Introduction

So you’re a design agency, partner or productised design service and you’re struggling to get as many clients as you’d like? It sucks, we know. And with 130,000 agencies in the US and 20,000 in the UK alone it can feel a bit disheartening when you start to think about it too much.

If you’re finding yourself looking at other, more successful agencies wondering how they did it then read on as we’ve got some good hot takes on how to start growing your pipeline.

In this article we’ll cover:

• Positioning: How to distinguish yourself as an agency,

• Outbound: How to do outbound properly,

• Social Marketing: What does and doesn’t work on socials,

• Service: How to win over prospective clients who show intent.

Positioning Your Agency

Before we jump into strategies for getting more leads as a design agency or design partner, it’s important to consider the positioning and who you plan to market yourself to.

You might - by the nature of the clients you’ve taken on, or from past work - already have a niche in mind. Or you might be open to anyone and everyone who’ll work with you. Whatever position you’re in, making sure that you speak to a particular audience makes building the order book far easier.

But why? Surely opening yourself up to a broader market is better since the pool of potential clients is bigger? Not exactly.

Although most clients’ design requests are pretty similar at the base level, they won’t see it that way. They’d prefer to see deeper knowledge of an industry and a proven experience designing for it.

So whilst positioning your agency towards seed stage B2B software companies in the midwest or lawn care companies in central Europe might seem like a step down, your offering becomes a lot more valuable to these customers. You can always grow your niche later on!

The Caveat…

A lot of these ideas are caveated on the assumption that you’ve exhausted any referrals that might be available to you. If you’ve not tried this avenue out yet, I would highly recommend going back out to ex-colleagues, past companies & friends and family as it’ll be significantly easier to convince them to come on board.

But assuming you’ve done this already, here are a few ideas to begin building a stronger pipeline:

Outbound

With well researched emails, you want to be providing a good amount of value. How would you define good? Well, if you feel like they got something helpful out of the email without even replying to you then you’ve done enough.

Agencies just don’t do well at mass outbound (to be fair, most other companies don’t do well either). Unlike software products, there’s a certain personal touch with an agency that makes the service worth all that money. So treating your lead like a lead is a sure fire way to turn people off to your service immediately.

Okay, the above isn’t a design agency but if you’re sending out stuff like this then there’s very little reason for the receiver to reply. First of all, it’s not signal driven i.e. they’ve not attempted to explain why now is a good time to explore this.

Second - and most importantly - step into the shoes of your potential clients. Would you look for a design partner who had no real interest in your business beyond the money for the project? Or would you want someone who could clearly articulate why they wanted to work with you? Regardless of the timing being right or not, being a missionary instead of a mercenary makes getting a reply a whole lot easier.

Social Marketing

Marketing yourself on social media is probably the easy and cheapest way to grow your order book. As long as you remain relatively consistent, you can grow just using platforms like X and I’m aware of many design agencies who do exactly that.

If you already have a portfolio of work, use this to promote what you’ve done for past accounts. Talk about your process, your decisions, the results they saw. If it’s not measurable results, share testimonials or reviews. If you have neither, go back to the client and ask - if the work you did was good they’ll be more forthcoming than you might think.

If you haven’t got a portfolio of work or are just starting out then you have a couple of options. You can share prospective work you’ve done yourself - which might be design explorations, or unsolicited redesigns or just general tinkering. Or you can talk a bit more about your craft. Comment on trends and opinion pieces and share your expertise with any potential visitors. Make sure to tie it back to the niche you’ve place yourself in.

One thing to mention here is that you can’t be disheartened if you don’t see any engagement. That’s totally normal in fact. Dark social is real and you’d be surprised how many leads come from seeing a post on a social platform, not engaging but researching the poster instead.

White Glove Service

Assuming at this point that you’re seeing some level of interest from potential clients, it’s time to dial up the personalisation. This is one of those things that just don’t scale very well (unless you’re using a tool like whomso 😉) but it’s a fantastic way to stand out from the crowd that your prospect will undoubtedly be comparing you against.

A white glove aka high touch service from the outset really sets the bar for how your design agency will work with them as a client. This isn’t about over-servicing the customer or setting an unattainable bar for future work, it’s about making sure they know you care about them.

To do this, I’d recommend sharing case studies that genuinely speak to their problems, design teardowns of their existing project so they can understand your thought process, or market research on what they could look like. I would steer clear of doing actual design work before they’ve signed but going above what other designers would do really does set you apart.

Summary

If you run a design agency and are struggling to generate interest or new clients, trying out these methods over the course of a couple of months is almost guaranteed to drive some engagement.

Unfortunately a lot of the time these channels take a bit of time to really get working - mainly because there’s a steep learning curve on how to do it correctly. But once you’ve hit your stride the leads will start coming a lot faster and with the added benefit of you building your marketing chops alongside it.

If you’re still struggling then drop me an email at alex@whom.so and we can talk more about how to improve your funnel!