Will Napolini: How To Start A Digital Marketing Agency in 2023 (Step by Step)
So in this six part tutorial, I'm gonna show you step by step how to start and operate and scale a digital marketing agency in 2023.
So I am incredibly excited for this video.
Look, it's gonna be a little bit longer.
This isn't your typical ten minute quick video.
I'm really gonna go in depth in this video to share with you each one of these six different segments, talking about digital marketing agencies, 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 that 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 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?
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 $0 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?
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 2014 or 2015, I actually took it, and 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. 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 upfront 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 ecommerce business or even like a brick and mortar business, where you have to get 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.
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 ours years ago, our goal really was just to pay for college.
We wanted to just 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 $5,000 per month, which was really a big goal for us.
And I would say that with digital marketing agencies, look, you're not going to make $100,000 next month unless you're smarter than Einstein, you're not going to make $100,000 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 going to 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.
And I don't have to really do much today because I don't want to scale that agency past that.
But that's another topic for another day as well.
But you can get it up to something that's making you maybe 2030, 40, $50,000 per month and then eventually automate it 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 of 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 have 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.
So 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.
But just be 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 if they own half the business, they get half the money.
So you want to just be 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.
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 consultants or freelancers, but try to retain as much equity of the business as possible.
And 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.
Now I'm not a lawyer, I'm 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 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 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 holes you can 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, the 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 department of State.
So if you want to do it right, I recommend using a company like Ink File.
I will leave that link to them down below in the description 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.
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 10 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.
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 08:00 A.m. To 05:00 P.m. And 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 are going to really focus on for your digital marketing agency.
So I'm going to tell you right now, the biggest mistake that anyone makes when they start a digital marketing agency or a 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 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 maybe you're not an expert in at the time.
So let me just give you a rundown of some of the 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, TikTok, 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, just look at like your local ice cream shop.
You go into the ice cream shop, you say, hey, let me run your TikTok, let me blow it up.
Make sure that you get tons of new clients, and we can do all this through social media.
You get them on a retainer, maybe $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month.
You start bringing them clients and they're going to be very happy, right?
That's just one 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 TikTok 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.
So paid advertising, 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 you're running ads on TikTok 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 your local newspapers, sometimes those actually do work, trust me.
But running paid advertising for companies, you can do this in the same setup.
And we'll talk about pricing and basically how to bill 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 $1,000 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 very highly in.
Typically Google search or the second largest search engine is going to be YouTube search.
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.
And so if you can learn how to hack that, how to get really good at that, trust me, this is another thing that it's going to take time to learn.
And in section number three, we're actually talking about 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 because we just have a really solid understanding of it.
All right, so another option is going to be email marketing.
There is 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 for 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 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 could 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.
And so if you want to learn how to do that, 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, a lot of businesses need websites, and it's a pretty tedious job.
Like, building websites is 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 could 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.
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 onto Forbes and Yahoo.
And Business Insider, and I'm going to make sure that 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. We've done this for a number of clients as well.
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 CNN or Fox News or something, and they're just like, it's crazy what you can do in the PR industry with public relations.
Okay? So that's another field that you can focus on.
And then another one is something like really focusing on graphic design, which you could say is a graphic design business, but you still could really make a lot of money 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 could probably add ten others on this list as well that are much more niche, down and specific.
But from this list, I recommend picking two to three of these different categories and saying, I'm going to focus on me specifically at first, and then eventually I can scale out and learn all of these, but I'm going to stick with just two to three of these right now and scale out later.
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.
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 at all of them, go for it. Just launch it.
But if not, then stick to one or two.
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.
People aren't going to like this because it takes time, right?
And 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.
So I do recommend 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 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 think this is a great opportunity for a lot of people.
And 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 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 the theory and the reading books, I'll leave a link to a couple of different books that I thought were really great about marketing.
There's a good SEO book that I read for search engine optimization.
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 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.
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.
I personally think the easiest is to honestly just do it through WordPress.
So we do also have a full tutorial on that, by the way.
But I think that's probably going to be the best set up for you.
It's going to cost you like two or three or $4 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 little website for some of the businesses in your local area for free.
And then eventually just become an expert at that, right?
So that's what I was just doing for that.
There's a couple of 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 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, 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've already done that because you've just practiced it with the free trial, you messed around for 14 days, and you've 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 the different types of software, get the free trials, learn.
The ins and outs of each one of these.
It's just 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 a couple of 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, 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 different businesses in the area, and I would say probably at least ten to 20 times per week.
They get phone calls from people saying, hey, I have a digital marketing agency.
Can I build a website for you? I see that you're not on Whatever Yelp or something.
Let me help you out with that. Let me help you rank with that.
And 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 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 clients.
Who are you going to choose to have as a client, as a customer?
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.
So the most obvious one that a lot of people go for right off the bat is going to be doctors, lawyers, dentists, because 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 let's say that the lawyer in your area is making $100,000 per month, so they're going to have more budget there to spend on marketing, to bring in more customers for themselves.
Now, the issue with this, I think 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, it's up to you.
But still, there's going to be a lot of competition.
Because what I was saying earlier is that 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 doctor, dentist, lawyer space.
Unless you want to do that for free, just to gain some experience.
The other options here perhaps you could 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 we'll 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.
$1,000 an hour. It 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 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.
I probably can't say which companies I did this recently for because I'm under NDAs, but some pretty big investing app that can't mention it, but you can do that.
Hard to get your foot in the door, obviously.
So maybe it's hard to start off with 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, anytime, like literally ever.
People are always running for Congress, for Senate, for President even.
And so I have a couple of friends who have done this actually, where they will get campaigns on retainer.
They'll say, okay, I need $10,000 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 running some of that marketing.
And a lot of campaigns, 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 or they've just done something where they have a lot of money flowing in.
So political campaigns, I honestly just love politics, so I want to include it in there.
But it's one that I think is pretty unique.
You're not going to have a lot of competition in this space if you go to everyone who's running for Congress in your state or in your tristate area and you approach them and say, hey, I can help you with this.
Let me help you with your social media. Give me $4,000 a month, I'll help you with your social media.
I'll make sure that this ten X's and you'll get so many more views and everything else.
There's a lot of money in that. Okay?
Another option here for target clients is something like an ecommerce business.
So let's say that you approach people who have shopify stores or who are selling physical products, whether this is ecommerce 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 of million dollars and they're looking for growth.
They're trying to get more downloads for their app or 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, 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 just burning money on marketing.
And I don't want to say burning as if it's a bad thing, but there's a lot of money flowing around after a startup raises around and they have a few million dollars to spend.
They're looking to get growth and they're willing to basically they're looking for someone to help the market.
Trust me, 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 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 watched a couple of these about digital marketing agencies and a lot of people just 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 into some of these things like 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 two 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 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 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 I'm not going to say his name, but he has like 30 some employees and they're on W two.
Like they're on salary. And that's the average salary of those employees.
Probably say $60,000 per year times 30 people. That's what, like $1.8 million a year that he's spending in just paying his employees.
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 one thousand and ninety nine s 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, do you want some work this week? Let me hit you with it. Go.
And I can just pay them for that week. I can pay them for that job, and then after that I don't have to worry about it and maybe won't contact them for a few more weeks 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 copywriting, right?
Or like, this is great for email marketing or for even 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.
Or you can even literally just have it on your wall.
And this could be two dozen different people that you can reach out to.
How do you find these people? You can find these people.
Well, 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 think fiverr, the quality is pretty bad, so 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.
On top of that, you can actually just post a lot of people off of LinkedIn as well. I slide into LinkedIn DMs, like, every day.
So when I see something that I really like, I'll just shoot them a message.
I'll go find their LinkedIn, I'll shoot them a 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, maybe they'll respond, but sometimes people don't.
So that's why I slide into their 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, building that 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 $5,000 and then you can go pay a graphic designer, you can go pay someone else to do with all this other stuff, and you can maybe pay them $1,000 and you're making 5000, making a $4,000 spread right there.
That's just one way to start to scale the business, right?
All right, now we're getting into the 6th 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 with 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.
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?
If you actually grow them, then you can leverage that and start charging businesses money after.
So you say, hey, look, this local business, I grew their TikTok 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, run your socials for you, right?
That's exactly how I would do that to start getting clients.
Because there'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 at 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 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, 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 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.
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, let's say that someone searches marketing agency in Philadelphia, you can run an ad to show up.
A lot of people will click on that.
I don't think you probably want to do that right off the bat.
I would just do that if you have extra bandwidth, and maybe you have just money to spend that to bring in new clients.
But I wouldn't recommend running paid ads to get your first clients.
I think the best way is just brute force going in and just trying to get a couple of clients 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 going to tell you right now, the biggest mistake that people make with digital marketing agencies for charging and 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 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, it cost me $3,000 to do all of this for the company, so let me charge them $5,000. This is not what you want to do, okay?
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 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 $20,000 from that, you probably want to charge at least $10,000, right?
So you don't want to mischarge with this, okay?
You want to 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 this is why you need to be really careful with businesses, especially if you start bringing on employees.
Let's say that your expenses for creating logos for a company, let's say that your expenses are like $1,000 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, 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 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 versus your expenses and your overall price. Okay.
That's how I would do pricing.
Okay. So those are the main things that we want to talk about in this video.
If you did, make sure you drop a, like, subscribe to the channel, and please, please let me know if you have any questions.
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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.