How to kickstart a Digital Marketing Agency and be successful?

Starting a digital marketing agency can be challenging. With so many businesses focused on digital marketing, it’s not easy to launch your agency and run a business with great success. Digital Marketing is one of the fastest-changing industries at the moment. To keep up with this rapidly changing environment, agencies need to keep some things in mind from the very start.

How can you ensure your agency starts off on the right foot and create a success for yourself?

Here is what we have done to kickstart our business in this early stage.

1. Build A Brand

When you promote your business, you are promoting the idea of sales increment but when you are promoting yourself as a brand, you are promoting the bond between you and your targeted audience.

It’s not that promoting your business is not important but rather promoting your personal brand is equally important.

Storytelling must be a part of your Marketing Strategy

The stories that you are conveying must be real and based on your own experiences because the more people relate to you the more they trust you.

The brand is one of the most important assets of any agency. Your products or services can be brilliant but without a clear strategy, it will be difficult to position yourself in the market and show what differentiates you from your competitors.

Do you know your competitors?

Have you checked what they are doing?

The lack of a clearly defined brand strategy will lead to the inability to connect with your desired target audience. Brands affect our purchasing decisions, even when we’re not aware of it. That’s why it’s vital that you take your time and build your brand strategy before launching your business.

We followed the following steps to define our marketing strategy and it should help you too.

1. Analyze and evaluate your marketing strategies, activities, goals, and results.
   1. Communication of a consistent message to the right customers
   2. Reveal new, unknown or neglected markets
   3. Fine-tune current strategies and plans to increase current market share
2. Overview of your company:
   1. Location, date established, sales history, number of employees, key personnel
   2. An estimation of the current awareness level of the company as well as the perception of your company amongst your buying influencers
3. Describe your marketing goals and objectives (e.g. increase company visibility, increase audience size, differentiate from the competition, generate quality leads or increase usage within existing customers.
   1. Long term goals with priority what to achieve the next 2-3 business years
   2. Short term goals for the next 12 months
4. Current customer and buyer persona
   1. Job titles, functions, industry, geographic location, company size, and behavioral descriptions
   2. Size of current customer audience
5. Preferred target customers
   1. Reasons you are targeting a specific group
   2. Behavior that needs to be present to target a specific group
   3. Size of the target audience
6. Describe services
   1. Strength or weakness compared to the competition
   2. Changes to products and services over time
   3. Current perception and awareness level of your services
7. Past Marketing Encounters
   1. What has helped you grow your business
   2. Not been tried but might help?
   3. What has your competition done to grow their business
8. Begin to Outline a Communication Plan. Begin to list current and future media sources as well if costs are fixed annual costs, and what funds are available for new efforts for:
   1. Advertising vehicles like broadcast, print, out-of-home and online advertising.
   2. Promotional vehicles like the website, collateral, direct marketing, interactive and online marketing.
   3. Media relation vehicles like media contacts, public relations and articles.
   4. Event vehicles like trade shows, special events, seminars, and webinars.
   5. Analytic vehicles like databases, market research, and tracking systems.
   6. List any promotional medium considered to be the most effective to date.

How to build a brand:

• Determine your target audience
• Research your competition
• Name your key qualities and benefits
• Create a stunning logo
• Outline your brand voice
• Integrate brand everywhere

2. Kontent is King

Get to the point, keep it simple, avoid industry jargon and buzzwords, and let your target audience know what you do, why they should be interested in your services and how to get more details if wanted.

In 2019 Google will make improvements to their content analysis and truly understand the content of a website.

Therefore you should focus on providing answers to client’s queries and most importantly write quality content. If you published regularly and include the right keywords, it will help you boost engagement, increase the traffic to your website, show your product’s value, and maximize your sales and lead enquiries.

Quality content is important if you want to:

• Communicate your unique value proposition
• Establish authority
• Foster relationships with customers
• Raise brand awareness
• Drive revenues via social selling.

Content marketing allows you to fully show your expertise and knowledge in your niche. With regular content on your blog or on other platforms e.g. LinkedIn, you can slowly position yourself as a thought leader who can provide their readers with useful tips, examples, case studies, trends, infographics and more.

There are many benefits of content promotion on media platforms, such as generating organic traffic and elevating your position in your marketplace.

Content marketing techniques:

• Run a blog
• Be a speaker at a local event (Linkedin Local)
• Be present on social media
• Send engaging and creative newsletters

Guest blogging process:

• Determine the topic and review it with the chosen platform
• Follow their guidelines
• Write an informative and engaging content
• Review the article with the platform and agree on publishing

3. Stop Worrying About Your Prices

Most marketers are already tired of cutting budgets and lowering their service prices. Trying to compete with others who are doing your job for a much lower price will not get you far.

Stop worrying about it!

There will always be clients who will choose price over quality but these clients are not for you. Your knowledge, expertise, and creativity have its own price and that’s completely understandable as long as you’re delivering high-quality services.

If you’re constantly talking to clients who are trying to decrease your prices, maybe it’s time to find another audience!

4. Make Yourself Visible

After you’ve designed your website to present your skills and your brand, it’s time to start building a portfolio and make it visible to everyone.

With your portfolio, you are demonstrating all your accomplishments in one place and the process of getting to the end-product. You know that your portfolio is the deciding factor when it comes to turning a lead into a client.

Displaying all of your work on your website will surely have a strong impact on your visitors. Once you’ve published it, update it regularly.

How to start building your portfolio:

• Offer to do some work for charities or nonprofits to get references
• Ask your first clients to display your agency’s name on their website
• Promote projects with content marketing

Make sure that not only your portfolio but also your website will demonstrate the talents of your agency.

Conclusion:

Agencies should use their website as a platform to showcase their skills and creativity, knowing that their clients will make a call mostly based on that. Missing the opportunity to demonstrate all your potential on your website is something you shouldn’t allow to happen.

After all, that’s the place where everyone who is interested in working with you will check first.

So make sure you start successfully!