How To Start A Social Media Marketing Agency in 2021

Have you been considering starting a social media marketing agency? When it comes to the vast space of media and planning, the future lies in digital marketing and advertisements. It’s easy to find reasons to start your own company. The problem lies in the execution of your idea. 

Social media marketing and digital outsourcing are the keys to a promising future. With the constant increase in emerging businesses, the need for an online media presence is overwhelming. The social media ad industry is projected to surpass $612 billion in 2021, with exciting career opportunities and work improvements for digital marketing specialists, graphic designers, social media marketers, and content creators. 

If you want to start a social media marketing agency and have big plans for the future, this guide will help you begin your success journey. 

Pros and Cons of Starting a Social Media Marketing Agency?

While it might always be sunny in Philadelphia, it’s certainly not the case with digital marketing. Nothing is ever easy with starting a business, and social media is already a challenging field. You must understand the cons with the pros so you can plan for the future. 

Pros:

1. High-Profit Margins

While working for other companies as an employee, you only draw a salary. When you successfully run your company, you can reap the benefits of drawing on the profits. You also have the liberty of deciding your salary, services, and any other allowances. Depending on the annual turnover, you can reap much more than you sow. 

2. Easy Schedules

There is a lot of running around to do initially, but once all the processes are set, you can decide on a personal priority list. You can manage your time and delegate the rest that is not crucial or time-consuming. You can also set your own schedule for the day and devote time to meetings and clients that are more worthy of your attention. 

3. Growth Prospects

For most entrepreneurs, the thrill of starting a business is in the scalability. Most investors and stakeholders concentrate on growth and scaling the company to higher peaks. As an employee, you always have to follow directives and goals set by your supervisor. As the owner, you can now decide the company’s best direction and determine the best way forward.

Cons:

1. Time Consuming

As the business owner, you will no longer have the luxury of working a set schedule. Apart from working only as directed, you will now have to focus on key clients and finance, human resources, IT, accounting, and much more. These other aspects can be time-consuming and can take away precious hours from the business’s planning and growth stages. In the beginning, you may even have to fulfill all these roles alone, without support from others. 

2. Risk

As an entrepreneur, the entire risk of the venture will be on your shoulders. All decisions will, directly and indirectly, affect your professional and personal life. Apart from this, the monetary risk of pouring money into a new business venture should also be calculated. Since most businesses do not start making revenue immediately, you would need to also consider a gestation period before reaching break-even and nullifying your initial capital investment. 

3. Expenses

For a social media marketing agency, the cost of yearly software and remaining virus-free is extensive. Photo editing software, graphic software, design spaces, social media management software, and their upkeep take up a lot of money from the annual balance sheet. To add to this, there are marketing fees, website costs, employee costs, business license fees, and ad costs. Put together; all these costs pile up to show in red in the company ledger. 

4. Gathering Momentum

For new businesses, gathering momentum and starting with a few clients can take several months. The major drawback for small businesses is the absence of a brand name in the market. Established agencies can tackle multiple accounts simultaneously, whereas startups can find this task challenging. 

How to Start a Social Media Marketing Agency?

Let us look at starting a social media agency in a step-by-step manner. With so much information available online, finding the correct data and implementing it can be a tedious task. With this article, we hope to simplify things for you and help you make an informed decision. You may also use this article as a guide to gathering your thoughts while you start building your social media agency.

1. Select a Niche

It is easy to say you want to start a social media agency. The first issue begins when you are unsure of which areas you should focus on. Deciding on a focus area to start with can be overwhelming. There are several different avenues that you can choose, but you should ultimately select one that resonates with your style of working. 

Once you are sure about the niche you want to establish your social media agency in, you can start thinking about other things like client base, staffing, technology, software, and networking spaces. You should always consider the niche that you are most comfortable with and have worked in earlier. Having the experience of dealing with clients and getting work done will help you start on a good note and help you get several clients based on your previous work experience.

Many entrepreneurs also prefer hiring people who have worked on projects around the same focus area since directing and setting goals becomes more straightforward. For example, if you select the medical social media space but hire someone with a digital engineering background, there may be a disconnect in communication and client requirements. 

To start with a bang, you can select a single niche. Doing this does not limit your future business scope but will help the business with a much-needed initial boost in the market. Always remember, clients like to work with people who have experience in their fields. If you are confident about the niche and your expertise, that is the kind of direction you should select from the get-go. 

• Select one social media platform to start with instead of many.
• Determine your scope of service and become an authority in your chosen niche. 
• Start with similar types of projects before branching out into other ones.

2. Keep Updating Yourself

Since education is an ongoing process, it is essential to keep yourself updated at all times. The field of social media marketing evolves and changes by the minute. New trends, platforms, and services can become famous overnight. Users and audiences can also change loyalties from old software to newer ones within a few weeks. New courses, styles, updates, patches, and software require money and time. 

While doing this, you should also make provisions for your employees to get the necessary training with all new updates. Apart from keeping yourself and your team educated, you should also follow the market closely. Knowing about the digital marketing jargon, all the nuances and dynamics like SEO, content marketing, content creation, keyword placement, Twitter tags, and so on will help you keep track of trends. 

Since clients will count on you to deliver the best services, you must keep yourself aware of leveraging and using all popular social media platforms. 

3. Build a Business Plan

Once you’ve identified your niche and areas that need constant updating, you should start planning and setting up the business. Make sound decisions regarding partners or friends to start your company with or if you want to fly solo with a proprietorship business. Business structures usually have their advantages and disadvantages. It would be best if you took some time to research the best fit for your future. 

Once you decide on the business type and structure, you should think of a name. The most critical aspect of choosing a name is that it should resonate with the business and not be confusing to remember or pronounce. If clients do not know how to pronounce the name, there is a good chance they will eventually forget about your company. You can choose unique or quirky names, but you should remember to ensure that they are relevant to your business. 

While selecting a name, you should simultaneously check and confirm that the same domain names are available for your use. Having a different company name and a website address might confuse customers and stakeholders. 

• Legal Matters: After you finalize a name, register the company, and buy the domain name, you should consider all other legal aspects. Ensure your business fits well within the confines of all registration, taxes, licenses, and compliance laws. You should also start a business bank account with a reputed bank for all future payments and tax filings. 
• Website: Ideally, you should purchase .com domains since they are commonly used across the world. Social media agencies usually offer marketing strategies, analysis, SEO, content creation, short video, infomercials, infographics, and other engaging content. 

4. Create Your Portfolio

Since you are starting a social media agency, clients do not expect you to have a well-established base. However, having relevant past work experience, testimonials, and ex-clients recommendations always helps build confidence and trust. Showcasing success stories and customer feedback always places your company and you in a positive spotlight. The whole idea behind creating a portfolio of your products and services is to let clients know what they are getting if they enter into an operating agreement with you. 

Putting together a pitch deck and making sure it’s up-to-date can be very time-consuming. Agency Vista allows social media marketing agencies to showcase their portfolio directly on their profile. Their ecosystem allows agencies to generate qualified leads on autopilot through the information on an agency’s profile.

Most clients are on the lookout for professionals to help them free up time from social media marketing. While doing this, these clients expect excellent results and turnover rates. For most businesses (large and small), marketing costs are directly proportional to the sales generated. So companies will expect a high return on investments from your social media agency. To help develop client trust, it is essential to showcase all your company’s skills and talent. Doing this helps bring in additional clients. 

• Ensure you add a few case studies of real-life clients with solutions to their marketing issues. At this stage, you should show quantifiable results achieved.
• It would help if you had an offering of different services provided (based on client needs).
• Adding video testimonials and video references also helps immensely.
• Verify your clients through an Agency Vista profile and be matched with businesses that match your best customers.
• If you plan on having different social media packages, you should add some competitive rates so that clients get a fair idea about your budgets.

It would be best if you had all this information readily available on your website at all times. For most social media agencies, the portfolio is one of the most crucial elements of the website. 

5. Gather Your Team

Once you have these steps in place, the next thing to do is headhunt for a fabulous team. For social media agencies, having the perfect team is all about goal setting and the drive for marketing goods and services. Marketers with excellent networking skills are highly valued in the agency field. Social media managers who have outreach with influencers and authority leaders usually understand the target audience better than those that do not. Highly educated, skilled artists, writers, and social media managers are needed for lead generation. Initially, you could hire freelance staff to take care of content requirements, graphics, and essential administrative work. You could also hire an accountant or invest in accounting software while you scale the business. 

Advertisers, PR professionals, and videographers are highly skilled people who may come in handy later. A social media consultant from your chosen niche would also bring a wealth of experience to the table. Apart from the prerequisite skills requirement, you should also ensure your team members are skilled communicators. 

6. Start Branding

Setting up your brand as a serious contender in the field of social media marketing will take thought and precision. It would be best if you aimed at branding and creating a space for your business on all social media platforms. Start by setting up business accounts on all leading social pages and populating the home pages with brand artwork, thoughts, social media tips and tricks, and short viral memes and videos. Doing this will help build traction and ensure people are sharing your content. 

Create a profile on the largest social media marketing agency network, Agency Vista, to help your business generate qualified leads on autopilot. They also provide marketing packages to accelerate your agency’s growth, which is an excellent option for small to medium-sized agencies. Their pricing plans are lower than what you would pay for a monthly press release, and you get that plus so much more!

A positive online presence will help in organic lead generation and will be a platform for you to showcase its strengths. Engaging new and potential customers with shareable and call-to-action-type content will also help create brand recognition over time. 

7. Track Your Progress

By this stage, you have the niche finalized, business plan, structure, and website done, company registered, portfolio ready, and team built. Once you start your branding and lead generation, you can slowly begin analyzing and tracking your progress. Social media management and agency recognition wholly depends on the quality of content provided. As a social media agency, your prime focus should always remain on the content’s quality and usability. Since social media is partially saturated, the need for the hour is to produce and assimilate quality readable and viewable content. 

You should set achievable targets with your clients and your team, with quantifiable metrics to help them keep track. Many online tools can be purchased to track and analyze backlinks, footfall, pay per click (PPC), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You should make fair use of these resources to help the agency and your clients keep a close watch on the bottom line and the return on all ads, videos, blogs, and other written content. 

Final Thoughts

With any new business, feedback is a necessity. While a feedback and communication loop is not part of setting up, it is crucial to have a good customer support team to help tackle clients and customers’ issues. New customers usually gain trust in the brand only if there are positive reviews about the business. Following these steps carefully is a definitive way to start your social media marketing agency and start seeing positive results. Always remember, with any new business, patience is a virtue.