Usually, entrepreneurs are encouraged to spend a few years in their target industry before launching their own ventures. This allows them to gain vital experience in their industry, learn the culture and language, build connections with vendors and clients, and generally come to understand how to achieve success with their own small business. However, prior experience is not at all necessary to find success with a digital marketing agency.
Digital marketing is immensely important in the digital age, and almost every business of any size relies on digital marketing services to connect with online audiences. As a result, there is a great demand for digital marketing firms — and here is how you can capitalize on that demand with your digital marketing agency without being a digital marketer first.
Set Goals and Target Audience
The earliest stages of creation for any business should include processes for understanding and establishing goals. No two digital marketing agencies are exactly alike; every firm is motivated by a different vision of success, and you need to understand what your goals are for your agency before you hit launch.
During this phase, you should also think critically about the types of clients you expect to work with, as you want to be certain that your goals and target audience align to deliver results.
Some examples of different goals for digital marketing firms include:
Maximizing prestige, which may involve attracting larger and more recognizable clients.
Profits Maximizing, which could include high-growth, high-opportunity clients but relatively boring projects.
Maximizing freedom, which typically focuses on low-maintenance clients with consistent needs.
Maximizing business value brings greater attention to internal operations, such as agency branding and cash flow.
The digital marketing industry is vast, but competition remains relatively fierce. Generally, you want to start small, targeting a niche audience that is currently underserved by existing digital marketing firms. Later, you can grow your firm to increase your total market and achieve greater success.
Partner With Marketing Resellers
As an entrepreneur with no knowledge and skills beyond business administration, you need to rely on marketing experts to deliver the services your clients need. Fortunately, many digital marketing firms operate as resellers. This business model allows marketing experts to avoid the hassle of sales, customer service, account management, and expensive and time-consuming concerns.
By partnering with marketing agencies that have these client acquisition and maintenance systems in place, these digital marketers can focus on the tasks for which they have trained and which they likely enjoy.
You can find many different types of marketing resellers, but to start, you might focus on essential and widely demanded marketing services. For example, you need to develop relationships with SEO resellers, website services resellers, branding resellers, social media management resellers, and more.
You should verify the quality of your marketing partners and ensure that they can scale with your digital marketing agency as it grows. Finally, you should allocate responsibilities and ensure clear lines of communication amongst your partners, to allow projects to run smoothly.
Build a Brand and Online Presence
The best indication of what a digital marketing agency can achieve for its clients is what is already accomplishing for itself. Thus, you need to invest heavily in high-quality digital marketing for your own business, ensuring a strong online presence that attracts your target audience.
Working with the same resellers you will utilize for your clients, you should create an effective business website with focused landing pages, extensive on-site content, and comprehensible and compelling branding. You might also need to build a presence on key social media sites and begin producing offsite content to demonstrate the range of your agency.
During this process, you should be able to spot red flags amongst your resellers and develop new partnerships as necessary to ensure high-quality results for clients as well as your firm.
Once you have these core components of your digital marketing firm in place, you can begin to invest in lead generation to develop a client base. You should put everything into meeting the needs and wants of your first clients, as their experience could lead to connections with more clients in the future.
As long as you continue to operate your agency to a high standard, you should achieve success — and you will never need to step foot in a digital marketing classroom.
