How To Start A Digital Marketing Agency in 2023 (Step by Step)

so in this six part tutorial i'm going to show you step by step how to start and operate and scale a digital marketing agency in 2022 so i am incredibly excited for this video look it's going to be a little bit longer this isn't your typical 10 minute quick video i'm really going to go in depth in this video to share with you each one of these six different segments talking about digital marketing agencies and really how to scale them so let's go ahead and get started with this video now first i'm going to outline each six of these different areas and then we're going to go in depth from them so the first thing we're going to talk about here in this video is setting goals and expectations for digital marketing agencies essentially how much money can you make how much time is going to be required what qualifications do you need and then in section number two we're looking at determining what type of industry you're going to excel in so there's tons of different types of marketing and we're going to help you to decide which type of marketing you would like to focus on at first when getting started then in section number three we're going to talk about building your online presence and becoming an expert how do you learn how to market this is a pretty serious question that we need to explore and then in part number four we're looking at identifying your target clients who do we choose to market for who do we decide to pick up as clients do we want high-end clients do we want dentists doctors lawyers there are lots of different ways to go with this and you want to make sure that you're picking up the right clients for your digital marketing agency then in part number five we talk about building your team do you need to know how to do all of this or can you outsource some of it who do you want to hire do you want to hire family friends there's just a lot of different ways you can go with that as well that you want to be careful with and then in section number six which is probably my favorite is going to talk about getting your first client and then scaling from there basically talking about growth strategy and how to grow this digital marketing agency from zero dollars today to something that maybe perhaps is making you hundreds of thousands of dollars per month and trust me that is very possible now before we get into each one of these sections you can feel free to skip around if you would like but before we get into each one of these sections i need to make a couple of quick disclaimers first of all i have nothing to sell you here okay there's no big online course honestly i don't think you have to pay someone to learn how to scale and operate a digital marketing agency i remember when ty lopez came out with his digital marketing course way back in like 2014 or 2015 i actually took it and you know i thought it was kind of helpful but i don't think it was really worth the cost that i paid for at the time so i don't think you have to spend any money to learn how to grow a marketing agency so this truly is the best business for anyone to start you don't have to have any experience you don't need a college degree you can be anyone you know me you anybody can do this and so this is why i love digital marketing agencies as a business to start and i think the best part about this is that there's really not going to be much money up front that is required to start this maybe you want to have a website maybe you want to have some different types of software but for the most part your costs are going to be very low this is why i like digital marketing agencies over something like an e-commerce business or even like a brick-and-mortar business where you have to get uh like materials and equipment and you have to pay for products and then you have to worry about cash flow with digital marketing agencies you can really bootstrap this from the beginning and there's just not a lot to lose there besides perhaps maybe your time if you give this a go and you try it for six months and it doesn't work out worst case scenario you probably learned a lot okay and maybe you didn't make a lot but you learned a lot that is the absolute worst case scenario from this so let's get started with this i recommend taking out a pen taking out a piece of paper because we're going to talk about a ton in this video and as always if you're not subscribed to this channel already make sure you hit that subscribe button because we have tons of different marketing videos rolling out on this channel every week okay so let's go ahead and let's start with setting our goals and expectations um so there's a few things first of all before we talk about entity formation and everything else let's first of all talk about how much money can you make with a digital marketing agency so when my brother and i started hours years ago our goal really was just to pay for college we wanted to just you know you know diversify away from some of our other stuff that we were doing our other businesses and we wanted to just pay for college so we wanted to just make five or ten thousand dollars per month which was you know really a big goal for us um and i would say that with digital marketing agencies look you're not gonna make a hundred thousand dollars next month unless you're like smarter than einstein you're not gonna make a hundred thousand dollars next month but i can tell you this that if you really put your effort into it i believe that anyone within 90 days can be making 10 000 per month with a digital marketing agency and i'm gonna lay that out with like the blueprint here today in this video of course all of this being free okay so how much money can you make with it i think on the lower end you can make a few thousand dollars per month if you want to just do this passively like keeping your day job or staying in school but then also running some marketing for a couple of brands picking up a few clients getting them on retainer we'll talk about pricing structure later in this video as well but i think from the lower end you can make a few thousand dollars per month and i've seen people make hundreds of thousands of dollars per month with their digital marketing agencies now we make five figures monthly with our agency and we decided to keep it at a certain level where we have pretty much all of it outsourced we have people running it and i don't have to really do much today because i don't want to scale that agency past it but you know that's another topic for another day as well but you can get it up to something that's making you maybe 20 30 40 50 000 per month and then eventually automate it um so that it's just making you money while you go and work on other business ventures or just go on vacation and have fun that's also possible and we've done that okay so getting deeper into this topic of setting goals and expectations you need to think about who is going to be in this business is it just you who's starting this digital marketing agency maybe perhaps you've been talking about this with a friend of yours or a colleague or maybe one of your siblings or somebody in your family i'm going to give you just a couple quick pointers here when it comes to starting businesses because i have dozens of companies it's just kind of like a big mess right now but i've dozens of companies i can tell you this that you want to be really careful starting a business with a friend because i've seen businesses really break up friendships and you can be both on the same page at first but over time as you run a business it kind of just changes dynamics and friendships and so i would actually recommend against starting a business with a friend especially a really close friend because i've just seen it so many times where your friendship ends up getting ruined because of the business it just happens time and time and time again that i've seen um so you know i started my business with my brother and pretty much all my businesses i start with my brother because i can trust him we're on the same page with everything i know we're not going to cross each other that's just personal but just be very very selective of who you start a business with and who's essentially getting equity in that business if you do a 50 50 split on a business with your business partner and two years from now you realize hey i'm doing all the work my business partner doesn't do anything and they're getting half the money and you might be really kind of upset about that but you know if they own half the business they get half the money so you want to just be really really selective on that and i personally think that it's best to either keep the business 100 to yourself or maybe bring in one other person but don't try to have like eight of your friends all starting the same business together it's just going to get really messy the fewer people the better you want to retain as much equity as possible in the business if you want to bring other people on you can bring them on sort of as like like consultants or freelancers but try to retain as much equity of the business as possible and you know we'll talk about entity formation here right now in this point as well so when you are starting a company like a digital marketing agency you're going to probably want to form something called a limited liability company this is an llc now i'm not a lawyer just a guy on the internet so make sure you do your own research on this but typically we like to start limited liability companies instead of just using our personal name uh when we are running a business especially something like a digital marketing agency there's really two reasons for this one for tax reasons and two because in the com in the company there limited liability company it's actually going to in some cases hopefully defer liability to the company so let's say that you're running a marketing campaign for a business the campaign goes terribly wrong that company ends up getting sued because of some marketing mistake that you made and then that company tries to sue you well if you're running this through your business you should be somewhat okay because they can sue the business and maybe the business will go down but they can't come after your personal assets and your personal bank account and of course you need to really dig into this because there's you know holes you can like poke in corporate veils but you're going to want to create a limited liability company or perhaps a corporation so the best way to do this is through a company called ink file they're an affiliate here so this is how i'm just funding this video so if you want to go check them out and you want to start your llc i recommend going down to the link in the description it's to ink file and they're going to help you set up your llc and also there's other things like setting up a registered agent that they're going to take care of for you as well overall this cost is going to be pretty minimal i use ink file for all of my filings whenever i create a new business they just kind of streamline the process now you could do this yourself if you don't want to use ink file you could do it yourself but it's going to be like a lot more headache and a lot more confusing you have to go through your like department of state so if you want to do it right i recommend using a company like inkfile i will leave that link to them down below in the description uh if you want to sign up and if there's any discounts or anything i will also put that in the description as well next to that link okay so once we form that entity once we form that llc and we've decided who we have as a business partner if we have any then we want to think about how much time this is going to take us overall with this new business venture and this is why i love digital marketing agencies because when it comes to time commitment it's really up to you like i said you can have this as something that you're doing maybe for five or ten hours per week after school or after work or you can make it a full-time thing where you're working 80 hours a week on it's really up to you and that's what i absolutely love about the flexibility of something like a digital marketing agency it's not like you have a physical store where you have to be there from 8 am to 5 pm and you know deal with customers every day all day you can do this really kind of on your own however you see fit all right now we're getting into section number two which is determining the type of marketing that you were going to really focus on for your digital marketing agency so i'm gonna tell you right now the biggest mistake that anyone makes when they start a digital marketing agency or social media marketing agency or whatever it might be the biggest mistake that i've seen people make is they try to be a jack of all trades they try to be a full service agency from day one now i personally think this is a huge mistake okay and i say this because i tried this when i started way back with our agency like in like 2015 we tried to be a full-service agency but we didn't know what we were doing and we were basically mediocre we were average at all these different things and so instead of trying to be average at all these different things i suggest focus on a couple of key specific areas get really good at them and then eventually as you scale your business as you bring on more clients maybe you can start hiring more employees and then you can venture into a couple of different areas that you know maybe you're not an expert in at the time so let me just give you a rundown of some of the like kind of primary areas for marketing we have things like social media marketing this is pretty straightforward and the great thing is a lot of people can do this this can be running social accounts for companies whether this is instagram facebook tick tock snapchat twitter any of the other different types of social platforms out there running social media marketing for companies look there's always going to be money in this and you can always pick up clients just one example here uh you know just look at like your local ice cream shop you go into the ice cream shop you say hey let me run your tech talk let me blow it up make sure that you know you get tons of new clients and we can do all this through social media you get them on a retainer maybe a thousand dollars a month two thousand dollars a month you start bringing them clients and they're going to be very very happy right that's just one like small example there of social media and how you can really really get good at social media marketing now this is also helpful perhaps maybe you have a tick tock account that has blown up and you have hundreds of thousands of followers on there you can easily kind of convert that into social media marketing for other businesses that's just another example there okay social media marketing that's a huge area that you can focus on another one is going to be search engine marketing or paid advertising in general okay so paid advertising uh this is also pretty straightforward in the name basically running ads on all these platforms whether it's on google or a youtube ad before this video or maybe uh you're running ads on tick tock or snapchat or instagram or facebook right you can run ads in so many different places but paid advertising and actually in the physical world as well paid advertising even through billboards or through like your local newspapers sometimes those actually do work trust me um but running paid advertising for companies you can do this in the same setup and we'll talk about pricing and basically how to build uh companies and how to determine prices but with paid advertising you can also set something up with like a retainer for example you say okay give me 500 a month or a thousand dollars per month and i'll run the ads for you obviously that company pays for the ad spend as well but you have them on retainer on top of that that's another great option there okay the third category that you can focus on is something called search engine optimization so search engine optimization this is basically trying to rank a company's website uh very highly in typically google search or the second largest search engine is going to be youtube search okay so when i go on to google and i type in dermatologist in philadelphia whoever's coming up number one in that spot that's not just luck i mean if you're showing up number one on google for a really highly competitive search term that really is worth a ton of money and companies are willing to pay a lot of money to anyone who can help them get to the top search result in google or even on youtube um and so if you can learn how to hack that how to get really good at that trust me this is another thing that's it's going to take time to learn and in section number three we're actually talking about you know how to become an expert but search engine optimization this is probably my best field i have a really solid understanding of it just because we've been running blogs and websites and youtube channels for almost a decade now so this is one that we actually offer to some of our clients um because we just have a really solid understanding of it all right so another option is going to be email marketing there's so much money in email marketing and a lot of companies just don't know how to run email campaigns so this is one that i've actually i'm not an expert with email marketing right and so because i'm not an expert with email marketing i hired somebody else to run some of my email campaigns from one of my other businesses so instead of me trying to do this myself i just outsource it to someone else but email marketing this is a huge one you can make a lot of money on this especially actually if you want to do this i would target influencers or brands that have like big social followings and they just don't know how to build email funnels and lead funnels in general so email marketing huge money in that you can focus on that become an expert in that field and make a ton of money another one web development look if you already know how to make websites beautiful that's great if you don't don't worry we have tons of videos on this channel that can show you they're multi-hour long videos that can show you how to build websites um and so if you want to learn how to do that you know you can check out some of those videos i'll link to them down below but if you get really good with wordpress you can build websites for businesses i mean you know a lot of businesses need websites and it's pretty tedious job uh like building websites it's not very fun right so there's definitely money in that for people if you have a digital marketing agency that focuses on building out websites for your clients and then you know you can even bundle that in with like search engine optimization and just make packages from that okay now there's two other fields that i just want to briefly touch on here one of them is something like public relations or also known as pr so there's big money in this okay running public relations for people or for companies to get the word out about something i find this actually really works well for authors somebody who just wrote a book if you can find a way to connect with them and say hey let me run pr for you i'll get you into the newspaper i'll get you on to you know forbes and yahoo and business insider and i'm going to make sure that you know we line up 50 different podcasts for you so you can be a podcast guest on all these different ones to help you with pr this isn't really digital marketing as much but it's still one that i think is a really great opportunity and it's honestly overlooked in a lot of cases is running a pr agency i absolutely love this uh we've done this for a number of clients as well um it's just honestly really fun to just see kind of like how far you can hack the news and next thing you know your client ends up on like you know cnn or fox news or something and they're just like you know it's it's crazy what you can do in the pr industry uh with with public relations okay so that's another field you can focus on and then another one is something like really focusing on graphic design which you know you could say is a graphic design business but you still could really make a lot of money uh from a graphic design angle with digital marketing so as you can see these are just some of the different possibilities and routes that you can take with a digital marketing agency from this list and you know you could probably add 10 others on this list as well that are much more niched down and specific but from this list i recommend picking two to three of these different categories and saying i'm gonna focus on these specifically at first and then eventually i can scale out and learn all of these but i'm gonna stick with just two to three of these right now and scale out later okay because like i said the biggest mistake people can make is by trying to be a jack of all trades and do all of them at the same time okay because i'm assuming that you don't are not an expert right now at all of these right so unless you're an expert all of them go for it just you know launch it but um if not then stick to one or two okay so that is leading us into section number three here which is to build your online presence and also how to become an expert in the field of digital marketing all right so there's a couple of routes we can take with becoming an expert and building our digital presence now the first thing that we can do and i think the best option but the one that probably a lot of people don't want to hear is to become essentially an apprentice or an intern somewhere at another marketing agency so you can really learn the ins and outs and the ropes of how marketing companies work um this people aren't gonna like this because it takes time right and you know i'm sitting here saying well your best bet is to spend two years at a marketing agency learn the ins and outs and then go start your own two years from now you probably don't want to do that so if you don't want to do that then the other option is you can do a lot of self-teaching to become an expert in any one of these fields that's the beauty of the internet today in this world so we have over 100 videos on this channel alone that can really help you along the way whether this is how to run google ads or how to run ads on facebook or how to build websites or how to sell on shopify i mean we have videos for all of these different topics um so i do recommend you know checking out some of those other ones and of course subscribing to the channel because you can do a lot of teaching for yourself for example i taught myself a lot of these different marketing strategies and i've just learned them over time and sometimes you know the best way to learn is through your own mistakes which is hard to say because you don't want to charge clients if you're doing a terrible job and that's why i think another great way to kind of learn how to do this is to basically offer your services for free for as long as possible until you can really build up rapport and also build up a lot of skills so i think this is a great opportunity for a lot of people and you know we'll actually get deeper into this in section number six when we talk about getting clients and growth strategy but if you want to learn how to do something and you're not really sure how to do it look just go and offer it to a business for free or for very very minimal cost and a lot of businesses are going to take you up on that if you say hey i want to grow social media accounts i don't have any experience but i'll do it for free for you if you go to a business saying that a lot of them from my experience will agree to it or you know not every single one of them but i would say at least one out of ten will say fine you want to go run our social media for free they don't see any possible loss there so they'll let you go and do it and then you start to build up those skills you get better at it you learn over time and then eventually you can start charging and you can leverage maybe not that client that you did it for free but you can use what you did for them and you can then charge the business down the street to do the same thing for that other business so that's another great way to learn is just through experience just through making mistakes and learning the ropes yourself on top of you know the theory and the reading books i'll leave a link to a couple of different books that i thought were really great about uh marketing there's a good seo book that i read for search engine optimization um you can read you know you can read some like gary vee books or neil patel books those are okay i think they're a little fluffy but they can definitely help you with certain types of strategy all right now you're also going to want to make yourself look very professional so you're going to want to build out a website for your business hopefully you've already formed the entity through ink file or through your state and then you're going to want to build a website and social accounts for your business immediately after you file for that llc um and so you can build a website on something like wordpress it's pretty inexpensive or you can do it on squarespace or on wix um you know i personally think the easiest is to honestly just do it through wordpress uh hosting it with hostinger um so there we do also have a full tutorial on that by the way uh but i think that's probably gonna be the best setup for you it's gonna cost you you know like two or three or four dollars a month to have your website set up like that and just from learning how to build your own website you're going to gain some experience and then maybe perhaps you can go build a website for some of the businesses in your local area for free um and then eventually you know just become an expert at that right so that's what i was just doing for that there's a couple other things like canva i recommend signing up for canva learning the ins and outs of that it's going to be really helpful for graphic design if you want to just put together some logos for some companies or for yourself then learn the ins and outs of canva also webflow i absolutely love webflow i think it's probably it's it's my personal favorite for building websites for companies i don't build any of these sites myself anymore we just outsource all that of course but that's my personal favorite for that is building websites with webflow and then also perhaps you know maybe you just want to get a free trial with shopify so that you can learn how to start a shopify store even if you don't have one maybe one of your clients in the future is going to want to do that and you know you've already done that because you've just practiced it with the free trial you messed around for 14 days and you learned a lot from that that's just another thing that you can do so basically what i'm saying is go through download all all these different types of software get the free trials learn the ins and outs of each one of these it's going to help you to get some footing to start you off so that you can then eventually go and start doing some of this work for free for companies or businesses in your area and then you know a couple months after that you can go and start charging companies for that and i know that's not like some people aren't going to like that i'm saying go work for free but trust me it's going to be the best option if you go out with no experience and you try to pitch businesses in your local area to charge them thousands of dollars to do something look trust me because i see this every day i have family members who have businesses like restaurants and and different businesses in the area and i would say probably at least 10 to 20 times per week they get phone calls from people saying hey i have a digital marketing agency can i you know build a website for you i see that you're not you know on like um whatever yelp or something let me help you out with that let me help you rank with that and like they shut all of them down because they all just want to charge them money and they just have so many people coming at them offering these services so you need to find a way to differentiate yourself uh from all those other people and i think offering for free right off the bat is going to be the best way to get your foot in the door okay so now we're getting into section number four which is identifying your target client who are you going to choose to have as a client as a customer um look i'm going to give you just a quick hint here you don't want to have anybody and everybody that you can get as a client you want to be very specific as to who you choose to work with all right so the most obvious one that a lot of people go for right off the bat is going to be doctors lawyers dentists because you know when you look at these people especially in your local area they tend to be making a lot of money and so they're willing to spend thousands of dollars per month to get new customers because you know let's say that the the lawyer in your area is making a hundred thousand dollars per month and you know so they're gonna have more budget there to spend on marketing to bring in more uh customers for themselves now the issue with this i think the the reason why i wouldn't target these people right away when you're first starting off is because there's just so much competition in this space of trying to get lawyers doctors and dentists to run their campaigns for them what type of marketing this is you know it's up to you but still there's going to be a lot of competition because what i was saying earlier is that like i i know a lot of people who have these businesses and they just get pitched so much on them that i think you're better off focusing on some different fields and kind of just skipping over like the dr dentist lawyer space unless you want to do that for free just to gain some experience the other options here perhaps you could uh find target clients like big corporations and when i say big corporations i mean like really big sometimes publicly traded companies i've done this myself where i've kind of angled it more like a consulting gig but will go into fintech companies because i have a personal brand so i'll go into fintech companies and you can charge them 500 an hour a thousand dollars an hour sounds kind of ridiculous but you can because corporations they just have so much money like to them they just have millions of dollars that they're throwing around and so it's not really a big deal for them to pay someone 500 an hour to find ways to you know market their product better because it can be worth a lot more to them so targeting corporations can be really great the problem with that is that it's kind of hard to get your foot in the door with like a big corporation um i probably can't say which companies i did this recently for because i'm under ndas but some pretty big investing app uh that you know like yeah can't mention it but um you can do that hard to get your foot in the door obviously so maybe it's hard to start off with uh doing some marketing for big corporations but there's a ton of money in that another one that i think is really exciting i've never done this myself but i think it's really exciting is political candidates okay you can offer a marketing service specifically for political candidates there's always going to be campaigns running at any time of the year any time like literally ever people are always running for congress for senate uh for president even um and so i have a couple friends who have done this actually where they will get campaigns on retainer they'll say okay i need ten thousand dollars per month and i'm going to help you 10 hours a week to run your campaign to do the marketing side of it to make sure that we're drumming up a lot of noise and we're getting crowds together and we're just you know running some of that marketing and a lot of campaigns you know some of them have pretty tight budgets but i've seen ones that are really able to spend a lot of money because they've raised from a lot of super pacs where they've just done something where you know they have a lot of money flowing in so political campaigns i honestly just love politics so i wanted to include it in there but it's one that i think is pretty unique you're not gonna have a lot of competition in this space if you go to everyone who's running for congress in your state or in your like tri-state area and you approach them and say hey you know i can help you with this let me help you with your social media like you know give me four thousand dollars a month i'll help you with your social media i'll make sure that this you know 10x is and you'll get so many more views and everything else um there's a lot of money in that okay uh another option here for target clients is something like a e-commerce business so you know let's say that you approach people who have shopify stores or who are selling physical products whether this is e-commerce or actually physical products like a store in your town and you can help them to get online and to start selling those products online both of those are definitely great options all right now i'm going to let you in on a little secret because this is my favorite type of client to land and it's going to be a startup okay a startup that just recently raised a ton of venture capital maybe they just did like a series a or a series b or a series c and they raised a lot of money maybe they raised a couple million dollars and they're looking for growth they're trying to get more downloads for their app or you know whatever type of startup it is they're trying to sell more product or they're just trying to sell more software and get more users and i found that startups tend to have really high budget and they're looking to spend it they're looking to burn it because they're trying to get more growth the startup world is absolutely insane so i have a fund so i you know i'm in this world quite a bit and so i've learned a lot about the startup world and seeing just how many people are are just burning money on marketing and i don't wanna say burning as if it's a bad thing but there's a lot of money flowing around after a startup raises uh around and you know they have a few million dollars to spend they're looking to get growth and they're willing to basically like they're looking for someone to help the market trust me like i know a lot of founders and they all are like hey nate do you know anybody who can help us to market to get more users and they have trouble finding people for that so if you kind of cater your agency to uh growth especially if it's like user growth app growth right i think there's just so much money in that and you can make tens of thousands of dollars per month from something like that and it's an angle that i just don't see very often a lot of these videos that i see on youtube i watch a couple of these about digital marketing agencies um and a lot of people just you know say like run facebook ads for your local store you can do that but you're going to be maxed out to a certain point i think just go for the big fish right i mean try to get in to some of these things like these these startups or into these corporations you have to do some scheming obviously slide into some linkedin dms but it is definitely possible all right so in section number five we're talking about building your team so i want to keep this part pretty brief because i think when you are first starting out you really should it should just be you or maybe some close associates you probably don't have the budget to bring on multiple people as like w-2 full-time employees and so the way that i personally structured this and that i would structure it again if i was going to do it again is to do a lot of it myself at first especially so that i can learn how to do it but then i would just bring people on as freelancers basically you 1099 them it's just a tax term you have them on a 1099 uh so that they're not like actual employees you just have them doing like miscellaneous freelance work from time to time maybe when you get overloaded and you can outsource that to them so what i like to do is build up a team and basically a network of people that you can reach out to whenever you need them without having like a big overhead so i have a friend who has a digital marketing agency and i don't want to trash him here in this video so that could say his name um but he has like 30 some employees and they're on w2 like they're on salary and that said the average salary of those employees probably you know say 60 000 per year times 30 people that's what like 1.8 million dollars a year that he's spending in like just paying his employees that's really stressful he has all those people that he has to pay regardless of how many clients he has that's why i like structuring it with 1099s and freelancers so instead of having tons of employees i like to just have a network of people so i have probably a dozen different graphic designers that i can call up right now and say hey you want some work this week let me hit you with it go right and i can just pay them for that week i can pay them for that job um and then you know after that i don't worry about it and you know maybe won't contact them for a few more weeks and because they're freelancers right so build a team of as many people in each space as you can so build a team of a bunch of graphic designers build a team of a bunch of web designers build a team of a bunch of people who are really skilled with uh copywriting right basically like writing copy or like you know this is great for email marketing or for like even like the copy on websites basically just the wording people who are good at writing okay so build a team of writers find half a dozen people who are good at writing find some people who are really good at even video editing or some other different things as well right build this team like lay this all out in a spreadsheet that's what i do or you can even literally just have it on your wall and you know this could be two dozen different people that you can reach out to how do you find these people uh you can find these people well you know i personally find a lot of them actually just through referrals and through friends but you can find a lot of them on a website like upwork i don't like fiverr i think fiverr the quality is pretty bad so i i don't use fiverr for any serious jobs that we're doing but upwork i think is really excellent you can find some really great people on there um on top of that uh you can actually just post a lot of people off of linkedin as well i've i slide into linkedin dms like every day so when i see something that i really like i'll just shoot them a message you know i'll go find the linkedin i'll shoot through the message and nobody messages on linkedin so if you see someone on instagram and you really like their stuff and you message them on instagram you know maybe they'll respond but you know sometimes people don't uh so that's why i slide into linkedin dms i swear it always works people don't turn off notifications for linkedin it's just some weird bizarre thing but it works really really well okay so building your team like i said i would focus personally on freelancers especially at first um building that like big big web of freelancers that you can reach out to at any time but you don't have a big overhead cost because you're not paying them every week you're only paying them when you need them for a job so if you get a job that you're charging your client five thousand dollars and then you can go pay a graphic designer you can go pay someone else to do all this other stuff and you can maybe pay them a thousand dollars and you're making five thousand making a four thousand dollar spread right there that's just one way to start to scale the business right um all right now we're getting into the sixth section here which is talking about getting clients and growth strategy now if you skipped to this part and you missed some of the other stuff in the video i already did mention some things that i would do to get your first clients and i think the best thing to do is to definitely work for free for your first few clients okay go in offer whatever service you have whether it's social media marketing or with paid ads or email marketing go into a couple of businesses and offer to them for free to do this for them you can even explain to them say hey look i'm not an expert at this this is why i'm doing it for free but it's at no cost to you there's no downside for you let me just do this for you and let me grow your social media you offer that to a couple of different businesses or people who are looking to grow right you offer that to them if you actually grow them then you can leverage that and start charging businesses money after you can you know do that right so you say hey look uh this local business i grew their tick tock account from zero to 60 000 followers and they're getting millions of views per month in the local area i did this for them now you go to the next business down the street and say hey look this is what i just did for them i can do this for you as well it's only going to cost you 1500 per month for me to run your socials for you right that's exactly how i would do that to start getting clients because it's really three ways to get clients and new customers the first way is to just go in and just ask cold emails cold calls showing up the doors of businesses and really just trying to get clients that way now this can work and this is what you're going to have to do for your first few clients but eventually you probably don't want to be doing that because what you really want the sweet spot for getting new clients is through referrals because you're already going to have some rapport you're all you're already going to have some trust so let's say that you're doing marketing for the ice cream business in your local area and they love what you're doing now they go tell the local chiropractor hey you know this this person just helped me market my ice cream business and i have so many more customers now they go tell their buddy who's a chiropractor and they go tell their buddy who owns a pizza shop and now those people want you and they're begging for you to work with them you don't have to go in knocking on their door begging for for them to hire you they already are reaching out to you so referrals are the absolute best way to get new clients and this is when you can start charging more money this is when you are in more demand so it's just a way better thing for people to be asking you to work with them rather than you begging them to work with you okay that's always going to be the goal and the third way to get clients is through paid traffic like if you want to run ads for example um you know like let's say that someone searches marketing agency in philadelphia you can run an ad to show up number one on that a lot of people will click on that that costs money i don't think you probably want to do that right off the bat i would just do that if you have like extra bandwidth and maybe you have like you know just money to spend on that to bring in new clients but i wouldn't recommend running paid ads uh to to get your first clients um i think the best way is just you know brute force going in and like just trying to get a couple clients um for for free okay so we want to talk about one really important thing here and that is how much should you charge for your services so i'm gonna tell you right now uh the biggest mistake that people make with digital marketing agencies for charging for pricing is they basically as an agency owner they will just look at their expenses and say okay well how much time did this take me to you know do this service and how much did it cost me and then they just kind of like add money on top of that to make a spread and say well you know it cost me three thousand dollars to do all of this for the company so let me charge them five thousand dollars this is not what you want to do okay people do this all the time it's bad you don't want to do that all right don't look at how much you're spending and then just add money on top of that you need to do it in the reverse okay you need to start off by saying how much value is being created for my client and then how much can i charge to make sure that i'm like getting as close as possible to the amount of value that i provided for my client so for example if you provide a service and you are driving 20 000 worth of value to that client because you're just driving so much business for them and they end up getting twenty thousand dollars from that you probably wanna charge at least ten thousand dollars right so you you don't wanna miss charge with this okay you wanna charge based off of how much value they are getting and how much it's worth to them rather than how much it's costing you and what this means is that sometimes you could be running at a loss so it's in this is why you need to be really careful with with businesses especially if you start bringing out employees like let's say that um like your expenses for creating logos for um a a company let's say that your expenses are like a thousand dollars to create a logo for one of your clients but how much is it worth it for them maybe it's only worth it for them for 500 that's the value that they put on a logo so you need to find a way to make those expenses lower um or else you can have some serious problems because you have to see what everybody else is offering in your local area what everybody else is bidding on uh the the other marketing agencies that i'm referring to here so that's just something that you really need to think about okay how much value are you driving and then how close can you get to the value that you're providing them uh versus your expenses and and your overall price okay that's how i would do pricing okay so those are the main things we want to talk about in this video i hope you found it valuable if you did make sure you drop a like subscribe to the channel and please please please let me know if you have any questions you can either shoot me a dm on instagram i'll leave my instagram up here somewhere or you can comment down below as well and i'll do my best to respond to you as soon as possible sometimes i get a little bit flooded but i will be updating some stuff on instagram and everything else instagram and twitter is another great option as well so thanks for watching the video and i'll see everybody in next week's video best of luck to everyone

Channel: Santrel Media

Views: 1,081,255

Keywords: nate o'brien, mike o'brien, santrel media

Id: U6_a-vDDWTY

Length: 40min 13sec (2413 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2022