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Last Updated on January 2, 2023 by Mandy Schmitz
It takes determination and grit to start a business. So, how does anyone start a successful social media marketing agency?
With the rapid growth of social media, it has become a critical aspect of any business marketing plan. Facebook alone has over 2.8 billion monthly active users, leading other social channels with more than 60.5 percent monthly visits. YouTube follows closely with over 2 billion logged-in monthly users. With more than 240 billion pins saved by users, Pinterest has more than 50 percent year-over-year for Gen Z regarding demographics. And we haven’t talked about Twitter’s 353.1 active monthly users or 1.074 billion Instagram users worldwide.
This dynamism creates a massive opportunity for anyone who wants to earn a high income as a social media marketing agency – providing valuable, simple services to an unlimited range of clients. It’s also worth noting that businesses are spending more of their marketing budgets on digital advertising than ever before, and you can get a piece of the action.
This guide will walk you through the steps you need to follow if you are looking to build a social media marketing agency. (Trust me, I’ve been there before).
What is Social Media Marketing?
Table of Contents
Social media marketing entails the process of promoting your business and driving engagement by creating customized content for each social media channel. This process has to do with connecting with customers or audiences and helping them know your brand better. As a result, businesses have found growth through social media.
How do you build a good relationship with someone you’re meeting for the first time? Since there won’t be any second chance, what can you do to make such an individual admire you instantly? Is there any chance of succeeding by saying meaningless and boring things to the person?
The fact is, people will follow you and engage with you when you make them happy, regardless of how you do it. The ability to discover and make your target audience happy will determine your social media marketing success. Your followers will like your brand and share your stories with family and friends when they are glad.
However, you won’t see any results from your social media marketing efforts if your story isn’t worth sharing.
1. Starting With a Plan
It is critical to consider your business’s goals before you start creating your social media marketing campaigns. It is like wandering around the forest without a map when you don’t have a social strategy in mind for your social media marketing campaign. Even if you have fun with it, you will probably get lost.
Ask yourself some of these questions when you want to define your social media marketing goals:
- Who is your target audience?
- What message will your social media marketing send to your audience?
- How does your target audience use social media, and where do they hang out?
- What are you planning to achieve with your social media marketing?
2. What Are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing?
You will need both creativity and strategy for your social media marketing.
The importance of social media marketing cannot be overstated, even though it may appear overwhelming. This marketing approach is so critical that 78 percent of marketers outsell their competitors using social media for their business, and more than 97 percent of salespeople use social media.
Besides, you will get more than increasing your sales from using it.
However, there are still thousands of small businesses that are not aware of social media marketing benefits. Essentially, 50 percent of small businesses are not promoting their business through social media. It is so glaring that there is a disconnection between the firms struggling to get started with social media marketing and those who are seeing its benefits.
Let’s talk about how social media marketing will help your business growth, and some of these benefits are:
- Promoting your products and services: You invest in marketing to achieve this, and social media marketing is great for promotions.
- Increasing traffic: You can also increase your traffic tremendously by linking to your site using social media.
- Growing brand awareness: Spread the word about your mission, products, or services through social media marketing.
Other ways social media marketing can benefit you and your business include:
- Keep your customers up-to-date
- Use #hashtags to increase your reach
- Use social proof to connect with potential customers
- Connect with clients about niche subjects you both enjoy
- Promote your content
- Drive conversions
- Help your cause to go viral
- Retarget your audience through social media
- Establish your brand as a topical authority
- It’s (mostly) free
- Build customer loyalty
- Provide excellent customer service that keeps your audience delighted
3. What is a Social Media Marketing Agency?
Social media marketing agency uses various social media channels like Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and other social platforms as an online advertising technique. They help brands connect with a more diverse, wide-ranging audience, gain customers’ interest, and create brand recognition.
A social media marketing agency also creates a proper campaign structure customized to their client’s businesses and ensures that their ads are impactful. In addition, a social media marketing agency also uses their experience to understand how to split a brand campaign since they have their expectations properly calibrated. With that, they can organize products and services for a business to achieve its desired ROI.
Any business may miscalculate when structuring their campaigns by not splitting up these campaigns finely or not narrowing down enough. But, on the other hand, an agency can structure its clients’ accounts to take full advantage since they are familiar with all ad types.
The perfect definition for a social media marketing agency is increasing efficiency. An agency understands that attention to detail for every part of a campaign, investment in high-quality creative, and rigorous testing may not translate into success.
A social media marketing agency knows that success is gained only by balancing all those elements against the business’s priority and budget. Therefore, they will maximize a budget to achieve a business’s goals since they understand its ins and outs.
4. What Does a Social Media Marketing Agency Do?
A social media marketing agency handles most of a company’s social media marketing responsibilities. However, you may not come across a social media agency that provides all the solutions your business needs. These agencies branch out into several categories and services that involve the following:
Create Social Profiles
Each social media platform is not working the same way, and not all businesses will find the desired results from all of them. For example, if you are a makeup brand, your best channel is Instagram. The job of a social media marketing agency is to study the social platforms that are best suited for a business after studying its industry. The agency then creates enhanced and completed profiles for the company so that their customers can engage and connect with it.
Develop Social Media Policy
Every business has its terms of use and privacy policy for its online assets and products. In the same way, a social media policy details how a company and its workers will conduct themselves on social media. As a result, businesses can ensure that their staff share content online responsibly and also protect their online reputation.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Businesses can crack into social media platforms through the innovative ways and creativity provided by a social media marketing agency. The first phase is running an audit of the current social media strategies and presence, find out about the business’ completion, and create a clear plan. Then, the social media marketing agency will develop content type and the publishing frequency appropriate for the industry/business. The social media marketing agency will also ensure a positive ROI by defining social media spend and metrics.
Competitor Analysis
Businesses can also get their competitive landscape from the in-depth analysis provided by the social marketing agency. What makes this information highly useful is that brands will know their competitors’ performances. The social media marketing agency also helps a brand understand how it performs against its competition. With this, businesses will know and learn about their competitors’ success and failure with their campaigns. Brands can then develop fail-proof campaigns for their business.
Social Media Publishing
The social media marketing agency handles businesses’ social media publishing activities. There will typically be an agreement between the company and the social media marketing agency on a set number of posts for each social media platform. The agency will then analyze and research popular content across social media in your industry. Next is developing a content calendar around those topics. A social media agency automates operations in order to scale, check out our article the best social media scheduler to find the best tool for your social media automation.
5. Digital Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing: What’s the Difference?
There is a difference. Social media marketing and digital marketing are not the same because social media is one of the various channels for a digital marketing campaign. Digital marketing is an umbrella term for social media, public relations, content marketing, email marketing, and SEO.
Professionals who work in the industry interchangeably use “social media marketing” and “digital marketing.” Even when many people implement only social media, they will still believe they are engaging in digital marketing.
However, you are typically implementing various digital marketing channels when engaging in digital marketing. The digital marketing strategy can include analytics and social media, content marketing, email marketing, or SEO. However, you may not have digital marketing in place when engaging only in one channel, such as social media. The use of various online marketing platforms typically denotes digital marketing.
Differences Between Social Media Marketing and Digital Marketing
While digital marketing and social media marketing provide trackable results, social media marketing directly engages with social media users. In contrast, digital marketing has to use different channels to reach the target audience when raising awareness.
Social media marketing focuses on attracting users to the business by creating engaging content on social media. In contrast, digital marketing uses digital products to reach the target audience at various touchpoints.
Digital marketing also uses digital platforms to reach a wide audience, while social media marketing has limited reach with social media users only.
6. Are Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing Essential to Business?
While a valuable asset like digital marketing can help the business grow and establish an authoritative online presence, social media marketing has helped increase business exposure up to 90 percent. With digital marketing, methods like SEO has helped about 89 percent of marketer succeed online. In addition, these brands get as much as 80 percent increased brand awareness through PPC advertising.
So, why are digital marketing and social media marketing important to businesses? Let’s start with social media marketing.
The Importance of Social Media Marketing for Business
Here are a few top reasons social media marketing is essential to business:
- Social media is great for news jacking
- Social media is a perfect addition to PR
- Build brand loyalty with a strong social media presence
- Social media is crucial to customer service
- Earn media coverage and get noticed through social media
- Social media ads enable targeting and retargeting
- Build relationships with the audience through an active social media presence
- Social media marketing helps to understand the audience
- Increase reach through quoted experts on social media
The Importance of Digital Marketing for Business
Digital marketing is critical to your business, and you can learn a few reasons why your business needs to adopt an online marketing strategy.
- Get an impressive return on your investment
- Examine campaigns and optimize them for better results
- Target ideal audience
- Compete with larger corporations
- Your competitors are already doing it
- Reach people where they spend their time
How Do I Start a Social Media Marketing Agency?
You may need to know that starting a social media marketing agency can be tricky, even though it takes tons of effort and time to start any business. However, you can get up and running in no time when you have the right tools and tips.
Let me say that you may look for another gig real quick if you are not experienced and prepared enough to handle several degrees of managing client relationships and accounts. It doesn’t matter if you are creative or intelligent than anyone in the game.
While it can take you years to figure the skills required for the job, I strongly recommend that you retain a good job for a period before taking the audacity on your own.
While many of us grind within some work environments, we may not realize how complex they are. There are many expectations, politics, oral and nonverbal communication exercises you will have to deal with, apart from the actual work you will produce. Your career or daily activities as a social media marketing agency will unfold with everything from leadership, product, and how it structures its culture.
Put yourself into a working environment where your prospects can work before mastering your digital marketing skills. Doing this will ensure you’re a well-rounded and more understanding expert. You won’t take it personally when customers are strained or probably projecting issues on you.
A few tips you may want to keep in mind as you start your social media marketing agency include:
- Define your niche
- Decide how you want to scale
- Develop the right business model
- Be a freelancer before upgrading to a founder
- Monitor your progress
- Acquire clients
- Determine your pricing models
1. How to Create a Social Media Marketing Agency
Create your social media marketing agency by start marketing yourself. Set up a good website and let people know that you are a capable marketer. Understand the front-loading business model of social media marketing and pick lucrative niches. For example, some experts recommend attracting high-value clients like dentists, lawyers, or doctors since they will pay you without struggling.
It becomes pretty easy to produce consistent results by duplicating the process for other lawyers when you have helped one. Develop more predictable income streams from multiple retainers and avoid the death trap of trading time for money.
Give different clients different things they want by creating packages. Some clients will wish to get extra packages, and you can lose them when you have only one pricing option. With different packages, you can have a basic service and VIP options. The type of work and the amount will determine these differences.
Learn to also win clients quickly through family, friends, and referrals. People will be risk-averse to hire you if they have not worked with you. Therefore, resist the urge to take any money from them. Instead, use a premade template to do a free evaluation of their social accounts and website. You can then confidently tell them how you would improve them by telling them how they are doing.
Ultimately, attract followers by telling engaging stories. And while at it, ensure always to track your results.[/su_icon_text] [su_icon_text icon=”icon: money” icon_size=”25″]
2. How Much to Charge
It can be tempting to start with hourly rates if you have no previous working experience in social media marketing agency. Some newbie social managers charge from $25 to $35 per hour. That is about 10 to 20 hours per month for one client. Therefore, they can get about $250 to $700 per month per client.
However, making a reasonable living by charging that amount as a freelance can be pretty hard. You will need experience and confidence to create a pricing package and retainers. With that, you can earn more money.
If you are comfortable with an hourly rate, go ahead with it for the first three to six months. After that, however, move towards packages when you have enough experience and can develop case studies for your work. [/su_icon_text] [su_icon_text icon=”icon: group” icon_size=”25″]
3. How to Get Social Media Marketing Agency Clients
Creating the strategies to grow your agency while providing a consistent level of service to your current clients is the biggest obstacle you will face. As a start-up, you might want to grab a pen and notepad and write down the answers to these questions:
- Why did I start a social media marketing agency?
- Who is my ideal client?
- What services do I provide?
- What makes my agency different?
- How do my service and prices compare to my competition?
As you start, you will soon learn that agencies often quest to get clients constantly. So, how do you get more clients for your business? You can start with some of these top tips.
- Tell your story to family and friends
- Take advantages of online directories
- Carve ideal prospects using LinkedIn
- Prioritize your portfolio
- Bring your clients to a free training session on social media
- Blog about marketing
- Consolidate quality as you grow
- Build a following with email newsletters
4. How to Compete with Other Companies
While you will spend several hours on social media each week as a social media marketing agency, you can also expect tons of competition. Everybody is on all social media. Thus, it has become a laborious, time-consuming task that takes dedication and finesse to stand out from the competition.
You can automate the process and beat your competition using various ways.
Provide Exceptional Customer Service
A great way to build loyalty among your clients and differentiate yourself from the competition is to offer outstanding, great customer service. Be responsive to customer queries while remaining respectful and courteous.
Stay Ahead of Competition by Changing Your Business
Identify a business model you can use for your social media marketing agency. Remember that it can take you months to execute any changes you identify. However, use your social services to start this journey.
Set Competitive Pricing
Giving your prospects more affordable pricing is one of the easiest ways you can use to beat your competition. First, you will need a clear picture of your competitions’ pricing packages to determine your ideal price point. Next, identify the competitors with the best value. With that, you can decide whether or not you can bring the same value to the table and have a higher price. [/su_icon_text]
SMMA Experts and SMMA Course
Most individuals are pretty honest about what they want or how they have achieved their social media marketing agency dreams. But it takes a lot of commitment if you are going to make $5,000, $10,000, or even $100,000 per month from your social media marketing agency. If you’re willing to learn and commit to the process, you will find value in taking some SMMA courses.
Some SMMA experts are offering social media marketing courses, and you will find them valuable if you are willing to make sacrifices and need the proven, step-by-step formula to get started.
1. Kevin David
Kevin David, the CEO of ThatLifeStyleNinja, created Facebook Ads Course to help anyone looking to set up their agency to generate their first sale and even bring more revenue through Facebook ads. It is a video course that will walk you through a step-by-step practical approach to creating and running laser-targeted Facebook ads to make massive profits with your social media marketing agency.
Kevin created the course to help ease the pain online entrepreneurs face with FB Ads while learning the ropes of Facebook paid advertising. As an individual who has spent millions of dollars scaling and optimizing several businesses to multiple 7 and even 8 figures through Facebook Ads, Kevin David knows a lot about Facebook advertising.
Click here to get the Facebook Ads Course.
2. Jordan Platten SMMA Course
Jordan Platten is a UK-based online entrepreneur who created Affluent Academy, a thorough course where people can learn how to create a digital marketing agency. The system will take you through some modules, including introducing social media marketing, setting up and getting customers, prospecting, and ways to get clients’ attention, how to close clients, the science of getting results, and more.
The course supports email supports with Jordan, a private mastermind Facebook group, funnel templates, contracts, and scripts. Overall, Affluent Academy is intense training that will teach you everything you need to launch a successful digital marketing agency.
Click here to start with Affluent Academy.
3. Tai Lopez SMMA Course
Social Media Marketing Agency 3.0, created by Tai Lopez, will serve you well if you want to set up your agency and willing to work hard. After this course, you will get small businesses to hire your services. You will learn how to set up your business, mastering social media marketing, acquiring clients, and building a team, servicing, or automating.
Students will get access to an active Facebook group, archived monthly live calls, and dozens of bonus lessons. The course is comprehensive, full of real success stories, excellent value for money, and much more.
Click here to get started with Social Media Marketing Agency 3.0.
Conclusion
Though it may seem daunting to start your social media marketing agency, it is not impossible. You can use the right strategies and preparation to create a strong base for your agency and develop from there.
While starting with your social media marketing agency, you can use free tools like Bit.ly, Facebook Barometer, AdsReport, and others. However, you can keep your clients happy and breeze through your projects when equipped with the right courses.
Good luck as you navigate this journey and help businesses with your social media marketing agency!