With the increasing need for digitalisation, you probably noticed the booming demand for digital marketing. Many companies are slowly incorporating digital marketing into their business by either hiring an in-house expert or hiring an agency to handle this part of their need.
So, if you are thinking of opening a new business, then maybe you should give building a digital marketing agency a try. Nowadays, digital marketing is easier than you think. With the latest tools, free resources online, and a small team of experts, you can quickly learn the ins and outs of digital marketing.
We’ve outlined a few tips and tricks to guide you build a digital marketing agency from scratch. This article will show you why digital marketing is a promising startup and 7 tips on how you can start your digital marketing agency.
Why Digital Marketing Agency is a Good Startup Business?
As mentioned earlier, digital marketing is an in-demand service today. Almost most businesses there require digital marketing to reach their audiences. And while most can just simply hire their in-house team, the market is all fast-paced these days. Businesses do not merely have the time to test and learn an effective digital marketing agency.
Moreover, digital marketing can be done anywhere in the world. Your location does not confine where you find customers. One advantage of starting your digital marketing agency is that you can operate your business from home or anywhere in the world.
How to start your Digital Marketing Agency?
There is a huge misconception that digital marketing must be a process requiring a massive company and multiple employees to take all the clients. You can start small when building a digital marketing agency. Even without experience, digital marketing can be learned carefully.
With that concept in mind, here are 8 tips before starting a digital marketing agency:
1. Educate yourself about the ins and outs of digital marketing
As you know, digital marketing requires a long, painful, and long process. Various tasks fall under the digital marketing umbrella. As such, it’s important to familiarise yourself with at least the basics of each digital marketing method. Here are some of the most common digital marketing services today:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Online Advertising or Pay per click (PPC)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Email Marketing
- Website development and design
And with the services mentioned above, you should first choose your agency’s initial focus. Start by learning the basics. There are tons of free resources and online available on each service. You can also ask experts on these matters. Try asking about their lessons learned or best practices and apply according to avoid some reasons why startups fail.
2. Do competitor research
Next is conducting competitor research. Studying your competitors is one of the best ways to get ahead of your competitor in any type of business. Understanding their methods and strategy will give you an idea of what works best and what does not.
To start your digital marketing agency competitor research, try to search the “digital marketing” keyword on Google. Then, narrow down companies located in your country or location. Next, look for their target audience and see if some of these are the same as yours.
Once you discover your competitor, check how they monetise their services. You can also learn what method they market or advertise their digital marketing services.
3. Create a business plan
Once you have some of the necessary details, it’s time to start a digital marketing agency business plan & document. Bring together a robust business plan and walk thoroughly your steps on how you can get your business started.
Include aspects like legal structure and needs, people you need to hire, tools you need, business location, and more. There are plenty of business plan templates available online to handle it easier.
You can also try to join a startup incubator to get your startup plan validated.
4. Register your business
And when you have a concise business plan. It’s time to make it official. Register your digital marketing agency legally. When registering your business legal entity, most steps can differ in each country and relevant authorities. You should check your local business registry office on the official measures.
Likewise, here are some needs for making your business official.
- Declare the name of your business
- Hire an accountant and auditor
- Register your domain name
- Design your logo and branding
5. Hire your digital marketing team
Before starting a digital marketing agency, the next tip is to hire your digital marketing team. At the early age of your startup, it is probably a good idea to hire a few people wearing multiple hats. You can hire a full-stack web developer to handle website development. Or PPC specialists that can manage both meta ads and google ads. And as your organisation grows, you can find specialists with specific skills for your client’s needs. Find those laser-focused individuals that can optimise each service well.
You can find your digital marketers on various LinkedIn, Upwork, Facebook, etc. Likewise, you can also try outsourcing these people from multiple agencies and more.
6. Choose the right tools
As mentioned earlier, the digital marketing scope is vast and massive. And if you want to be effective in accomplishing these services, you need to have the right tool. There is an available tool for each marketing method – from project management to scheduling your social media content.
Likewise, here are some of the top tools most digital marketing use today:
- Project Management: Trello – Trello is a tool that can help your managers organise the project and easily give each task to team members.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Ahrefs – This digital marketing tool can help you with a website audit, link building, competitive research, etc
- Social Media Marketing: Hootsuite – This social media marketing tool is perfect for streamlining your social media planning, scheduling content, analytics, etc.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) / Online Advertising: Google Analytics (GA) – GA is a great help for tracking all advertising metrics. It can help your marketers discover the best places to advertise, convert keywords, and understand user behaviour.
- Email Marketing: MailChimp – Mailchimp is one of the top email marketing tools in the digital marketing arena. It provides free plans for those with less than 2,00 subscribers with various tools for your email marketing strategy.
- Content Marketing: HubSpot – HubSpot is a digital marketers-to-go tool for content marketing. It is an all-in-one digital marketing tool that can help you plan, create, and share high-quality content. It determines methods to reach your target audience.
7. Create your work process
As you grow your agency, you probably will get more clients. When this time comes, you might need to create a work process for your company and employees. A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a document that has all the necessary steps in performing a specific task, including client onboarding, service offering, and contract signing.
To start, use your current working process and branch out from there. Create various document templates, proposals, customer reports, and specific checklists for your employees to perform multiple client tasks. It’s important for you to also make an organisational chart to know which of your people are responsible for a certain department.
Likewise, keep these documents simple and don’t overcomplicate things. Store these documents in one database of cloud storage to save them organise.
8. Build your portfolio
And once you are done with everything, it’s time to build your portfolio. You will probably only be getting clients from friend’s referrals or advertisements at the start. But once you have completed several projects, you can build a portfolio to showcase to potential clients.
Let us help you build your digital marketing agency!
And that’s it! These 8 easy tips can help you take off your digital marketing agency business. Just make sure that you research enough about the industry and keep up with the industry trends. You will know when you are ready to start your business.
And if you need help in establishing your digital marketing agency, the Flexilabs StartUp program can help you. Contact us today!