How to Start a Digital Marketing Agency in Easy Steps

Did you know that only 50% of digital marketing agencies survive in their first five years? (Source: HubSpot) Starting your own digital marketing agency isn’t a cake walk and it comes with many obstacles initially. It’s way beyond just renting a workspace and hiring people. 

To make it work, you need to attract clients, wear multiple hats, stay profitable, and attract experienced employees. All this will become a chore. The more obstacles you come across, the more difficult it will become for you to survive. 


But what will keep you going at that time is the goal because of which you started a digital marketing agency in the first place. It is really important to make yourself aware of the obstacles that might come your way before you start your journey. Now that you’re aware, let’s start digging into the steps required to start your own digital marketing agency. 





Start your own digital marketing agency from scratch in 6 steps


Sharpen your knowledge and skills

To establish a digital marketing agency, you first need to have the skills and knowledge in the respective field. Digital marketing has many niches like SEO, PPC, SMM, SMO, and much more. The jargon is never-ending and the more you go into the depth of these concepts, the wider they get. 


The best part about the founders of any agency, be it a digital marketing agency or some startup, is that they never stop learning. No matter how far they come, learning goes along with them. To enlighten yourself with in-depth knowledge of digital marketing, you can get help from some online courses or other platforms like YouTube. 


Online courses might seem a bit kiddish, but as a matter of fact, it can be really helpful for you to sharpen your knowledge of digital marketing concepts. Now if you’re thinking that just by doing some courses, you will become a digital marketing guru, then you are highly mistaken. Anybody can do a digital marketing course and memorize the concepts but applying those concepts practically isn’t an easy thing. You will have to apply those concepts while managing clients, building relationships, providing services, and growing as an organization.  


So, do an online digital marketing course only to get some clarity about what digital marketing niches fascinate you in particular. You can use your interests and strengths in choosing your niche or shaping your agency’s services. 


Come up with a business plan 

  • Opening a digital marketing agency without proper planning will leave you with more losses than revenue. Here are the things that you should focus on while creating a business plan.


  • Come up with a mission and a vision. Your mission will give an idea to your clients what value you provide them. While your vision will help them understand your long-term goals and aspirations. 


  • Once your mission and vision are clear, you can start researching your target audience. You should know which category of businesses you want to feed your services too. This way you can tailor your strategies according to an individual’s needs and preferences. 


  • After that, conduct a market research to find out your target audience’s needs, the challenges that they face in their industry and how you can help them solve their problems through your services. 


  • After figuring out your target audience, it’s time to find out what your competitors are doing in your niche. Try to understand their strengths and weaknesses to come across as a strong agency. The idea is to be unique compared to your competitors. You need to make your audience realize why they should choose you over your competitor. Specify your unique selling points. 


  • From the initial costs to the expected revenue that you will make in the first year, make a financial statement of everything. While calculating the expected income you will make in the first year, you need to consider things like, your niche, the pricing model that you’ve decided, and other aspects. 


Must Read : Internet Marketing Course In Delhi

Decide your offerings

You need to choose those services that are high in demand and that give quick results. Whoever is going to take your digital marketing services will not stay for long if they are not getting good results. So, make sure that whatever services you choose to offer, your expertise lies in the same. Some digital marketing services that you can provide may include, 


  • Search engine optimization (SEO)

  • Pay-per-click (PPC)

  • Website designing and development

  • Email Marketing

  • Social media management

  • Content creation 


Try to leverage gaps between the services that are being offered in the market and what customers actually want. These gaps will help you grow early and also help you stay ahead of everyone. You can offer some unique services that your competitors aren’t doing like, you can tell them to pay only if they feel satisfied with you services or only if their expectations are met. This will help clients develop trust and confidence in your expertise. 


You can also try to work out your pricing model. Try to come up with attractive prices that drive quick conversions. If you are offering services at the same price as your competitors are doing, how will that make people choose you? To attract new clients, you can go for hourly billing services. But the most popular pricing model is the retainer model which means the client makes an agreement for a specified period of time and the clients pay a certain amount to the agency every month for the work done. 


Keep in mind that every business works with different strategies and has different goals. You need to tailor your services based on your client’s needs because what worked out for one client might ruin things for the other. Initially, only offer those services that you and your team are confident about, and then start expanding. Do not make unrealistic promises to your clients that you won’t be able to make, this will ruin your reputation in the market. 


Create an online presence

Having an online presence is extremely important in the digital world. For a digital marketing agency, it’s really important to have a good online presence, so that whenever people are searching for your services they can easily find you. 


The first step in creating an online presence is to build a website for your digital marketing agency. Your website should have good color themes and should have all the important information related to your business. Your contact information, portfolio, services, mission and goal speak a lot about your agency. Come up with a professional but creative logo and a unique name for your agency. 


Optimize your website for search engines like Google to make sure that you drive traffic organically to your website. Make sure that your website is accessible on all kinds of mobile devices, as it affects the user experience. 


Create compelling content for your website’s blog section. The content should be related to your niche and of high quality. Optimize your website’s content for SEO as it also affects your website’s ranking on Google to a great extent. 


As important as it is to have your own website, a good presence on social media can take your business to great success. You need to find out the social media platforms where your target audience spends most of their time. Create content for those platforms to attract organic audiences. For instance, if your target audience is business owners and founders, then you can create engaging content for LinkedIn.


These days Instagram has become a great platform for businesses to promote their services. You can make use of video content by creating reels or videos for your Instagram handle. The type of videos that you create can be a mix of educational and entertainment content. This will help you drive engagement and generate new leads for your agency. 


Last but not least, get your business listed on Google Maps and local business listings. This will broaden your visibility. Ask your clients to leave a good review on Google My Business or other review websites, to establish a good reputation. 


Also Read: Best Digital Marketing Institute In Delhi

Build a good team

Without a team of experienced employees, you will not be able to scale your agency. You will need a team of skilled SEO specialists, social media managers, content writers, data analysts, and people from other fields. What kind of talent you hire also depends on the services that you are offering because you will need people who can give results to your clients. 


You can find people who can be a part of your team by posting on job platforms like, LinkedIn, Naukri, Indeed, and more. If initially you are low on budget you can go for hiring interns for some job profiles and experienced employees for the complex profiles. 

Create a good working workplace environment for your team. This will help them stay motivated and stick with your agency for long.  


You can think about tying up with a digital marketing agency to meet your client’s requirements. Because you don’t need to have expertise in all the niches of digital marketing, in such a case, taking help from other agencies can help you earn shared profits without turning them away. 


Tying up with other agencies has mutual benefits. Firstly you can help each other meet the client’s requirements and also get free referrals. So, this will help you generate organic leads along with a great deal of profits.


Conclusion

These are the steps to build your own digital marketing agency and grow. During the first year of your launch, your main focus should be on creating a vast network with people in your field. Leverage social media platforms and tailor your online presence to achieve the same. Once you build a good network and respect in your niche, all you will need is to simply expand your services. The more you expand, the more diverse team you will need and the more clients you will get. So, have patience and keep working hard, no wonder you will become a successful digital marketing agency. 

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