites, private group shares, and events as content for pop-ups.
Here is a quick example of showcasing your social links on your home page! At GoWP, we share our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram pages.
Step 2: Use The “70%-30% Share Rule”
The point of being on social media is to communicate, connect, and share. The keyword here being share.
When you get wrapped up in marketing your own brand, you can often lose sight of how much you’re sharing about yourself.
That’s why it’s important to use the “70%-30% Share Rule”. Share 70% of your own content and 30% of others. We encourage you to lift up your partners through social media. It’s important to support them in their successes, share their journey, and root them on in the process. Partnerships are about support, compassion, and growth.
Some quick and easy ways to do this are to dedicate some time to re-share your partners’ posts daily. You can create your own posts with their content and share it as a friendly win as well! Be sure to make it all about them - no secret sales included for yourself.
Step 3: Follow Like-Minded People
One of the freedoms you have on social media is to choose who you follow and who you don’t.
When you are growing as a digital agency, it’s important to surround yourself with people that will help you grow and support your brand. Now that we are more virtual, following the right people on social media is extremely important.
There are a few different style people we recommend you follow when you are setting out to create meaningful partnerships on social media. Tune in to friends, referral partners, community partners, clients, and other agency owners. Their viewpoints, strategies, and processes will help you grow as a digital agency owner - and that is priceless.
We put together 30+ experts to follow on Twitter, we hope you make some good connections there!Step 4: Share Other Content Before Your Own
This can be a tough one for some to remember. This step does not have to be done every time, however, it’s a good reminder to share other like-minded people’s content first.
This simple act alone shows your social partners, potential leads, and friends that you are humble, kind, and compassionate. That combination wins trust online.
The rule of sharing at GoWP is that we take some time each day to share content from our partners. Our Slack channel is full of posts that our team pulls in from our social community to reshare to our followers. It makes us happy to share the successes of our partners daily.
The best thing about sharing other people’s content is that it always comes back to you in the kindest of ways.
We created #SharingMondays in the Niche Agency Owners Facebook Group where our members can post links for others to share and help promote. We have such a great community that lifts up others - it’s been a real joy watching that grow.Step 5: Create And Share Valuable Content
If you have learned anything from Marketing Agency Coach, it’s that valuable content is key for success.
Using the core steps in the agency sales system means that you are curating and executing content to share.
The mission when sharing on social is to make the content valuable, educational, and resource-based for learning. The technique of “selling” your services is long gone. Now, the objective is to educate your followers. How do you do this?
If you're a GoWP partner you have access to our client portal. That's where our Knowledge Base is and that's where we host resources for free to help our partners grow. Our community is made up of agency owners so we’ve created resources to help them. In our Knowledgebase, you’ll find landing page templates to help sell care plans, a website maintenance checklist lead magnet, and a lot more.
Think about what would help your target audience, and what they’re already looking for, and create it! We encourage you to create some of these resources:
- Tutorials and Walkthroughs
- Videos
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Checklists
- Templates
- Guides
- Ebooks
- Whitepapers … and more!
Step 6: Host Events With Social Media Partners
A fun way to create meaningful partnerships on social media is to host an event with others!
With all the different types of events, it’s important to keep up with hosting your own for growth. The connections you build on social media are a great avenue to event building. Once you connect with someone on social media, you can learn their expertise and apply it to an event that has mutual benefits for both.
There is a science behind requesting a host for an event. It’s ideal to be on the same page with how you present it, where you host it and how it’s run. Communication and documentation are crucial for a successful event on both sides. As long as you stay on the same page and prepare together, it will drive engagement for both parties involved.
We had the pleasure of having Lee Goff host a webinar for us about Creating a Non-Stop Lead Generation Process for Your Agency. Our partnership has taken off since connecting on social media and we are grateful to collaborate on these events.
Hosting events is a win-win for business!
Step 7: Refer Others Often
Your agency may do a lot, but it can’t do it all! That’s where the power of referrals comes in.
When you offer any kind of product or service, there are always clients that need things outside of your wheelhouse. Creating a solid referral database is key for being a resource for your clients.
These referrals can come from social media connections! Getting connected online can bridge the gap for a fruitful referral relationship. We recommend gathering all the companies and brands that may be useful for your clients and sending them referrals often. If you can refer them right on your social media platforms - even better!
Step 8: Create Lists, Hashtags, And Tags
Personalizing your social media posts is a good content strategy to put into place. There are many tools that can help you niche down your social outreach so that it is more beneficial to your digital agency.
We recommend that you create lists, unique hashtags, and always tag your social partners when sharing about them.
Twitter offers Lists, where you can gather your social partners and easily share to and from there. You can make public or private lists to help generate more shares for all.
When sharing your tweets, you can use relevant hashtags to support the search. Be sure to keep your hashtags to a minimum, using 1-3 only around the topics you are tweeting about.
Tag your friends, followers, partners, and fans when speaking of them! It encourages engagement and growth.
Step 9: Create Private Groups For Your Inner Circle
Creating a private group takes time, dedication, and commitment for success. You have the ability to reach a powerful group of people if you can use it as a resource.
At GoWP, we created the Niche Agency Owners Facebook group to connect with our community and share resources with agency owners that will help them grow. It is a highly-vetted community of agency owners and WordPress experts that provides expertise, free resources, community shares, and plenty of fun. It’s grown so much over the last year, and we love seeing people make connections, learn, grow, and help each other out.
Creating a private group enables the inner circle of influence to be a powerful source of lead generation. When you connect with someone on a niched-down level, you are happy to support their business. You can throw events, workshops, and interviews in these groups to showcase community involvement.
Private groups are incredibly impactful!
Step 10: Post Positively During Negative Times
As a digital agency owner, your online presence represents your brand. It’s your voice that is showcasing your product or service and it’s important that it’s true to you.
We encourage you to share positive, uplifting, and encouraging content! The social media world can get negative and it can be easy to fall in line with it! Being an inspiration to others is a good core strategy for creating meaningful partnerships on social media.
Here are some ways you can share good content during bad times:
- Re-share partners, friends, group members, or referral partners
- Share your gratitude for partners
- Share positive feedback
- Create polls to encourage more engagement
- Share events like webinars, podcasts, community conferences - both yours and others
- Share other partners' successes
- Share inspiring posts
- Share expert advice
- Share a funny meme or GIF 🙂
Wrapping Up: Creating Meaningful Partnerships On Social Media
Social media is a big world that can build a lot of connections. When you are able to manage your social accounts well, you can create meaningful partnerships that are lasting.
Wrapping up what we learned, we believe these ten steps can help you use social media to build relationships for growth. In conclusion, we recommend you link your website to your social accounts, use the “70%-30% Share Rule”, follow like-minded people, share valuable content and others before your own, host events, refer others, utilize lists, hashtags, and tags, along with creating private groups to build community and being positive.
What ways do you build meaningful partnerships on social media? We want to hear from you!
Author: Caylin White
Hi! I'm Caylin, Growth Manager at GoWP. I love digital marketing, growing partnerships, writing fun content, and of course, WordPress! I’m certified in WordPress 101, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, and Inbound Sales with HubSpot. When I'm not helping GoWP grow, you can find me hanging with my family, playing with my rescue puppy, or enjoying a good book.
(email is caylinbrie@gmail.com for WordPress)
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