20 Tips to Start a Digital Marketing Agency

Welcome and Thank You for coming on Victorious Digital blog page & reading this article, it will defiantly help you to build your own Digital Marketing Agency.

My Name is Atul R Sharma ( Founder & Owner Of Victorious Digital ) Sharing my experience with this article and try to give best tips out of my 10 years of Digital Marketing Journey.

In this article, I will give you the tips to create your own Digital Agency, get clients, deliver fruitful results for them & how to reinvest your profit in to your growing agency.

What is a Digital Agency ?

Why we call it “ digital agency” because we don’t need a set-up, shop, or an office to run this agency. Since we are providing service to business online, we will call it as a digital agency.
Let’s first look at the definition of digital agency.
“ Digital agency is nothing but, a business or an organisation providing a particular service on behalf of other business, person or group”. ( Google Definition ).
If you grow as an agency and you need more team members, then you don’t need any office to manage it, you can easily manage it remotely with other agencies and freelancers.
Before we go more deep into this article, we need to understand that why we need digital agency ?

Why we need Digital Agency ?

Just think like a business owner
Generally, businesses and services required marketing services, and they cannot hire permanent employee to fulfil that requirement because of so many disadvantages.

Let’s see what could be the reason to not hiring full time employee

1. It is difficult to find talent, hire them for full time and manage them.
2. If the business is small then it is difficult to attract good talent, because good talent wants to work with big companies and brand.
3. Businesses need certain services time to time, hiring a full time employee will cost a lot money, time and energy.

That’s why businesses hire agencies.
For example, I want to run advertisement  for my “digital marketing courses in Pune “ and I don’t have budget to shoot a video ad, editing, and final copy with a full time video editor. But I really need a  good and attractive video to run my Facebook and YouTube ad, then what can I do for it. I will hire a video editing agency which can complete my all task and give me an attractive video to run my advertisement.
This is how I would work upon and similarly all small businesses are getting their work done.
There are so many reasons to start your own agency but this one is the solid reason to start your own and find out these kind to clients near to you.
Now Lets talk about Tips to start your own agency.

Build Your Own Brand and Trust

Before you start dreaming about your own digital agency, you have to keep one thing into your mind that convert client into prospective will be a tough task. If it was then everyone will be running a successful digital agency.

If a client is coming to you for promotion then keep this think in your mind that he is already worked with other agencies or freelancer before.
Every service provider unreliable until they proven to trustworthy. Doing a good agency work is not so easy.

There are two main factors to build trust in your clients.

1. Your personal brand as an expert.
2. Your agency brand as a team

Getting your First Client

When you are getting started to build your new agency, you need to quick wins to help confidence in your line of work.
Keep one think in your mind that your 1^st client will come from your personal network, this strategy might not scale but it good to get started. Because if you do not survive for first 6 month then you would not survive further.
Building process and system
During your initial stage you will not have any process, based on your expertise you will come up. You don’t know what to do but you will learn things with time and when it required.
But keep one think in your mind, if you will not set a process then you will not go beyond a few clients. You will be a consultant or freelance but you can’t be a company or agency.

Getting a Business Partner

As we all know that building a business is very tough thing if you are going alone.it may give you the hardships, a lot of setbacks, but on the other hand it will give you a lot of learning lessons too.

But here I would not go into the deep in this topic rather we talk about partnership consequence’s and how to make it better for future success.
Building a business alone can be challenging (though many people done it alone), many people burnt out during this process.
You need someone, whom you can share your thoughts and ideas, who can correct you and address you while you are doing something wrong and encourage you on the right time.
We humans are emotional creatures and we can’t think rationally most of the time.
Simultaneously, you need to keep one more think into your mind that business partner can cheat you as well, you both can fight like a married couple. However, if get right business partner then nothing is better than it.

Building Your A-Team

If you just started a Digital agency and planning to hire employee, then it can be a wrong decision for you. You should keep this thing in your mind and take bird eye view on hiring right from the begging so that hiring process can be easier in later stage.
Most of the start-up’s get go with the hiring process in initial level just because they are funded with investor and late on they get failed to survive.
In the initial level you should done all necessary work by yourself only, if it really need to hire a person then only go for it.

Personal Finance Mastery

The success of your business largely depends on how you manage your personal finances.
One of the reasons why jobs are so attractive because they pay monthly salary to manage your personal monthly bills and we do not go beyond it.
When you become an entrepreneur, you may not have a regular income to pay monthly bill, some month you will have a lot of revenue to coming and some month you will not be generate good income. That is the reason you have to pay yourself for doing your own business.
In the first 3-5 years you will see this problem to establish your digital agency.

Long Term Thinking

Long term thinking means you are not a short term greedy.
That means you are generating short terms gains for long term business.
If you have a customer then make sure you would provide him good service and make him happy before moving ahead to the next customer.
If you are building a digital agency, your long term success is lies in your customer satisfaction.
Customers satisfaction comes from growing slowly.
Growth is not something that you have to strive for it, it means your relaxing by growing your business.
Growth means making your existing customers happy rather than hunting new clients.

Goal Setting for Your Agency

Goal setting is important because you have to make decision throughout this journey and every decision should aligned in this way that will take you to an end goal.
Make a SMART Goal
You can create a small goal that can be achieved in short term andMake a SMART Goal
another should be long term goal that can be Real, Achievable.

Solitude and Deep Work

Being a business owner one should spend time alone, in solitude, it does not mean that you should stay alone or feel lonely all the way. It spend time with yourself, think what have done in your past and how can you improve it.
Get new ideas, start reading books which can add value into your day to day life as well as into your business. This all mean by solitude, though it is not a part of building digital Agency but still it is good sign of doing business.

Your Agency Name and Office

Creating a digital agency is not a big deal, infect you can get investor for your agency, you can get clients, and late on you can sell it out as well.
If you would run an agency on the name of “ Victorious Digital “ then it would connect to me, where I teach “Digital Marketing Courses in Pune”. It is good for teaching and mentor brand but not good for digital agency.
But if I would like to go for digital agency then I will go with a proper name and gives the feel of an agency.
Go to the go daddy and nook your own domain first before telling anyone about agency.
Establish your brand among the audience, start giving them free consultation for initial level but not all the time.
Start writing blog on strategy building in digital marketing, how digital marketing impact on your business, start giving them a free webinar. This is all not for to get client bit it is for build your brand.
talk about office then you should defiantly go for an office, because it would give you sense and feel about business that you are doing something, otherwise you must have heard about work from incidence’s also watched reels on Instagram.

Niche Selection and Positioning

Your digital agency success depends upon your niche, there are some niche where too much competition but some niches are available where competition is less but opportunities are high.
One of most crucial question that business owners have in their mind, which niche to be selected and how ?
But unfortunately there is no answer of this question.
You have to go through with some trial and error.
You have to do market research, personally should visit to the customers and ask them about digital marketing, those who are felling comfortable and want to spend amount on digital marketing, those can be your customer’s and their business can be your niche.

The Big Four Niches

Lets talk about niche and niche selection process.

First we need to understand 4 major and broad categories of niches

1. Health
2. Wealth
3. Relationship
4. Art

I do not recommend  to choose broad category as your niche.
For example
If you would choose wealth as your niche then there will many sub category in wealth like, business, investment, banking and so on.
So I would recommend you to choose sub category as your niche.
Because people would respond when your specific on your niche.

Competition Research

Competition research is most important part of starting a new business.
Gut feeling and observation will not work all time, it will only work when the data is not available.
When we have the data, we need to trust on data, because data never lies.
Just because competition exist  in the market, it doesn’t mean it will be taking away opportunities from you.
Rather, competition is warming up the cold audience.
Having competition means market is real not imaginary.
How to do competitor analysis ?
Go with tool that SEMRUSH or AHERF.
Best tools for competitors analysis
You can do better keyword research with them, also find out competitors backlinks, how they are doing on social media, this can also be covered with these tools.

Create a Community

As a digital agency, you’re going to focus on providing service to a specific niche. You would turn their dream into the realty.
Before you create your offer to them, you need to understand their pain areas.
Clients will pay you for the solutions but before they pay they would ask you to showcase your potential. They would ask about your previous work, and you can showcase your attention and authority through your content.
When you create a community, and give them space to enter to them to read your content and give them opportunity to educate themselves from you, then that would be the best option to convert them into your clients.
The community can be as simple as Facebook group for your personal and professional network.
Once you have 50 members in your community then start asking them question related to their business. Ask people to ask any questions in your community related to their business and provide solution in front of everyone, so that other can also relate it.

Why you should blog

Start writing a blog, but do not make it to generate revenue out of it.
Also keep one more thing into your mind that do not write to making it publishing into business. Write build authority.
Many people would come to your blog to find out the solution of their problems and there are possibilities to hire you as an agency for their business.
If someone wants to hire you as an agency then you blog can be a good source to read about you and there will be no need to interview yourself for finalisation.

How to Set Up Your Blog

Setting up a blog is very easy.

There are two platforms where easily you can set up your blog

1. WordPress
2. Blogger

Both platforms are free for initial level, later you can upgrade for paid version.
But I would suggest you to go for paid version once you done with technical activities, because changing permalinks may create some trouble  for indexing in Google.
For this to create your own blog set up
You will be required a Domain & a Hosting
Which you can buy it from Hostinger.
What I recommend for is that – buy a domain on your personal name or a name that is closely linked to your personal name.
The home page yourname.com should be a landing page for your personal brand. You can put a hero image and use a call to cation button which can go for a lead or email to contact you or booking a call with you. You can also add your lead magnet and give them option to subscribe your mail.

You can showcase your clients testimonials and other achievements on landing page.

Plan Your Book (or eBook)

Writing and publishing a book is nest way to build your authority.
I know it may take time to plan and execution to write a book.
You are probable thinking that some day you will write a book someday. But believe me you don’t get started right now, you would never get it done.
Whenever you come across someone who have written a book, we look them as an authority. Even before reading the book. We have respect for them.

Your Landing Page

There is a huge difference between a landing page and website.
Landing pages have only one call to action button. Websites have so many links and positions to so many assets and they are good for information.

People might visit a website to get information about a specific product or service, however if you are driving traffic via paid campaigns, it is not recommended to use the website.

You should have a call to action button on your landing page to collect their contact details and in return you will give them high value content like, e – book, course, video etc or access to a community.

Inbound Leads vs. Outbound Leads

Generating leads for your digital agency is the most important part of your digital agency.
A lead means the contact information of your customer who might be interested in your product and service.
Leads can be cold or hot.

There are two types of method to generate leads for a business

1. Outbound lead
2. Inbound lead

Outbound lead method is old and traditional where we use various tools to extract data or purchase data from sellers and calling them to sell our product.
In this method the customer takes a lot of time to convert in prospect or there are chances to not convert into your clients.
Inbound leads generation where you attract leads to you. It also may take time but you can easily convert your cold lead into a warm lead for your business.
In this method you can use complete digital marketing to reach your potential customers.

The Best Type of Lead Magnet

Lead Magnet is the best way to attract lead towards your business. When you run an ad on Facebook or Google, you can give them free lead magnet like e book, or video course or free basic strategy to at least start using digital platforms for their business. In this way you can attract more and more clients which may convert for your digital agency.
Hope you like this blog !! I will see in the next blog.
Thank You for Reading

Regards,
Atul R Sharma
Founder and Owner – Victorious Digital