I think one of the most frequently asked questions is how do you start a marketing agency, so if you’re looking to start a marketing business in 2020 and beyond, keep reading this blog post.
I wanted to give you a step-by-step blueprint and to start a marketing agency because starting a digital marketing agency is difficult and very rough and luckily you have someone teach you some of the stuff.
So when you go out and start your own agency, it’s not going to be a huge hassle. Before we start I just want to give some disclosures:
This blog post is not to start a business in 30 days and make two hundred million dollars very fast.
I’m going to be very honest with you and though is a very practical blog post on the experiences that I’ve had in the past that will help you generate business and start your marketing career without having a bunch of hassles.
Because unfortunately, what it is today is, there’s a lot of people on the internet giving false hopes and telling people all these different types of stories but these different products and services. Still, it comes down to a few different things, and I’m going to talk about those few different things today in this blog post.
So getting started I want to talk about what is a marketing agency and what exactly it does.
What is a Marketing Agency?
What a marketing agency is, it’s an agency that brings leads to businesses that’s it.
If you are not bringing the business customers, it doesn’t matter how pretty you’re making them look online; it doesn’t matter how many views you’re getting them they’re going to fail you.
Now, this is not for every type of client that businesses attract. We can have clients like; they only wanted brand reach, or they want a hundred thousand people to see their ads. And that’s very easy to do.
Now it’s different though when you say, I want this ad to target this many people; get this many leads or this many sales, and that is fine.
So if you are going to start a marketing agency, you always remember the first thing is sales that’s number one.
And once you can bring sales to businesses, you are in business.
Now there’s a few different ways to bring sales to a business.
Search Engine Optimization:
If you’re working with local small business, I highly recommend that you look into search engine optimization.
Now, what is search engine optimization means?
Search Engine Optimization means, if you type in a keyword into Google and you click on the first result, that company is most likely to get a phone call that is the easiest way to bring customers to a business.
From the years of experience, this is the easiest way to bring customers to a business.
And look I am not savvy at Facebook Advertising, but I understand SEO very well; I know email marketing very well. And I can tell you this that the money is not in the SEO, but the money is in the follow-up; email marketing and even you can use Facebook ads to accelerate some of these tactics to bring in the money to the business.
But I found that the traffic from Facebook ads is not as sticky and converting as the traffic from search engine optimization.
With that said, you need to understand what types of services you’re going to offer as a marketing agency.
Start With Facebook Advertising:
When you start a Digital Marketing Agency, start with Facebook Advertising, and I think that is a perfect way, to begin with, because Facebook ads you don’t need to know much.
All you need to do is understand the psychological behaviour of people on Facebook. If you can do that you can become very successful at Facebook advertising.
Here’s the other thing I like about Facebook Ads:
It doesn’t require any cost. So you can pick up a backpack, go to every state in the world and start selling Facebook advertising services.
Now when you’re going about this, I highly recommend that you take some type of training course or series.
I know everybody’s weird about courses, but it’s the best way to learn and accelerate it.
You can find somebody on YouTube that you like and just follow with them step by step and purchase their course.
There’s a lot of people out there like, and I don’t want to buy a course; people shouldn’t be selling courses.
Why not these people sell their books. It’s not free; it’s not free information you got to pay for it and if you pay for it, guess what you buy your way to success.
Most Marketers out there say if you buy your way to success, they’re going to see progress much faster just the reality of the way it works.
Don’t Specialize in all services:
So now that you understand to pick a service right, you are specialist or confident of bringing the results to the client.
You can be a specialist on Facebook; Email Marketing or Youtube video optimization, but what I don’t recommend you to do when you’re starting your marketing agency is specializing in everything.
Because I guarantee you that is a blueprint to fail in business. If you specialize in one focused thing such as SEO, Facebook ads, email marketing or video or whatever it maybe you’re going to see a ton of success.
And here’s the reason why:
So if you’re starting your digital marketing agency guess, what you have to do:
1. You are going to get customers:
And when getting customers, it’s a lot easier to say that we primarily focus on Facebook Ads but instead of trying to sell somebody SEO. Still, you suck at it, and you’re confident in it, specialize in Facebook ads.
Look what I did when I started and you can take this as a tip. I started by just doing marketing for restaurants and if you’re just doing marketing for restaurants, guess what you can say or do:
It makes people trust you, and they will trust your brand. Focusing on one specialization is the key to success when you are starting first.
2. Make Videos:
A lot of people want to start their agencies, and they can’t even bring themselves business with their marketing strategies.
And if you can’t do that, you’re not comfortable with your marketing and, guess what your marketing probably doesn’t work. If you can’t bring yourself business using marketing which you say you do, it doesn’t work.
Customers feel comfortable when they see it when they work with a marketing agency; agent; person; YouTuber or whoever they may be.
They feel comfortable with the fact that people make videos. Look, I get clients telling me all the time, I feel comfortable, and you are already making these videos, I see your landing pages, I see your SEO, and let’s work together.
If you have an agency where you don’t even have a website; you don’t have a business card; you don’t have a nice shirt; you don’t have traffic, or you don’t even have a sales funnel they’re not going to trust you.
Look it’s just that way, and I’m tired of all these scam artists telling you that you don’t need a website; you don’t need an email. Who the hell is going to give you money without having a business card; nice shirt; a website; social profiles or the traffic.
Whatever the metrics you want to use or the KPIs you want to use; nobody’s going to give you any business. You need to have tangible results.
I always recommend before starting your marketing company, spend six months still in your full-time job if you have one. Spend six months building out traffic from the ground and an audience or videos or build out your brand before you quit your job.
I quit my job like an idiot and I just literally stopped going to the office one day and guess what the income was with seventy thousand to zero.
Great, now I’m stuck here with no traffic, no brand awareness, no videos. The point here is, I just made a wrong decision and thinking that people will start hiring me and guess what happened nobody hired me for the first.
For two months, I had to put a bunch of money on credit cards, and this is why I’m telling you that before you quit, build some brand; branch out and build some content initially to study your freaking ass off before you quit your breadwinning job.
Offer Free Services:
Start doing a lot of stuff for free; I know a lot of people are against doing things for free but look at what the wealthiest people who worked for free in their life and that’s just the case scenario.
The reason being is because when you work for free, you get to test your abilities and you get to see what you can do to impact the business.
If you’re watching this right now and you don’t feel comfortable starting the marketing agency simply because of the fact you don’t know how to get results. Don’t start an agency. I’m just going to be super serious here, do not start an agency if you’ve not got somebody the desired results.
Here’s why you should work for free:
You start an agency thinking that you can bring somebody results, but you don’t have real facts of bringing somebody results, or you don’t have actual data on this.
Then you are going to have a severe problem, and this problem is going to be that you get hired to do something. You are not able to bring the results, they’re going to complain about you, and you are going to have a bad reputation in your local area, and that’s not where you want to start.
Start by testing out your mom or dad’s business; your friend’s business; your aunt’s business or simply join a Digital Marketing Executive and test it out on their business.
Look at Neil Patel, know how he started first. Neil Patel is one of the most famous internet entrepreneurs today; he owns Neilpatel.com; he owns crazy eggs. He started first by doing SEO for free for somebody for six months.
The reason being is because Neil Patel, of course, he is the greatest SEO guy now, but when he started, Neil Patel had no idea what he was doing, and he even did something for free.
So, I know a lot of the training courses kind of go above and beyond this. They say, look you should never do something for free; you should know your Worth.
Look when you’re starting, you’ve got no work. I don’t care who you are; your ego is at the door; you are nobody.
You need to do stuff for free. Everybody’s done things for free. Why the hell do you think there are internships? It’s just a way of proving yourself and getting yourself experience before somebody pays you.
So with that said, start charging more. Once you have gotten this specialized product; once you’ve gone out and tested this product and you’ve brought somebody leads and services, you can start charging for this stuff.
Now the way I charge for my services does that go by the hour. You can do it on your terms, that’s just the way I like to build the rates.
And if you want to check out how I build the rates just go ahead and leave a comment down below and I’ll get back to you.
How to set the price for a service:
Let’s think about it if you can bring one new customer to a business and that customer is worth $2,000 for them, and your price should be $1,000 because you want to double their ROI.
So if you start bringing them two customers per month, you can charge them $2,000; $3,000; $4,000 so on and so forth.
Look, it all depends on what the average return on investment is for that business. So one of my favourite questions to ask, and how I determine pricing is, what is your average customer spend; what is your average customer lifetime value.
Those terms are powerful when you think about pricing, and it should completely throw out what you think about pricing because, if you can bring a business testified results, and if you do it consistently, you should know how much you should charge.
Now here’s the other side of this, if you have a customer that makes $5 for every customer they get, you are going to have a hard time charging $1,500 to $2,000.
So, what I recommend you do is find a higher ticket or higher return on investment customers and charge them a lot more, it’ll be a much better time for your money, and I can almost promise you that.
And if you want to check out how I build the rates just go ahead and leave a comment down below and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Featured image source: Freepik