I’ve spent thousands of hours testing 5 channels to grow Magnet Monster into a 7-figure agency & Klaviyo Elite Partner. Here’s a breakdown of what’s worked well and what’s been downright ugly in getting to this level.

I spend a lot of time chatting with other agency owners about marketing and sales.

It always fascinates me to see how much better they do things than us on certain channels, and vice versa.

I’ve realised that after running my own agencies for 6 years now, there’s no single way to grow your business, and all channels have pros and cons.

It’s much more important to pick your battles by finding what you’re good at, and going deep until you hit a limit before experimenting with other channels.

With that being said, I’m going to share my experiences on:

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1. Cold email
2. Paid ads
3. SEO
4. Content marketing (on social media)
5. Referrals

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I’ll also touch briefly on events, networking and community, even though we’ve not spent much time to pass judgment on these at the end of this article.

Let’s dive in.

1: Cold Email

Out of all the channels we’ve tested, this is the one I hate the most.

We’ve hired 2 agencies to run cold email for us, and both were terrible and didn’t drive any results.

The first one I stopped two years ago after a 3-month engagement and 10,000 sends leading to 3 15-minute calls (2 highly unqualified, the last one ghosted) and $10,000 down the drain.

The second one seemed more professional upon setup with more advanced tech, but again, results were non-existent.

I don’t blame the agencies exclusively for this. We could have been better and tested more offers, but after 5 months of investment and around $16,000 (plus the time investment), results were non-existent.

The main reason why this channel didn’t work for us is that the space is far too saturated for what we’re selling, and the tech is only making things worse by the day.

The agency owners I have met who have made this a success (and continue to run it) are really focused on ultra-high volume or spending a lot of time doing personalised Loom videos and teardowns to get responses.

We could do this as well, but the reason I won’t is because I hate the idea of spending over 90% of my time only to be ignored.

I consider it a low-impact activity so we’ve parked it for now.

That being said, it CAN and DOES still work for some people, but we’re not running with it for now at Magnet Monster.

We may experiment with it at Content Army at some point once we refine our offer in that company, but we won’t be revisiting it for MM any time soon.

2: Paid Ads

We’re still testing some ad channels, to varying degrees of success. What we’ve found so far (for us at least):

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• META: couldn’t make the unit economics work, had to pull back on budget at the time as we didn’t have enough to keep experimenting
• LinkedIn: investing in thought leadership content, aiming for brand awareness at this point

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The problem we’ll have scaling ads for our offer at MM is that we’re dealing with quite a small TAM (like 25,000 Shopify stores) who aren’t in the market frequently to switch agencies.

Even though we are experimenting now with some more direct-response retargeting angles (Klaviyo audits + conversational ads), it’s still primarily focused on exposing our content and bringing our ICP into our world where we are strongest and building a relationship over time.

I think paid ads are another tough one to scale in our space so we’re focusing on using it to increase the distribution of our content rather than direct selling.

3: SEO

Surprisingly, we’ve had some reasonably good results from SEO.

Whilst we’ve got a massive amount of brilliant content on our website, it’s poorly optimised and needs somebody to come in with expertise full-time in order to make the most of it.

This isn’t going to be an initiative until the second half of this year, as right now we’re focusing our resources on social content and partnerships, but knowing it’s an opportunity to invest in gives me comfort as we’ve spread our risk.

4: Social Media Content Marketing

This is where we excel as a company.

Over 70% of Magnet Monster’s closed historical business has been inbound from my content. The remaining 30% (referrals) have largely been relationships that have been built as a byproduct of that as well, so you could make a case that we have been built exclusively through this channel.

We’re terrific at LinkedIn, average at YouTube, and poor at X. But going deep on LinkedIn has been enough to get us to this level, and it’s why I’m such an advocate to other agency owners to master one channel before spreading yourself too thin.

We dropped the ball a little on this last year, and it started to hurt us in the second half of the year.

We’re back on track this year so far and things are going extremely well again.

Historically, we’ve been so strong in this space that we’ve even set up a second business (Content Army) to help others reap the same benefits.

I believe every digital agency owner should be investing in personal brand and content. It gives you a tremendous amount of leverage in the sense of preferential partnerships, fast-tracked networking and the business opportunities that ensue from being visible online.

Many people think the opportunity has closed now to build a personal brand but I could not disagree more. Yes, it is 10 X harder on LinkedIn & X than it was 2 years ago, but you just need to be more strategic, patient and commit to a higher output to get results. It’s a non-negotiable for us and always will be.

5: Referrals

I’ve spoken in the past about the danger of agencies being built off the goodwill of others. And while I stand by that, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that probably 80% of agencies I speak to generate probably 80% of their businesses on referrals. So while I stand by my position to be cautious about relying on them too much, it’s clear that referrals are a proven business driver for most of us and we couldn’t live without them.

With that being said, what generates referrals? There are only 2 things:

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1. Delivering great quality work so that your customers want to refer you to others
2. Having strong network connections who will actively seek opportunities for your business

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Both sound simple in theory but are actually hard to scale and even more so predictably.

As your business grows, protecting the quality of your work and enhancing it becomes challenging as you become removed from the operations. This may have a small to large impact on your ability to generate referrals from clients, depending on the quality.

Usually, most founders I speak to (including myself) will turn their attention to building strategic partnerships with other agencies and software companies. But finding the right partners for both of these is equally as challenging. You need to be extremely careful about referring your existing clients to another agency, while most tech doesn’t produce the uplift needed to justify the investment.

That being said, we now generate 50% of our business from referrals. These come from both tech companies and other agencies and are an invaluable source of pipeline. The key is to make these partnerships intentional, tracking inputs and taking them seriously both with lead sharing and co-marketing opportunities. There’s no other way to make them work.

Channels I Plan to Experiment With

That’s about the extent of our experience to date, but we do have some other ventures in the pipeline I’m expected to dabble with this year to varying degrees to test the waters.

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1. Offline Events: curated dinners of 8-12 people. I’ve been invited to a few over the last 3 months and I’ve come away with a lot of value from these.
2. Community: we’ve started experimenting with a dedicated Slack community for Content Army. Time will tell if this isn’t just another distraction. It’s incredibly difficult to make communities work but it bodes well with my personality type so I’m excited by it. Will report more on the results as the year goes on.

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There are other channels as well beyond what I’ve listed, of course. But as I’ve said repeatedly, you have to pick your battles and focus on your strengths. We’ve got so much room for improvement and optimisation in the above channels that we don’t need to get distracted by others at this moment in time.

If you’ve got a spare minute, drop a comment and let me know what’s worked well for your agency – I’d love to know.

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