In the space of just a decade, the internet has grown from being a promising research and learning tool (and an endless source of cat pictures) to an unbelievably diverse virtual space filled with marketing opportunities. It’s no surprise, then, that digital marketing agencies and their services are increasingly high demand from brands in every industry, in every corner of the world. When you start a marketing agency, it can be a very profitable venture. Especially if you take the time to plan, set realistic goals, and build a strong and capable team.
Ready to learn how to start a marketing agency? Use these 10 simple steps to get going…
Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience
Your first step is to identify your key target audience. Once this is done, you need to design your products and services around their pain points and needs.
Your marketing agency plan should contain a Customer Analysis section in which you document who your ideal audience is, their demographics (including ages and locations), and what they prioritise when buying services like the ones you plan to offer.
Step 2: Decide Which Services to Offer
Now that you know who your target audience is, you need to choose the services your agency will offer. These need to be aligned with the needs and desires of your focus group for best results.
Just a few of the many niches your agency can cover include SEO, web design, content marketing, social media marketing and management, paid advertising, and even website hosting.
Step 3: Set Your Business’ Goals
Setting goals is crucial for the success of your agency. If you don’t have clear goals and objectives, you risk moving forward in a direction that takes you to a different destination than the one you had in mind.
Identify your largest, most immediate goals. Then, break each one down into smaller micro goals and milestones. This makes it much easier to take structured, informed steps towards achieving your short-term and long-term goals without getting side-tracked.
Step 4: Get Clients Onboard
If you’ve previously freelanced, you can start the process by collating reviews and testimonials from past clients. If you haven’t flown solo, offer to do a few free projects for some of your ideal target clients, and request testimonials as your payment. Once you’ve got them in hand, approach your target audience online with daily snippets of free advice in your field, or email prospects directly by using open directories and website extractions to find them.
You can also do direct outreach via email or phone, launch paid traffic and PPC advertising campaigns, or even rely on referrals to get your agency’s name in front of the right people. In your correspondence, make it clear to your leads that you know exactly how to fix anything lacking from their current marketing strategies, and use an attention-grabbing headline to catch their eyes.
Step 5: Create Your Processes
Your processes dictate the efficiency of your agency, ability to scale, and your ability to create consistently great results for your clients. Creating solid processes will enable you to scale much faster, while reducing customer churn and maximising customer satisfaction. Your clients want predictable, high-quality results every time. With the right processes in place, you can meet their expectations and build trust and loyalty over time.
Create effective processes by identifying any task or process you will need to do repeatedly and recording a list of steps to take to ensure that these tasks are executed seamlessly. Share these processes with your team members to instantly streamline and simplify your workload.
Step 6: Build Tools to Generate Leads
Simplify lead generation by offering tools proven to help with building brand awareness, generating more links, and driving the acquisition of quality leads.
Even building basic tools like basic A/B testing calculators or plug-ins can drive your revenues and enhance recognition of your brand online, especially if they’re free to use.
Step 7: Establish Your Web Presence
The first and most essential tool you need to establish an online presence for your agency is a responsive, fast website. This will allow you to share your portfolio and testimonials with prospective clients, generate traffic using SEO, and tell your target audience exactly what you offer and why.
Once you have a website established, you can branch out into paid advertising campaigns, social media posting, and generating shareable, value-packed content. In doing so, you can use your digital channels to establish yourself as a trusted player in your industry.
Step 8: Start a Digital Marketing Blog
Creating a blog focused on your agency’s niche is a fantastic way to generate traffic, engage your target audience, and offer them genuine value in the form of shared knowledge and expertise.
Your blog content needs to be evergreen (not time-specific), offer a unique perspective and angle on your topics of choice, and be simple enough for even beginners to understand and gain value from. You can also re-purpose blog content by turning snippets of your blog into simple infographics and videos for sharing on social media by your follower base.
Step 9: Build Your Portfolio and Customer Testimonials
We’ve already mentioned how you can approach your ideal prospective clients and offer them free work, at least initially, in exchange for glowing reviews of your skills and ethic. Once you have a few of these positive testimonials, you can build a portfolio and upload it to your agency’s website. This shows leads that you can indeed produce excellent results, which means more clients and more sales in the long run.
We recommend only adding your very best work to your portfolio to ensure that it stands out as much as possible. Your clients’ time is limited – they want to see your best work in a format that compels them to contact you ASAP!
Step 10: Hiring Your Talent
There are plenty of different ways to hire a skilled and passionate team for your agency, from searching LinkedIn to using recommendations from existing team members.
Once you have a few strong candidates in mind for a specific role or weak spot in your business, test each person’s knowledge to assess whether they’re competent, innovative, creative, and capable. Those who ace their assignments and go out of their way to put in extra effort are your top choices.
As Easy As 1, 2, 3
There’s an abundance of different elements and actions to consider when you start a marketing agency. But if you take every aspect into consideration and plan appropriately, the results will be well worth the effort. Use our 10-step system to build the foundations of an agency that’s destined for success. So, what are you waiting for? Start a marketing agency today!