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Off to Market. Keys to Starting Your Own Marketing Agency

By | Jared Jaureguy

Marketing is one of the fastest-changing industries right now. Social media, as well as technological advances in big data and artificial intelligence, means that marketing requires a high degree of computer savvy and personal adaptability. If you’re ready to take your marketing know-how to the next level and offer your services to others, read on for some keys to starting your own marketing agency.

Staff Your Business

Your forte is marketing. Put your smarts to work creating a marketing strategy small business and hire others to take care of your accounting and answering the phones. Trying to run a one-man operation is not a sustainable plan that will allow you to focus your work hours on what you do best. Even if you don’t have an office outside your home, you still can and should bring in outside help. If you’re running on a shoestring budget, start with a part-time office assistant.

Get the Low-Hanging Fruit

The fastest way to get your company off the ground is by looking for business from the people you know. Ask your friends and family for business and for referrals to potential clients. While you are building a client base, try offering free evaluations of a business’s current marketing so you’re able to praise what they’re doing right but also let them know what you could do for them to improve their current setup. Once you have a few customers under your belt, you can parlay their experiences into reviews and other feedback that you can use in your social media.

Create Your Image With Social Media

A major part of your job is creating branding through social media for other companies, so it’s vital that you have a robust social media presence of your own. Before you even open your doors, use social media platforms to create buzz and interest around your company, but also to define your brand. Create appeal for the types of brands you want to draw in, but also their customers, looking for that crossover. While your business may focus on many aspects of marketing, it’s a good idea to know your ideal business customer and your key services, whether that’s hooking up businesses with the proper influencers or managing their content. 

Find Your Niche

Part of defining your perfect customer is about getting paid. If you focus on small businesses like attorneys or dentists, you’re in with a set of customers who will be able to pay you without issue. On the other hand, you may want to focus on small businesses with local or artisan products. Having a niche will mean that once you find a strategy that works, you don’t have to come up with a completely unique strategy for each customer and the work will increasingly take care of itself. 

Create Your Offerings

Marketing is more than one strategy and customers will come to you with different needs. If you have a one-size-fits-all system, customers won’t feel that you are working to cater to their specific needs. On the other hand, offering each service individually can feel overwhelming and many businesses won’t know where they should begin. Instead, find the sweet spot in the middle by offering packages of your services that will fit different customer needs and costs. Also, think about add-ons that can be discounted if added to an existing package. No matter what you offer, consider keeping it limited at first, so that you aren’t running out of budget trying to advertise and do too many things at once. Packages can help you clearly define what you do, and do not, do. 

Track Your Results

You may expect your customers to track their own return on investment for your services, but it is equally important that you do the same. Not only will you be able to prove the worth of your services, but you can track what is working best and adjust your offerings accordingly. Tracking success is just another line of input for your own social media, sharing your customers’ successes. 

Stay On Top of Technology Trends

The use of artificial intelligence to provide round-the-clock chat support is just one of a whole suite of new technology to help businesses find and engage with clients. Having these types of cutting-edge resources available for your customers will differentiate you from the competition. Becoming complacent when you have developed a strong customer base can be all too easy. Whether it’s getting out there and selling to new customers or keeping abreast of the latest trends, marketing agencies only succeed as much as their teams invest the time to stay successful.

Learning marketing is more than investing in someone else’s success at teaching marketing. It’s about taking hard computer skills and soft people skills and combining them into a package that will make many types of businesses succeed. 

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