If you are building up your own digital marketing agency from scratch, you will want to know all about the best ways to set up your agency for future success. Starting from nothing can be stressful, but you need to know how to start your agency in order to create a solid foundation for success in the future.

Like with everything else, a solid foundation is important to make sure that you can achieve great things with your new marketing agency. The goal here is to help you learn more about the important things to know when starting a marketing agency for success.

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One of the most important things that you need to do, if you haven’t already, is to gain experience in the industry.

If you have no experience, you won’t have an easy time trying to get business to your new company.

Clients won’t trust a CEO that doesn’t even have any marketing experience. If you don’t already have experience, now’s the time to get started. You can work as a freelancer, offering these services to a small number of clients at first. Eventually, this will help you establish yourself enough where you can launch your own industry.

There’s also the option of gaining experience by working for a larger and well-established marketing agency. This can help you not only hone your marketing skills, but also give you insight on what is necessary to run a successful marketing agency.

If you don’t have experience but really want to jumpstart your career, you do have some options available to you. First of all, you can form a partnership with someone who does have the marketing experience. Another option that you have is to hire the right team. By having experienced professionals on your team, you can still be successful even if you don’t have the experience yourself. These are just a couple of options you have if you want to start a business.

Who’s Your Audience

Which market are you trying to appeal to? Do you want to work with larger companies, or do you want to specialize in small businesses? You need to know who you want to work with in order to know what services you are going to offer. It’s also important that you pick a specific solution to specialize in, especially since just starting out you may not have the resources to hire a team of experts in different areas. For instance, if you are extremely skilled and knowledgeable in SEO, start off by just offering this service.

Eventually as you grow, you can expand your services as you gain the capital to hire additional members of the team. Until then, you can run the risk of having mediocre services that can hinder your business. If you do one thing really well, do that one thing until you can grow your business.

Find a Way to Stand Out

There are tens of thousands of marketing agencies right now. This means that you are facing a lot of competition as you try to break through this industry. If you want to establish your brand and create a great reputation within the industry, you need to find a way to make yourself stand out from the competition. But how do you do this?

One of the first places to start is knowing who your audience is and just focus on that market. You could also focus on bringing a fresh perspective and a unique voice on behalf of your client. If you offer a unique approach to marketing, this could be helpful in standing out.

Stellar Customer Service Matters, Especially for Earlier Clients

As with any new business, the early clients that you bring into your business matter. They are important because they are examples of what your business is capable of. You need to really nail it with your early clients because not only will this help you start off on a good foot with positive reviews, it’s also about the referrals. If these early customers love your services, they will be quick to refer you to other people. This type of referral can be amazing for growing your business especially as you are just starting out.

Plan for the Future

You need to plan for the future, especially since margins for marketing agencies aren’t that great and particularly if you outsource your work. In order to make money in the long-term, you need to create a plan to scale in the future as needed including bringing in new clients. This means that you need to get out there more to market yourself or create incentives for current clients to refer your business to others.

Offer Packages

It can be a good idea to create packages for your clients. You may have individual prices for services, but there’s something about package deals that clients really love when they are pricing out services. In fact, you may even find that people love your more expensive packages because many customers do what extra. Giving them the ability to get more is extremely appealing to them.

Become a Storyteller

Creating engaging stories can make you stand out and be like one really long, ongoing commercial. You are branding your company and yourself through having an active presence on social media. By showing off how great you can tell your story, you are showing clients how amazing their story is going to be when they trust your agency with their needs. Your success in telling your story and attracting clients to your agency will show clients just what you can do for them. You are showing them that it’s important for you to have an engaging story for their business and that this is more than worth the investment in their company.

Create the Right Business Model for Your Digital Marketing Agency

One of the first things that should be discussed when talking about your business model include liability and taxes. When you are creating a marketing agency from scratch, you need to decide if you are going to create an SCorp or an LLC. This is an important place to start because it can make your business more legitimate, making it more likely you can get those important customers to start off with.

You should also consider getting a tax person to handle your taxes and maybe even help you setup the liability for your business. They can offer great insight as to which option is the best choice for you and they are worth the investment because they can file your taxes for you. This is a wise investment, especially when you consider the amount of write-offs that they can help you find.

The next part of this is looking at how you are going to make money. For the most part, agencies will charge their clients by the hour for their services. This can be a highly complex pricing structure to choose because you will typically spend a lot of time working closely with your clients. As you spend more time with the clients and offer complex services, this can be more complicated as you go on. Sometimes projects take longer than anticipated and it may be hard to explain that to the client, who will then become skeptical about the services that you offer.

Another option is a flat retainer. This is the simplest option as far as pricing models go. You carefully assess how long a specific project is going to take. Then you and the clients decide on a monthly fee for these services. This can get rid of issues that may occur with hourly fees, such as where the money is going, because you and the client have already work it out. You just have to be sure that you offered stellar services so that the client won’t refuse to pay the bill. The biggest downside to this option, however, is that if your client scales up their needs, you need to be able to renegotiate the contract to accommodate the scaling up.

Lastly, there’s the pricing model of percentage of spend and commission-based model. With percentage of spend, you may end up getting about 10% of the money that your client spends because they aren’t spending as much anymore. Commission-based option is one typically used by agencies that are trying to get a competitive edge over other agencies. With this option, you will only get paid if the client makes money off of a sale.

In a nutshell

Building a new marketing agency from scratch isn’t an easy task. You need to be sure that you develop the necessary skills and experience to attract customers to your business. Then you need to setup your business model and figure out who your target market is. It requires a lot of patience and dedication to be successful, but it’s important that you build a solid foundation for your marketing agency to set yourself up for success.