There are huge opportunities out there nowadays for marketers who start their own agencies.
Today, it’s easier than ever for people to found their own businesses, and young adults are keen to try their hands at entrepreneurship. This means that there’s a whole new generation out there of business owners who might know a great deal about creating a high-potential product but who need as much help with exposure as they can get.
Sure, you can provide marketing services to these companies on a freelance basis, but if you want to scale up quickly, then you’ll need more diverse knowhow and more bandwidth to take on a higher volume of accounts than possible solo. Here are the steps you need to take so you can build a growing agency.
Step One: Determine Services
When starting a digital marketing agency, you can choose to specialize by offering one service or offer a full range of services, depending on your skillset and what you are most comfortable with. Many agencies handle website development, brand design, conversion rate optimization, search engine optimization, content creation, email automation, audience acquisition, and social media management.
Although you don’t have to offer all the available services – and should not if you don’t have the appropriate staff or expertise to provide anything on the list – many businesses are looking to minimize the number of vendors they work with, which makes “full-service” positioning attractive. In this sense, the more you can offer, the easier it might be to land clients.
There are plenty of ways to build a team of professionals remotely if you want to maintain the most control over the clients and projects your team is involved in. There’s also the option to outsource certain aspects of account fulfillment to others, but there’s risk involved in making sure deadlines are met and clients are happy with the quality.
Many white label tools exist to help you create client dashboards and portals for services and communication. These allow you to use tools created by a third-party company in such a way that the client-facing experience is an extension of your brand and services. This puts you in a great position to scale and grow… which we’ll get to farther down.
While mastering as many service types as possible might make sense for attracting clients, the opposite is true about the industry you serve. This is where it’s important to “niche down” and have a defined specialty, so that prospective clients feel like they’ve found the experts in their industry – or however else you want to define the segment you’re after. Choose whether you’ll focus on a certain geographic area, businesses in a certain industry or a specific size.
For example, you might want to position your organization as the pay-per-click management agency for startups, the onsite content generation specialists, the B2B earned media funnel optimization experts, or the direct-to-consumer ecommerce growth agency. Dig deep to find something that sets you apart from your competition so you can use your unique selling point to start signing clients.
Step Two: Build Your Brand
As a marketing agency, you’ll need a stellar brand that effectively conveys that you know your stuff. Your own branding should exude expertise and authority, but it should also be developed and visible, which helps prospects feel that you can do for them what you’ve done for yourself.
After all, not all clients who approach you for services will have an established brand or even an idea about where they should go as they build one for themselves.
Don’t forget, though, that your logo and color palette are not the extent of your brand. Your brand includes:
- Business name
- Value proposition
- Positioning and differentiation messaging
- Logo, tagline and color scheme
- Voice and values
- Website and social media channels
- Assets like email signature files, marketing email templates, proposal templates, and business cards
You’ll need to conduct all the legal research in regard to copyrights and trademarks, to make sure you’re not infringing upon another business’s rights before you even get started.
Step Three: Build an Optimized Workflow Process
Your workflow process should be as optimized as possible so that you can turn around projects efficiently. Unless you intend to scale up on your human resources quickly, minimizing fulfillment cycles is the key to agency revenue growth, because that’s what allows you to bill for more projects.
This is where the right tech stack can go a long way. If you’re in the business of building out landing pages, mobile-friendly websites or landing pages with dynamic, personalized content, using a platform such as Duda can help a great deal. With Duda, you’ll have a white label solution you can customize to fit your brand, while giving your clients the freedom to edit their own websites or even pin comments directly to front end mockups. It also includes client management and team collaboration tools to help you create the right workflow for your needs.
There are also a variety of other business management and collaboration tools you can use, such as Notion or Podio for project management, contact relationship management, and so on. Both platforms are highly customizable so you can create a system that matches your ideal workflow. You’ll want tools for internal and external project communications, too, such as Slack or Skype.
Step Four: Start Marketing Your Services
Here’s the fun part. At this point, you’ve got everything you need to establish yourself as a credible business in the digital marketing space. It’s time to use the skills you plan to sell in your agency to make it possible for people to discover your business and land clients.
How you choose to do this will depend heavily on your market, target audience, and competition. The important thing is that you take the time to plan and document a marketing strategy.
Research shows that marketers with a documented strategy are 313% more likely to report success. And marketers who proactively plan campaigns and projects are 356% more likely to report success.
Step Five: Scale and Grow
Once you reach the point where you can’t handle any more work on your own, hire contractors to help you. Hiring remote workers can help you grow faster while giving everyone the freedom to work from home or their local coffee shop.
Consider hiring a sales team, even if it’s on an affiliate referral basis to help bring in more clients, and dedicated account managers to handle specific or high-value clients.
And keep experimenting with and analyzing your workflows to ensure your team remains as efficient as possible.
Get Started
Now that you have a basic outline of the steps to building your own digital marketing agency, what are you waiting for? Start putting together your business plan, legalizing your business structure, building your brand and marketing your company.