As an agency, you’ve left it all out on the floor for your clients. You may have completely overhauled their website, rebranded their company, driven thousands of organic users to their site, 5x’d their ROI per click, but…you haven’t talked to them in years. And they’ve now entered your trophy catalog of very successful, but dormant, clients.
I hear this story more than you can imagine. We at Verblio (formerly BlogMutt) work with 500+ agencies every month, and I try to talk with as many agencies as I can in order to understand the main pain points that we, as a content creation partner, are solving.
One of our agency partners is trying to rev up his slowed current client pipeline, but has an inactive client list of 120+ companies that he hasn’t talked to in years. Another agency partner told me about a new website that he launched for a client who was obsessed with SEO—but then never got around to adding new content to his beautiful new site once he got buried in his next big project. Around here, we call this SEO purgatory.
Even though agencies cover the gamut of areas of focus and strategies, almost every agency I speak with is looking to accomplish a few goals:
- How can we create more subscription revenue to smooth out the bumpy agency revenue ride?
- How can we monetize our former clients—as there are so many that we already did great work for and developed a great relationship with?
- And how do we do this while driving value for those same clients (and current ones)?
- How do we accomplish this without adding staff?!?
Spoiler alert: You’ve got options & opportunities.
We’ve been working with agencies for years on solving these questions. Content is such a nice opportunity to consistently relate to your customers and deliver unparalleled value.
Whether the agencies are looking to roll out a new content offering or to expand services with current clients, we and our network of talented writers stand ready to meet the challenge of consistent, high-quality content with minimal effort. Many of our clients are adding tens of thousands of dollars per year in additional revenue by working with us to provide content for their former clients. And even more importantly, they are better positioning themselves for the next big project by keeping their relationships “warmed up” and thus more engaged.
There are four ways agencies working with Verblio have been successfully re-engaging former clients:
- The Modern Content Package: Topic pillar & cluster strategy
- The Content Basics: Blog, blog, blog
- Ongoing Refresh Packages: Boost SEO with scheduled and ongoing refreshes
- The New Content Table Stakes: Content + video
Each has these approaches offers the same key benefits:
- Driving subscription revenue for your agency
- Keeping your client base engaged, so that you stay top of mind
- Helping your former clients with the critical content work they often aren’t able to even get to without you
Each of these approaches can be done by managing the service directly with clients, using Verblio as a white label content platform, or using our referral program if you’d like us to manage them directly.
Let’s take a deeper dive into how Verblio can help you keep your current and past clients engaged:
1. The Modern Content Package: Pillar Content + Blog “Clusters” = More Customers
At this point, the concept of a Topic Cluster Strategy is reaching a crescendo. And it’s because it works! HubSpot has been the loudest advocate of creating great pillar content (also known as skyscraper or cornerstone content) and surrounding that pillar with multiple support pieces of content that refer back to part of your killer pillar content.
You are probably using this strategy yourself and with your current clients, but I’d guess you have a lot of former clients that could use your help or at least a refresh or discussion of their content strategy.
We recently added a pillar content offering to pair with our subscription model specifically to support agencies with the content cluster model. More on that here and here.
2. The Content Basics: Why Is Blogging Still So Hard?!
When Verblio was BlogMutt, we earned our highly-focused name by starting out with one product—blogs. More specifically—by making sure good ones were created and delivered every week for our clients, consistently and reliably. Blogs have been around for so long that people often forget they’re still the foundation of a strong, multifaceted content strategy.
The reason we created this company still holds true—it’s really, really hard for companies to maintain a great, consistent blog with 1 million other priorities today. It should be noted that agencies are often the worst offenders on keeping up with content for their own marketing.
This is the classic “the cobbler’s kids have no shoes” scenario.
So, in your quest to continually improve your clients’ marketing strategies, consider reaching out to your former clients to start a conversation and see if you can be that accountable source to keep their content vibrant, support the basics of their SEO strategy, and create some subscription revenue while doing it.
3. Ongoing Refresh Packages: Google Loves A New Coat of Paint
Similar to the basic content strategy of #2, many top agencies recommend frequent content refreshes for their clients, as frequent as every 3 months, or every year or so at the least.
The strategy focuses on boosting SEO results by making sure your landing pages and blogs get ongoing facelifts and refreshes from a keyword perspective as content (and rankings) change over time. This can be a tough goal to hit, and we shoot to make this as easy as possible.
Read more on how we did it ourselves for Verblio’s archive of content and how it worked for us.
4. The New Content Table Stakes: Content + Video
Video is definitely the cool kid at the party these days. It has all the right clothes, listens to the right music, and is currently riding a Lime scooter, vaping, listening to fluorescent headphones, and sporting ridiculous facial hair. He might seem like he’s only cashing in on the latest trends, but this guy looks good and he knows what he’s doing.
Plus, he’s having fun while doing it!
But a key opportunity for video has been missing up until this point—that is, how to bring affordable video to the mass market. So how can agencies produce the mass quantity of videos needed to keep up with market demands?
Verblio is now offering select beta agencies the ability to transform written content into short videos to better engage their users (and clients’ users) through pairing text and video. This approach to video has the potential to transform the content creation market into a broader multimedia approach at a much more cost-effective price. We’ve been working on a solution that provides this at an affordable cost compared to the sky-high price of most video production companies or agencies and does so quickly.
Please let me know if you’d like to be part of the beta. Feel free to reach me at caroline[at]verblio.com to learn more or get involved.
The benefits to your clients with this type of offer are clear.
- Double the amount of your clients’ content while opening a new audience in new, diversified channels
- Dramatically raise engagement of clients’ content
(And make you look like a marketing superhero.)
In Conclusion: Go forth & reconnect!
I hope this post gives you ample ideas on how to reconnect with former clients to create more value for both of you, and to keep you in touch and front-of-mind as they’re considering future major projects. Some of our agencies are making these options front and center in their follow-up drip campaigns or email newsletter blasts, while others are simply monitoring the performance of their former clients’ sites so that they’re ready to jump in and help when the time is right.
And our goal is to make it easy. If you’re having trouble imagining how your in-house team can handle the fulfillment if all of these client re-engagement efforts are successful, we now offer a dedicated, highly trained team who can set up a custom professional services package for your agency. And if even a managed white-label solution still sounds like a lot to handle, we offer a simple referral program. Feel free to email me to ask about that, too.
Whether you’ve already got a strategy in place to engage former clients, or you’re looking for exciting new solutions or services to pitch, Verblio can help you create a plan of action.
Interested in learning more? Drop me a line at sales@verblio.com. I’ll be thrilled to chat with you.
