Identify Your Niche
The digital marketing industry is highly competitive, and to stand out, you need to specialise in a specific niche. Identify your area of expertise, whether it’s social media marketing, content marketing, search engine optimisation, paid advertising, email marketing, or any other digital marketing service.
Don’t try and be a generalist (you will find it very hard to be successful and win business) but focus on a specific niche. This will help you build your brand, establish yourself as an expert in your field, and attract clients who are looking for your specific skills and services, and ultimately, as the expert, you’ll be able to charge higher fees.
Sometimes your niche will be obvious (e.g., it was obvious to me when I started coaching that I wanted to specialise with SME Marketing agencies since that was my background) but sometimes it can be more challenging to establish. I’ve written at length about how to find your niche so you can learn more about that here.
Define Your Target Audience
So now you’ve worked out your niche, you need to define your target audience and understand, specifically the challenges they have that your product or service can solve. You cannot target anybody that might need digital marketing services, but a subset of people who will understand and value what you do. Think of your market as a fruit tree and consider that your target audience is the ripe fruit that is already on the ground, not the juicy fruit, that’s at the top of the tree, but very hard to reach! Be mindful that you are not targeting everyone – this might sound like an attractive idea but the reality is in your efforts to target everyone, you will target no one since your marketing messaging will be too vague and generalised.
Researching and analysing competitors in your chosen niche
Now you have established your niche and your target audience. You need to research and analyse your competitors in this niche. And if your answer to your competitive research is “I don’t have any competitors”, then I would be rather concerned and question whether the market really exists!
So do your research on your competitors to understand how they position themselves and the marketing messaging that they are using. Consider how you can go against what they’re saying or do what they’re saying better (don’t just copy their messaging!).
Developing a unique value proposition for your agency
Once the research stage is completed, you will be able to now articulate a clear value proposition and ‘elevator pitch’. This will help your target audience understand what you do, why you are different and how you can help them. Use all this research in your outbound marketing (website, emails, blogs, videos etc.)
Develop Your Digital Marketing Skills
To start a successful digital marketing agency, you need to deeply understand digital marketing and the skills required to provide high-quality digital marketing services. Take online courses, attend industry conferences, read industry blogs, and gain experience by working on your own digital marketing projects. The more skills and experience you have, the better equipped you will be to provide value to your clients. And this is a fast-moving market, so you need to keep investing in your own (and your team’s) digital marketing skills.
In order to run a profitable business your business plan needs to be ambitious but realistic, so set your business goals accordingly, and make sure you are reviewing your plan regularly and updating it based on what you know today that you didn’t know last month.
My advice is to pick 2-3 channels and go deep with them. To determine what channels to use, consider which ones you are most comfortable with (and therefore can create content consistently) and overlay that with the channels that your ideal target customer uses.
Now of course to do this you need to really know who your ideal target customer is and what pains they have that your digital marketing services can solve. So start by defining exactly who your ideal customer avatar is (you can learn more about customer avatars here).
How Do I Get My First Client?
Now you have all the basics in place you need to find your first client, and whilst you’ll have started with your marketing, the reality is that your campaigns will deliver results in the medium to long term so in the meantime, you need to earn some money and the best way to do that is to reach out to your network and tell them what you are up to and see if they have any needs or if they can recommend you or introduce you to 2 to 3 other contacts.
If you take this approach then before you know it, you’ll have increased your network significantly and you’ll be able to win your first clients through a friendly introduction. This is how I started and won my first clients, and it’s the advice I give to my private coaching clients when they are just starting out.
One important area to help you build credibility is to have testimonials and case studies from clients. So make sure part of your client journey is to ask for a testimonial or case study. These don’t need to be long. They can be a paragraph or 2 or better still a quick video or they could be a full-blown case study.
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