Maybe you’ve seen people crush it with SMMA signing 2K a month clients.

But you don’t know how to start your social media marketing agency?

Information is thrown at you from all directions and you don’t know what exact steps to take.

If that sounds like you right now, I understand what that’s like.

I’ve been there too.

That’s why I want to break this business model down to its fundamentals so you can understand how it works and how you can start your digital marketing agency managing social media for clients.

I’m doing this because I wish I had seen something like this when I was starting out.

A breakdown to better understand what is SMMA, how it works, and why it works so well.

These strategies are the ones that I personally used to start my agency.

And without further ado, let’s get right into this free SMMA course.

What is SMMA?

An SMMA stands for social media marketing agency. It is a business model where you run an agency that provides social media marketing services to clients.

And this can be done from anywhere in the world so you don’t need employees with a social media marketing agency. It is not a formal business that requires an office employee or even a legal corporation.

It’s not this weird hack or trick or tactic. It’s just you have a service-based business that provides services to clients. Pretty simple.

1. Develop Digital Marketing Skills

Now the first thing that I want to share with you is that if you want to run a serious business, you need to develop the skills.

There is no way around it. And if you’re just getting started, trust me, I’ve been where you’re at currently.

And there’s so much to learn. That can be quite daunting, right?

I’m talking:

• Paid advertising
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Sales funnels
• Copywriting
• Conversion rate optimization

There’s so much out there.

I feel like what stops a lot of people is that. It’s the paradox of choice. There’s so much out there that you can fight and focus your energy, time, and attention on one single thing.

So, how to develop the skills to start a social media marketing agency?

Let’s find out.

How To Develop SMMA Skills?

What I like to do when learning new skills is what I call the Elon Musk advantage.

Now, what do I mean by that?

Elon Musk is a very smart guy and does many things very well.

But one of the things that really stands out to me is that he finds a way to surround himself with very, very smart people who far exceed their capabilities and knowledge in specific areas.

And he leverages these people to create some of the most innovative companies in the game.

How can you apply this to your agency?

What you want to do when you first start out is leave your ego at the door and put your hands up and say, “I don’t know much about the service I would expect.”

So what am I going to do? I’m going to go ahead and start learning as much as I possibly can in my free time and sort of solving as much information as I possibly can to become an expert myself.

But I will also seek out other experts who have been doing this for years.

How to find the experts?

Well, there are tons of great digital marketing courses like Fiverr’s Paid Advertising: Social And Search, which will give you a deep understanding of social media, paid advertising, driving leads, and digital marketing overall.

8 courses in total with over 261 videos led by some of the top digital marketing experts in the world.

But if you have some digital marketing knowledge, I personally recommend the free digital marketing course provided by GoHighLevel, which is specifically designed for agency owners.

GoHighLevel is a digital marketing platform for digital marketing agencies that also gives you access to step-by-step training on how to run an SMMA agency.

2. Create SMMA Website

If you’re thinking about starting an SMMA agency, a website is a must. If you run an agency and you don’t have a professional website, sales funnel, and business email – nobody will trust you.

Creating a website for a digital marketing agency can help promote your business, showcase your services, and attract new clients.

Your website must effectively and efficiently communicate the company’s services to potential clients. It should also be visually appealing and organized well.

There are many different options to create an SMMA website, like:

• ClickFunnels 2.0
• Systeme.io
• Squarespace

But the best software for digital marketing agencies is GoHighLevel, which I’m also currently using in my agency.

It’s essentially an all-in-one digital marketing platform explicitly created for agencies. The great thing about HighLevel is that you can not only use it to run your agency but also provide marketing agency services to your clients.

GoHighLevel enables you to:

• Build websites and sales funnels
• Manage your clients with its advanced CRM
• Schedule appointments with your clients
• Customize email follow-up sequences
• Build surveys and forms
• Create chatbots
• And more

They also have something called GoHighLevel snapshots that basically lets you deliver a snapshot of an account and everything in that account to another account you set up in HighLevel.

But the best part about GoHighLevel is that you can actually white-label this software. This means you can brand the platform and its mobile app with your custom domain, logo, and colors, and then you can resell it to your customers for a monthly subscription that goes straight into your SMMA agency’s bank account.

GoHighLevel empowers over 15,000 agencies around the world.

If you want to give it a try, GoHighLevel offers our readers a 30-day extended trial where you’ll also get the training once you sign up.

Create a Logo

If you’re looking for premium clients, you want to make sure you have a premium look so you want to make sure you have a high-quality logo.

It also gives you a very easy win when it comes to branding your agency.

And it’s actually very easy to get it done, You can try it yourself, or you can find professionals on Fiverr.

Set up a Business Email

And the final thing is your business email. And for this, I recommend the whole Google Workspace.

It’s going to cost you $6 a month and you get access to all Google tools and features.

And that way, you do not have to invest that money into Dropbox and a bunch of other individual software that combined come up to much more. Business email is also essential for different cold outreach outreach strategies that we’ll cover later in this SMMA course.

So this is what you need to have your website up and running. You can read more in this guide on the SMMA website if you want to learn more.

3. Choose an SMMA Service

What are some of the most profitable services I can offer?

What are the services that will add the most value to clients?

What service should I pick and sell to clients?

If you want the answers to these questions, keep reading.

First, pick your service.

There are a ton of SMMA services you can sell:

• Paid advertising
• Social media management
• Building sales funnels
• Content creation
• User generated content
• Influencer marketing

The list goes on and on… But how do you choose which one to offer?

I like services that have a clear return on investment. Services that get you a clear idea of how much money you spent and made back. This way, it’s clear for you and your client.

There’s no discussion on your value. You can both see how much profit you generated them without question. Let me dig a little deeper and give you two scenarios:

Scenario 1:

Let’s say you’re doing content creation. You take photos for your clients for their social media pages.

And that’s great, but the problem with this service is that you can’t attribute a clear return on content creation.

You can’t clearly see how much money you made with each photo or photoshoot.

Scenario 2:

Now, let’s say you go with Facebook advertising.

With each ad you create for them, there’s a clear number of how much you made them. You can easily see the ROAS (return on ad spend).

For example, if you put $100 into running the ad, and you see it’s generating a $2OO revenue, you’re getting a 2X ROAS.

That’s why running ads for clients will give you the clearest look at the return on investment.

Pro Tip

Focus on one single vertical.

Yes, becoming a full-stack well-rounded digital marketer is an incredible skill. It does give you quite an edge over competitors, but at first, focus on one thing. For example one social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.

And I think that mastering a single platform actually is going to give you more of an edge than actually being an expert at a bunch of different services.

4. Pick Your SMMA Niche

To choose your SMMA niche, you need to answer the question of who will you be serving with your agency.

When I started out, it wasn’t until I became laser-focused on one niche that I started to see results.

Until then, I tried to appeal to too many people who didn’t share many commonalities.

And see, the easiest way to fail with SMMA is to try to appeal to everyone.

By trying to sell to everyone, you’re not going to understand the people well.

And when you don’t understand the people you’re selling to well, you will have a hard time solving their problems.

You’ll end up having little impact and no one will want your services.

So, instead of targeting the masses, narrow down to the specific group of people you will serve.

It’s about learning their common traits, speaking their language, and finding out about the problems they’re facing.

This way, your offer will be much more valuable. It’ll be easier to sign clients, too.

From here, there are mainly 2 routes you can take to narrow down your niche:

Local Businesses

For local businesses, your main service offering will be bringing leads (people who have the potential to become customers).

The downside about helping local businesses is that there’s no clear attribution to how much money you made them.

E-commerce

With E-com, you get to see a clear dollar return at the end of each month. You can clearly see how much money you’ve made your clients.

Not only that, but you can also see a clear attribution to sales. Let me explain.

Every time someone buys from a Facebook ad you created, that sale gets tagged under your ad.

Your Facebook ad gets attributed to that sale.

Then it’s easy for you and your client to see how much money you’ve made them directly.

Now, if you’re going down the E-Com route, it’s important to narrow it down to your sub-niche.

This helps you further diversify and stand out from your competitors.

Whether your target niche is a local business or you want to work with e-commerce stores you shouldn’t stop here.

1. Choose a Category

When it comes to finding your SMMA niche, you want to think about what you’re knowledgeable in and what the demand is for what you’re providing.

Here are some examples of categories to choose from:

• Health
• Fitness
• Clothing
• Tech

There are so many categories to choose from!

2. Narrow Down to a Subniche

After choosing a category, you’ll want to go even narrower.

So let’s say your category is fitness. Under fitness, you might think of:

• Crossfit
• Hit Workouts
• Yoga

Or any other kind of workout that you can think about.

Now, you might be thinking, “isn’t this going to limit my opportunities?” Good question.

But no, it’s not going to limit your possibilities.

In fact, it’s going to expand your client opportunities because you’ll have a deep understanding of your specific market.

This beats going broad and general every time.

It gives you an edge over other agencies that don’t specialize.

See this chart below for a rough guide (this is an example, there are many more sub-niches out there!)

If you’re still struggling at this point or need some inspiration, check out this article on best SMMA niches, where I break down 12 different niches.

5. Create Your Unique Selling Proposition

Why is it important to have a unique selling proposition?

What drastically changed things for me when building my SMMA agency was clarity.

Often, the answer is not downloading more info into our brain, but stripping everything down to its bare bones and having total clarity.

Clarity about the value you offer businesses and clients. Clarity about what it is that your agency is great at doing. Clarity as to how you monetize your agency as much as possible.

And all clarity starts with a mission.

Having an agency mission will not only give you incredible clarity as to what prospects you should be reaching out to, but it will make your outreach much more powerful.

It will indicate to the prospect that you speak their language and that they specialize in their niche.

A mission clarifies your prospects and how you can help them get where they want to go.

It shows that you understand their business model. It shows you speak their language. And people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

This will put you ahead of 99% of people who are reaching out and have clients in 100 different niches.

It will also help you streamline your service. It’s of extreme importance that you pick ONE single service. This will reduce operational complexity and will allow you to gain a competitive advantage by being the best agency for that specific service in your niche.

So, with that in mind, are you ready to dive into the 4 pillars of your agency’s mission?

Question 1: Who do you help?

Is it fitness brands?

Tech brands?

Beauty brands?

This would be your niche.

Question 2: What do you help them achieve?

Is it to grow sales?

And grow it by how much?

Make sure to be specific on this part. Set your standards so prospects will get an idea of what they’re heading in for.

Think about the ONE outcome prospects in your niche value most.

What is the main KPI that they are optimizing for?

How do they measure success?

Question 3: How will you help them?

This part shows your service.

Pick an in-demand online service. I recommend a revenue-driven service—a service where you’re bringing in measurable value/revenue.

Question 4: What sets you apart from the competition?

This is your competitive advantage over other agencies.

Some examples are creative or data-driven.

Other pillars you could base this on are time, cost, efficiency, results, quality, etc.

Check out the graphic below for a one-sentence breakdown:

6. Get SMMA Clients

Now, let’s take a look at how to get SMMA clients.

As an agency owner, there’s no hiding from sales and approaching a business.

If you don’t master sales and outreach, it’s going to be nearly impossible to grow your SMMA.

I tried running away from it when I first started. I used to say things like I’m not a salesman, or I’ll never master this thing.

300+ sales meetings later, I can, without a shadow of a doubt, say that sales come down to practice.

The more prospects you speak to, the better you get at it. The better you’re at it, the more people you close.

Now, you’re going to be picking the most effective methods you’re going to use for outreach.

Ready to get into it?

Step 1. Make a List of Prospects

You want to make a lead list. You want to start locally, you can go broader later, but start locally and just create a Google sheet, Google Docs, or it can even be pen and paper.

And just write 20-30 businesses, their:

• Business name
• Phone number
• Email address
• Website
• Social media pages

So that is the process of lead sourcing and basically just collecting a bunch of leads that you intend on reaching out to and just collecting as much information about those leads as possible.

So that way you can have the highest likeliness of setting a meeting with them.

And to make your life easier, you can use lead generation software like Apollo.io, LeadFuze, or Uplead,

With just a few clicks of a button, you’re going to get hundreds of leads from nearly every city and industry.

All you have to do is just type in the targeted city and industry. This tool is going to save you lots of time.

Step 2. Prepare an Outreach Template

Now, here’s a very simple example outreach message example that you can use:

SMMA Email Outreach Template

“Hey,

My name’s [Your Name] and I help restaurants get new customers.

I’ve just had to look at your website and I noticed you’re leaving a lot of money on the table in your business.

I have some great ideas for you to get more customers in.

Would you like to discuss them?”

The most important thing is selling the meeting, not the service. A lot of beginners in social media marketing make that mistake.

You are selling the meeting, not the service, so when you’re reaching out to clients, don’t start talking about the benefits of your service.

Don’t talk about your service at all. You are just selling the meeting and its infinite upside for them and basically zero downsides.

So that is super important because you need to understand these business owners are busy, respect their time, and make sure that the meeting is an absolute win-win for them.

Step 3. Pick SMMA Outreach Methods

Here are the best SMMA outreach methods you can consider:

1. Cold Email

This is the bread and butter of any outreach strategy. If you go about it the right way, with a powerful email copy, it can be very effective. Here you can learn more about how to do SMMA cold email outreach step by step.

2. Cold Call

The oldest method in the book but can work tremendously well. This is much better suited for local businesses. You can find more about this outreach strategy in my guide on SMMA cold calling.

3. Facebook Outreach

Finding your prospects on Facebook and starting a conversation on the platform.

Before doing so, I recommend you clean up your Facebook profile.

Have a professional profile picture in place, ideally a banner with your agency mission, and in your bio, you should also have the agency mission. Make ‘unprofessional’ pictures (you partying, drinking, etc) private.

4. LinkedIn Outreach

This platform is particularly important if you’re in the E-commerce niche. Here’s where most of your prospects will be hanging out

5. Video Audit

We will talk about this method later on. One of the methods I’ve had the most success with.

6. Cold Instagram Video Intro

Cold DMs on IG seldom work. I have noticed that the Instagram video intro is much more powerful. Shoot a 1-2 min video introducing yourself, what you do, how you can help them, and a clear Call to Action.

7. Walk-in

This consists of literally walking into a business to speak with the manager or business owner. This is, of course, only applicable to local businesses.

8. Facebook Groups

This method consists of identifying Facebook groups where your prospects will be hanging out.

You are infiltrating them and providing value upfront by answering questions and engaging with the community. Once you engage often, you will begin getting inbound leads in your messages.

You can also proactively transition prospects for whom you have answered questions to a DM.

So, what next?

Step 4. Pick Your Best Outreach Method

Once you have picked 4 outreach methods, you want to test them and watch out for feedback and results over 1-2 months.

After having looked at the data, you will realize that some are performing better than others.

This is normal.

Depending on your personality and niche, different outreach methods will be better suited than others.

Now you want to pick the 2 winners and kill the rest. That way you’ll be able to double down on the ones that are working.

Then keep on looking back at the data (email open rate, message response rate, etc.)… And keep iterating according to feedback.

Step 5. Use your Personal Network

Friends, colleagues, acquaintances, classmates, family members, etc.

You’re looking for a business owner, and you can now use your network for your personal benefit.

I truly believe that the people who get ahead and get what they want in life are those who are willing to ASK.

Most people go their entire life without using their networks.

A network is there to support you and for you to support them. So make use of it.

Here’s a script you can use to reach out to your network:

SMMA Outreach Template Example

“Hey [friend name],

Congratulations on [insert a recent accomplishment /event]. Hope all is well!

I just started a digital marketing agency. Exciting times but as you probably know, the initial phase is always the hardest one.

So I was wondering if you could give me a hand since you have a vast network. Who do you know would be interested in growing their businesses?

Any help is always appreciated.

Let’s grab a drink soon. It’s one me!”

Step 6. Arrange a Meeting

Explain to them the benefits of your service and how you can help them. Be upfront about them being your first client and you needing the experience.

Ensure they know you’re someone who is serious and someone who will work incredibly hard to take their business to a new level.

I also want you to understand that business owners understand. They understand that you’re trying to get your jumpstart.

Why? Because they’ve been there themselves.

They will have much more empathy if you come across as a genuine person who is real about where they are currently at, than if you try to play it out to be this ‘successful agency owner’.

Transparency and honesty should ALWAYS be top of your list of values as a business owner.

Step 7. Leverage Other People’s Network

Have your network come back with a no? No worries!

It’s time to tap into the exponential reach of a network.

You want people closest to your network to dig into theirs, creating a viral loop effect.

Even if your personal network comes back with qualified leads, you should still use this method to your advantage.

We are going for volume at the start, as those initial meetings will serve to give you momentum and confidence.

SMMA Outreach Tips To Get More Clients

“But with so many possibilities for outreach, how should I best go about it?”

“What should I do or don’t do with them?

After sending out hundreds of messages and iterating according to feedback, I’ve come across a couple of simple guidelines for increasing conversion rates.

I’ve boiled them down to 3 easy things.

Understand the typical day of your prospect

Where are they likely to hang out? Linkedin? Facebook? Instagram?

If they’re in the E-com sphere, they’re most likely hanging out online on Linkedln or Facebook.

Play to your personality and strengths

Try out a couple of these platforms and see which one you’re most comfortable with.

For example, if you are strong with writing, go with emails and messaging. If you are stronger on camera, go with the video audit.

And if you decide to go down the video audit route (which I’ve personally seen the most success with)…

I’ve boiled down my process to a simple-to-follow guideline after sending out 334+ video audits.

Would you like to know what it is?

Avoid Huge Instagram Accounts

If you’re reaching out to someone with a huge Instagram following, DM’s may not be the best place to reach them.

It’s important to pay attention to where the business owner will be most receptive to your message.

Make sure the platform you’re sending the message with isn’t supersaturated.

The Video Audit Method Explained

Doing a video audit means sending a 5-10 min screen recording to our prospect.

To go over their current digital marketing strategy and how they are currently doing in our area of expertise.

We are going to be using loom.com for this, which is free for up to 100 videos. I love Loom because it gives us instant URL access to our video recordings. We will be sending this link to our prospects.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

We will pick their closest competitor who is implementing the service we offer and compare it to our prospect’s lack of implementation.

If you’re offering Facebook Ads, you will take a look at both the competitor’s and the prospect’s Ad Library for example.

Here are 4 keys to a killer video audit:

1. Deliverability is everything:

Before putting together the video audit, make sure you can get a hold of the decision-maker.

Otherwise, you risk wasting your time.

This outreach method is one of the most effective ones, but it’s also more time-consuming.

You want to make sure that they are at least going to notice you.

2. Turn a Cold Video Audit into a Warm Video Audit:

You can either start a conversation with them prior to recording or ask them straight away if they would be interested in seeing a video audit of their current digital marketing strategy before sending it.

Going about it in this way might mean you spend a bit more time prior to sending the audit, but it tends to be well worth it as you ensure that they will watch the audit.

3. Get them to a meeting:

We aren’t trying to close any prospect via a message or call.

We need to jump on a Zoom video call with them – that is a high-income scenario.

4. The Intro is King:

Here’s where your prospects will decide whether they want to listen to the rest of the video audit.

You want to make sure you have the first 1-3 minutes perfected.

Below is a script you can use to make sure you master the intro and start on a good foot:

SMMA Prospecting Outreach Template Example

“Hey [business name], it?s [your name] here from [your agency name] and it’s great e-meeting you.

I have gone ahead and created an in-depth marketing audit on [prospect business] where I have included 1-2 pieces of ACTIONABLE strategies.

These are strategies we are implementing right now for all our clients to [the outcome your service produces].

And these are strategies you can immediately apply right after this quick audit, to make incredible returns and recoup some of the revenue lost at the moment.

So, without further ado, let’s get right into it.”

7. SMMA Service Delivery

So, once you sign your first clients, now is the time to service them.

And as a digital marketer, you have two options: social media management and content creation.

Content Creation

Content creation includes:

• Creating social media posts
• Making videos
• Design banners, graphics
• Writing copy
• And more

Social Media Management

This service involves:

• Posting on social media platforms
• Running Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns
• Running PPC ad campaigns
• Answering DM’s and comments
• Writing copy
• Growing the social media platforms
• And more

That is the easiest place to start and usually, that is where you’re going to get the highest retention.

So these services, you get the most obvious ROI. It’s the easiest to learn and there are few costs.

8. Scale Your SMMA Business

The next step is all about hiring your expert team and scaling your business.

At this point, you have two options to get results for your clients. Either you outsource, or you do it yourself.

Doing it yourself is easier to start. Outsourcing is easier to scale.

Your team can take care of one of the most important aspects of the agency, which is service delivery. Note that I didn’t say the most important aspect.

A lot of people say, “Oh, well, if I’m just outsourcing the service delivery, what do I actually do? What is my value? ”

Your value is creating an incredible ecosystem, processes, reporting, communication, and signing clients, which is massive, making sure the clients are.

My point here is your value is not just doing the service. The value of an agency is not just delivering the service for clients.

There are so many other things that come into the picture that are incredibly important, but that’s a whole other topic.

What I want to do right now is I want to show you where and who to hire for your team.

Now, when it comes to where I’m a big fan of Facebook groups or any type of community online around your service which is social media management.

The great thing about the internet is that people congregate online with like-minded people.

And the reason why I liked searching for people there is that it’s not transactional.

If you’re going on Fiverr, which by the way, is a good backup option, the person is there for transactional reasons, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

But when you look for people on Facebook groups that are just there to develop themselves, to grow their skillset with the service.

And so that is why I am one of the big fans of Facebook groups.

Other backup options include Reddit or freelancer platforms like Fiverr or UpWork.

Another way to scale your SMMA agency is providing AI marketing services like:

• AI chatbots
• Marketing automation
• Content automation
• Custom workflows
• And more

If you want to learn more, I’ve put together an article on how to start an AI automation agency.

Best SMMA Tools

Now, let’s take a look at some of the best SMMA tools.

1. GoHighLevel

So as I said earlier, GoHighLevel is the fastest-growing white-label marketing automation platform for digital agencies. They have everything you need to run an SMMA business, from CRM and website builder to marketing automation, 2-way SMS, sales funnel builder, and more.

You can check out my GoHighlevel review for more details or try it out straight away.

Here you can start with a GoHighLevel 30-day free trial.

2. BuzzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a powerful content marketing platform that lets you find the most shared and trending content across the internet and different social media platforms. This helps you find the topics and formats that have already been successful in your selected SMMA niche.

BuzzSumo has 5 main parts: Discovery, Content, Influencers, Monitoring, and Projects. Together, these parts make up a full set of tools that can be used for a wide range of tasks.

3. AdCreative.ai

AdCreative is a powerful tool for making ads and social media posts. It uses highly trained artificial intelligence to help businesses make personalized content for their brand.

AdCreative takes your ad account data and uses advanced algorithms and millions of data points from other advertisers to make creatives for social media platforms or pay-per-click campaigns.

All you have to do is give AdCreative some basic information about your business and the people you want to reach, and it will do the rest.

What makes this software unique is that the longer you use it, the better results you’ll see. After just a few days or weeks, AdCreative can create limitless content for your SMMA business.

One of AdCreative’s best features is its neural network, which keeps improving every day and adapts to your business’s needs. This makes sure that the content made for your brand is always optimized and tailored to it.

Here you can get 25% off any AdCreative pricing plan and $500 in free Google Ads credits.

4. Ocoya

Ocoya is a social media marketing platform that helps you create, schedule and analyse your campaigns from one place.

You can start the design process quickly with Ocoya’s built-in template library, which has designs for your marketing campaigns that can be changed to fit your needs.

With more than 10,000 image and video templates at your disposal, you can make professional graphics for your projects quickly.

You can easily design content with custom fonts, colors, backgrounds, and layouts with the drag-and-drop editor.

With the help of Ocoya’s AI copywriter, you can take your social media marketing to the next level.

Just type in a simple idea for a post, and in seconds, the AI copywriter will come up with interesting captions and suggest relevant hashtags.

This platform also has a powerful link-shortening feature, so you can shorten URLs right in the caption editor, shorten links in bulk, and even make QR codes.

You need more than just captions and hashtags to connect with your customers and get them to make more purchases.

Note

Make sure to check out our list of AI marketing tools that will help you scale your SMMA agency faster. Below is also a video version.

SMMA SaaS

As you can guess, marketing can take months and months before it takes off and start showing results. That was a big problem I ran into was that clients were not seeing the immediate results and so they were not willing to keep paying me the $2,000 to $3,000 a month that I was charging them.

So I had a ton of people request refunds and a lot of people quitting after the first month because they didn’t see results in 30 days, which is very hard to do as a marketing marketer.

So maybe that was my fault for not establishing that good enough, or maybe I’m not a great marketer and you guys can produce amazing results in just one month but that was not the case for me.

GoHighlevel SaaS Mode

Then, this is when I ran into GoHighLevel SaaS mode. So SaaS, you can white-label your own GoHighLevel marketing software that works perfectly for a specific niche. You can give your clients all of the marketing tools that they need for success.

So instead of me building the website and building the funnels and doing the ads and all the posts, I give them a platform so that they could go and do it themselves and manage all of it themselves. So instead of feeding them fish, I was teaching them to fish. I was teaching them to become the marketer, which most business owners want to learn and want to do.

And also they love having the software because it solves all of their marketing problems and they don’t have to pay a marketing company thousands of dollars a month to do it for them. You can offer your white-labeled GoHighLevel software for anything from $ 197 to $497 a month, depending on which features they get in the different subscription levels.

And what I love about it is that there’s no management or legwork after I sign a customer up. So I jump on the sales call, collect their payment info, create their account, and then they have everything that they would ever need pertaining to marketing for their company. And then I’ve been able to enjoy passive income that comes in every single month as part of the subscription that they pay for the software.

SMMA SaaS Downsides

If I’m being completely honest, there are a couple of downsides to SMMA SaaS. The first, it can take time to set up and launch. It’s very much an upfront time investment, and so that is one downside. It can take a week or two to set everything up.

There is a turn rate for users, meaning people do cancel every once in a while. I found that in my little bit over a year doing this that the turn rate is around 10 %, meaning if I sign up 100 clients in a year, about 10 of those people are going to cancel on me. Not everybody puts in the effort to get those amazing results out of the software. And so, every once in a while, you will have people canceled.

But not nearly as many people are canceling on my software as they were on the traditional social media marketing services that I was offering previously.

And then lastly, GoHighLevel is very intuitive. It’s always changing, it’s always getting better. And so you do have to keep up with that stuff. You might have to update things for your users every once in a while. But trust me, it’s not a ton of work, but you do have stuff to do every once in a while.

SMMA SaaS Benefits

But in my humble opinion, the benefits greatly outweigh the detriments. And so the first benefit we have is that you can make substantial passive income every month. If you had 24 people using your software, which is not hard to reach at all, all paying $297 a month on average between the different subscription levels that you have, you would be making $6,000 a month in passive recurring income.

Number two, you can use the software for your own personal business if you have one. Obviously, I use GoHighLevel in my personal business, and it’s helped me grow from zero SaaS clients to serving over 100 SaaS clients today. Something else that’s awesome very few people know about this.

Less than 1 % of people know about this opportunity to sell your own white-labeled software, and so it is not a saturated industry at all. There are other big software companies, but a lot of them aren’t very niched down. And so if you can come up with the software and serve a specific niche with that software and solve all of their problems, then you will have a much greater product than all these other software companies out there. On top of that, you’ll learn a ton of valuable business and marketing skills.

There are 32.2 million business owners in the United States that you could serve with your software and that are using a worse software than the software that you could be providing for them.

And then, lastly, you can work from anywhere. You can take time off when you want and you’ll still get paid from your clients for their monthly subscriptions.

I hope you guys understand why SMMA SaaS is such a powerful opportunity right now. That’s why so many marketers are switching from their traditional social media marketing agencies to a SaaS agency because GoHighLevel has created a tool for us that we can give to business owners and allow them to succeed and excel in their marketing efforts

What Do I Need To Start SMMA Business?

To start a social media marketing agency, all you need is:

Laptop

Business email

Social media account

And optionally some marketing automation tools that will make your life way easier. I personally recommend GoHighLevel and Ocoya.

This is what you don’t need:

Employee

Office

Registered business

College degree

So, if that’s holding you back, please don’t let it.

Best SMMA Courses

Here are some of the best SMMA courses you can find online:

• SMMA Blueprint
• Agency Incubator by Iman Ghadzi
• 6 Figure Agency by Billy Willson
• 30 Day SMMA
• Marketing Agency Program by Kevin David
• 7 Figure Agency by Joel Kaplan

I highly recommend doing in-depth research before buying any of them because prices reach up to $4,000, so they’re really expensive.

My personal recommendation is free digital marketing training provided by GoHighLevel if you decide to upgrade to any of their pricing plans.

Despite getting access to many digital marketing tools to run your SMMA business, you’ll get access to really great training led by digital marketing experts.

If you’re interested in getting started, GoHighLevel offers a 30-day extended trial for our readers.

Starting SMMA Business Final Words

And that is how to start your social media marketing agency in 2023.

I really hope you guys enjoyed these tactics, strategies, and fundamental concepts in this in-depth SMMA business course.

Did you find this guide helpful?

If you find this valuable, please share it with other like-minded people. I truly appreciate it!

The post SMMA Business: How to Start Your Agency in 2024 appeared first on businessolution.org.

If you’ve never built a website before, it can seem totally overwhelming to have to make this web property to host your entire brand online.

The reality is, though, it can be incredibly straightforward, and you can set it up in almost no time at all. Even if you have no prior experience and no clients to speak of, you still have a lot that you can talk about and many ways to build credibility with your SMMA website.

So, let’s get into it.

Starting with the Basics: Domain and Web Platform

Now let’s talk about what you need in order to build your SMMA website.

Selecting the Right Domain Name

The first thing that you’re going to need is your domain. I’m going to assume that you already have a name for your SMMA business, but if you don’t, this will be the name dot com domain or web property that you point people to visit your website online.

Think agencyname.com, agencyname.co.uk, wherever. It can be anything you want, but we always recommend starting with dot com just because that’s going to be what most people go and type into the web browser.

Logo

The next thing you need is a logo or brand. For your agency, authenticity is key, and a professional logo is an essential part of that.

Canva is a great place where you can actually create logos for free, but typically, free logos lack quality.

I recommend investing in a well-designed logo. You can visit websites like Fiverr.com, where you can order a logo for around $10 – though prices may vary.

You might think a logo isn’t a big deal and consider putting it off, but changing your logo later can have significant implications. It’s best to get it right from the start, especially when it’s so affordable.

Remember, your logo is critical. It will appear on your business cards, handouts, and represent your company everywhere. It’s the most important branding element.

Business Email

Finally, while you’re creating this, you will want to create an email for your business as well. This will not correspond with everyone, and many site builders these days will prompt you to create a Google Workspace address when you start designing your website.

So it’s super easy. You can do it all in one go and you’re ready to rock.

Otherwise, you can go to Google Workspace and it’ll take you through the steps to set it up and map it to the domain that you purchased.

Choosing an SMMA Website Builder

The next thing you will need is a web builder or platform. I guess that most of us aren’t developers who will be coding their websites, but if you are, good for you. So you’ll probably want to set up for a website builder.

There are a ton of different web platforms available today and a lot of drag and drop website editors, but some of my favorites to recommend are:

• GoHighLevel
• ClickFunnels 2.0
• Squarespace

Squarespace is going to be the most professional. They’ve got some of the best-looking design templates out there. They’ve got a lot of different formulas that you can use depending on your style.

It’s a mid-tier price. It’s not the cheapest, it’s not the most expensive. It doesn’t have the best templates. It doesn’t have the worst templates. So it’s a solid middle-of-the-road.

A couple of other great platforms are going to be ClickFunnels 2.0 and GoHighLevel (30 day trial). You probably have heard about these. I personally use GoHighLevel myself, and I definitely recommend them.

GoHighLevel website builder is easy to use, and they have tons of templates for literally every industry, including marketing agencies.

Either of these options will work.

However, if you’re trying to get your agency started for the cheapest dollar amount, they can be overkill when you’re first getting started. If you’re going to be doing general social media management or simple social media services, you might not need to build funnels for your clients right away, even though I recommend that service model.

Clickfunnels and HighLevel are the top SMMA tools you probably have heard about if you’ve been in the agency space for a while.

While they are incredibly powerful, robust, they are by far the most expensive. So if you’re first getting started, they can be a high cost. When you could build your own website, get some agency money in the door, and then use that to reinvest in something like this.

If I had it to do over again, I probably would do the exact same thing that I did, would just start with a cheaper site builder, close a couple of clients, and then reinvest that in ClickFunnels and HighLevel,.

SMMA Website Key Elements

Now we’re going to cover what you should include in your SMMA website

Headline

The first thing that you’re going to want is your SMMA website is a headline. Some call this your hero text. It looks like this.

When we were first getting started, we were working with a lot of small businesses, so our headline was, We help small businesses grow. And that really resonated with small business owners. They saw that at the top, they said, These guys understand us, and they were more inclined to give us their business.

The headline can be anything that you want. However, we do recommend obviously customizing this to talk about your specific niche or the industry that you’re working in. If you’re keeping your agency general, but doesn’t necessarily need to be a specific niche, like in our case, it was general small businesses, but you want to be talking directly to the type of people that you’re reaching out to in the text that you use here.

About Us Page

The next thing you will want is something that talks about your agency where you talk about your expertise.

So, I would go ahead and talk about your specific experience and your specific agency.

Services Page

Another key piece that you’re going to want is your services page.

If you’re looking for more information on what services to provide, I have a guide on best SMMA services where I cover what agency services I recommend that you provide with your SMMA.

Contact Page

Something you will want to definitely have is a way for businesses to contact you. In the case of this funnel, I created what’s called a calendar booking link.

When you click the button, it pulls up a calendar on which your prospects can go ahead and just book an appointment outright.

They can select a time, pick what works for them, and then go ahead and confirm that booking.

Call to Action

Finally, the last thing you will want to include is a call to action. In the case of this website, it’s this button, “Let’s Talk,” that opens the pop-up and tells them that it’s time to book a call.

Totally optional, but you can also include a contact form as well, where they can fill out their name, email their company name, and whatever notes they have or why they’re inquiring.

But we found that it actually increases conversion a little bit if we just give them the calendar link right there, and they can shortcut the whole email exchange of trying to figure out a time.

Again, totally up to you and how you want to do things with your business. So that’s all that you need to include in your website to get started, be off to the races, and start chasing down clients.

The Importance of a Website in SMMA

Does my agency need a website? I see this asked all the time. And the reality is that as easy as it is to create websites these days, there’s really no reason why your agency shouldn’t have a website. There are site builders that range from $5 per month up to $300 per month, all of which can do the purposes of getting your agency launched and off the ground.

Website as a Professional Front for SMMA

The biggest thing that you’re going to gain from your SMMA website, first of all, is going to be confidence.

When you interact with business owners, whether online, through email, or in person, they will likely research your agency. They won’t simply take your word for it; they’ll look for evidence of your legitimacy. This is where your website plays a crucial role. It acts as a digital business card, providing proof of your existence and professionalism.

You’re going to have confidence in the fact that you have a real brand, that you have a place where your agency lives online and where you can send people when you’re out networking, when you’re reading them in person when you might be calling them on the phone, especially if you’re doing any cold email outreach or DM outreach of any kind. One of the first places that they’re going to go is your website.

Lead Generation

This is also a place where you can send people once you start spending money on ads, and they can actually fill out the form and book appointments outright with your agency without you ever even having to talk to them.

Your website can help you get SMMA your clients. In fact, this is how we get most of our clients today. A lot of our clients are actually inbound. We don’t do a lot of anymore just because we built such a name for ourselves and our niche.

People are giving each other our name all the time and there is booking directly through a calendar link on our website. It eliminates a lot of friction and I’m glad that we have it set up that way.

Why a Facebook Page Isn’t Enough

One question I see fairly frequently is can I just use my agency Facebook page? I definitely wouldn’t recommend it. Facebook is always changing the layout and everything, and it’s tough for people to find information.

Additionally, it’s just not the same as a regular website. This is something you can build in a couple of hours at the most, including designing your own logo, and I definitely recommend going that route and just calling it done.

The post SMMA Website: The Ultimate Guide for 2024 appeared first on businessolution.org.

First of all, we will be talking about the importance of a script and whether you need it.

Let’s get started.

The Importance of a Cold Calling Script

Cold-calling script is the biggie. Getting this script right is the secret to getting your first SMMA client. It’s the key, it’s the fundamental, it’s core to success in cold calling for SMMA businesses.

Cold calling has been around for years and years and years. It’s the OG of outreach. These days, it really wants to be used as part of a multi-platform strategy. You want to use cold calling as one of your outreach strategies in your bigger-picture sales process.

Script or No Script: Addressing Common Concerns

One of the most common questions people ask is:

• Do I need a script, or do I not need a script?
• Is it going to make me robotic?
• Is it going to make you sound like a salesperson?
• Am I going to have to hold it in front of me?

The misconception that you need to get out of your mind, the common conception that people have about call scripts, is that it’s this physical piece of paper that they’re going to be holding in front of them. That’s not what I want you to do at all.

I want you to memorize this script. I don’t want you to be holding this piece of paper, reading from it. I want you to treat it as if it was a monolog in drama in high school. We’ve all done their monologs and drama. You learn that script.

Once you actually learn it and internalize it, you can truly master the tonality because that’s when you understand why you’re saying what you’re saying and not just what you’re saying on a piece of paper.

That is when you separate yourself from the other agency owners who sound robotic and salesy and struggle to close.

What really separates good salespeople from average salespeople is their sales script and the ability to master their tonality and the way they execute their script.

We’re not going to call it a script. It’s the structure. It’s the framework. It’s the blueprint.

5 Key Elements of a Cold Calling Script

Here are the five things that you want to include in your cold calling script.

1. Diffuse Initial Resistance

The biggest mistake that I see in so many sales scripts is when I see someone say,

“Hey, how are you doing?”

“Hey, how’s your day going?”

This fake rapport building. You don’t care how their day is. You don’t care what they’re up to or how they’re doing. You don’t know the person you’re calling. They don’t care.

If you care about that, it’s just this fake facade of niceness. It just doesn’t work. It doesn’t wash because every salesperson thinks that they should say that to build rapport. However, it’s not building genuine rapport at all.

You’re saying it to absolutely everybody. Hey, how are you doing? It’s just a false conversation, and it doesn’t need to be in there. In fact, the best thing for you to do is diffuse them on the thing they’re worried about the most, and that’s you wasting their time.

They do not want their time wasted. They get pitched all the time. If you’re doing business to business, these people you’re calling up, they are getting pitched day in, day out.

That’s one of the things you need to recognize. How can I separate myself from everybody else, which is calling that person up?

So diffuse them right away and diffuse them on time. You could say,

“Hey, John, I know you’re busy, so I’ll be quick.”

“Hey, John, have I caught you in the middle of something?”

You can ask that question. You could almost be a little bit of a role reversal because no normal salesperson would ask somebody, Have I caught you in the middle of something? They can then potentially give you an objection. Actually, it works the other way around. It then proves that you have respect for them, and therefore, they’re going to trust you a lot more and be more inclined to give you their time.

Because you should be grateful for the time of someone that you don’t know. Make sure you diffuse them right away. You don’t bother about that fake small talk.

2. Craft a Concise and Impactful Introduction

We want to say who we are, where we’re from, and what our company actually does. Keep it this really short, no waffle. This is the whole theme of how your cold calling script should be in this day and age.

Gone are the days of these A4 pieces of paper, this long script where you could get away with pitching someone over the phone for about five minutes without them saying anything. It doesn’t work.

You need to make sure you’re not waffling, you get straight to the point, and you respect the person you’re speaking to.

You can say something like,

“My name is [Your Name]. I’m the managing director of the [Your Agency], and I help restaurants get more clients per month using social media ads.”

You could say something that is relevant to your service. But make sure it is relevant to you, who you are, where you’re from, and exactly what you do in just one sentence. It doesn’t need to be longer than that.

3. Personalize the ‘Why’ of Your Call

When they’re going to say what is the reason we called, this is where we want to introduce some personal touch. We want to say something that says to that person that we have only called up them, that they’re not just one part of some big Excel spreadsheet.

What information can we dig up on them?

Can we say something that’s relevant?

Basically, you want to highlight something unique to them.

As a marketing agency, I could say something like, “I was on your Facebook profile earlier, and I noticed the range you brought out recently. How’s that going?”

You could ask them a question about their product or their service, something unique to them.

 Just build some rapport. This is your chance to build rapport with the business owner.

You’re telling them why this is what you’re actually called, but you could drop something in there to let them know, like a little bit of tangent conversation to let them know that you’ve actually done your research on them.

Or you could just say something which is unique to them:

“Hey, I saw you’re running some ads at the moment. I’ve seen that retargeting ad. That’s a really nice copy you’ve got going on there. But actually [You can tell them what it is you can do to improve on that for them.]”

This is my tip. Give them a compliment on something unique to them, personal to them, and then you can serve them up the fact that you can improve it. You don’t want to go straight in.

The big mistake people are making is to go straight in, all guns blazing; you’re doing something wrong.

We’re just going to put them on the back foot. They’re going to feel attacked. You need to make sure if you are going to deliver criticism to somebody, you deliver it with a compliment as well.

You make them feel good, then give them some criticism, and then at the end of the call, you will make them feel good again.

You’re going to offer them something that they really want. That is your why. Why is it you’re actually calling and how can you make this unique to them. What can you add there in your sales pitch, something unique about them that makes them feel personal, like you personally outreach them.

Qualification: Identifying Suitable Clients

Now, at this point, we can ask them a question to qualify whether they are suitable for our service. For example, if we are a marketing agent, so if we could ask them:

• What is your current marketing strategy?
• Have you run ads before?
• Have you used Facebook ads before?

And you’re asking them a question to pre-qualify whether they are actually a suitable client for you.

You’re going to make them think about whether they want your product or your service before you’ve even offered it to them. A

s I said, you don’t always need to do this. There will be instances when you already know that this person is qualified. They’re already really keen.

You think that the conversation is going well, and you’re pretty sure that you can get out of them what you want to get out of them. The majority of the time in SMMA, it’s going to be getting some a meeting with them, some a follow-up call, so you can actually close them.

I wouldn’t recommend you selling on a cold call if you have a B2B client. People need warming up. You want to arrange some a meeting with them.

But on the flip side, that person is a bit standoffish. They don’t really sound interested. When they answer the phone, they sound like what? You might want to dig deeper.

You might want to try and get some conversation out of them, build some rapport with them, and ask them a question about their business, about whether they are doing something that you provide for them already.

Ask them a question that makes them think about your service before you actually deliver it to them on the actual call.

Defining the ‘What’: Your Call to Action

What do we actually want? We could transition to the what just by saying something like,

“The reason for my call is I want to see if you’ve got 10-15 minutes over the next couple of days or so I can share some ideas with you. I can talk you through this. I can talk through how this works. I can see whether we’re a good fit for each other.”

That’s a good one to say. I can see whether we’re a good fit for each other. That’s a nice bit of psychology in there. The key to why that actually works, and I’ve used this in many sales scripts before, is you’re almost de-qualifying somebody.

You’re almost saying you might not be the person we want to work with. One thing we’ve introduced into our cold call pitches is something like:

“I’m only looking to take on one or two new clients this month,” or

“We only have the capacity to take on one new e-commerce client this month.”

To them, it’s like, I want to be that person.

You create that scarcity and that desire. Scarcity in marketing is a technique that makes people want to buy from you.

You can introduce that into your script somewhere by saying to them, by de-qualifying them. You’ve got either a qualification or a de-qualification, something like that:

“We’re only looking to take on 1 or 2 new clients this month. But I want to see over the next couple of days if you’re free for 10-15 minutes so we can see whether we’re a good fit for each other.”

In which case, they’re going to be like, Well, yeah, obviously, I’m a good fit for this company. What do you mean? Why wouldn’t I be a good fit? Let’s have this call, and let’s see if I am.

It’s that reverse psychology, and it works really, really well.

So what do we actually want from this call? Do we want to sell them our service? Do we want to have a meeting with them?

Then you go ahead and actually arrange all the technicalities.

Handling Objections in Cold Calling: Turning ‘No’ into ‘Yes’

Now, the majority of the time, these calls aren’t going to go the way you want them. That’s just the way it is. That’s just sales. You don’t always get a plain sailing yes without any hiccups. You’re going to get some objection. This is a numbers game.

But an objection is not a rejection. It’s just a request for more information. Remember that. Any good salesperson will push back on an objection.

The majority of the meetings we have at our marketing agency is when we push back on some request for more information.

For example, if somebody says to us, “Well, I don’t have the time,” This is a really common one.

Your answer to this objection could be like:

“So when are you going to have the time to increase your sales? When are you going to have the time to increase your client base? I thought you just told me you want to expand your business. When are you going to have the time to do that?”

“Okay, so you don’t have the time now. That’s fine. What about tomorrow? What about next week?”

And that’s just one objection that you can get. Another objection is: “I’m not interested.”

You answer could be like:

“Okay, fine. I presume you’re making a lot of money from Facebook ads at the moment. If not, why would you not be interested in making more money from a new source? I just want to share 15 minutes with you over the next couple of days. What have you got to lose?”

The question of “what have you got to lose?” is super powerful. They haven’t got anything to lose. You’d just overcome these objections.

How to Prepare for Objections?

The best thing to do to prepare for objections in cold calling is to write down every possible objection that you could get or over 100 cold calls. Just write down every objection that you’re getting and then write down an answer next to that.

Over time, you’re going to master objections. Just like with SMMA email outreach, the secret is in the follow-up that the success is in the follow-up. It’s not in the initial outreach. It’s the exact same for cold calling, where the success is in the objection handling.

You don’t get it the first time. And if you give up on the first hurdle, you don’t deserve the sale or the meeting in the first place. You need to push back again and again and again and again until that person doesn’t want you on the phone anymore.

Because you don’t want to just burn a lead with an objection if there’s just a request for more information, a really simple, easy request, but more information that you could have given them.

Make sure you always, always, always push back on objections.

How to Get Better at Cold Calling

Now, once you’ve actually written out your script and you’ve internalized it, you’ve learned it, I’ve got a huge tip for you. This is a massive one. This will help me improve my sales adequately more than anything else. That was recording my cold calls. You can easily do that with a cold calling software like JustCall or GoHighLevel (30 day free trial)

Record your cold calls over a period of 7-14 days, judge them, and critique them.

Even better, have other people critique them. Judge the way that you are pronouncing and delivering every single word, every single sentence, and play with it over time and continue recording it.

Over a period of a month or two months, you’re really going to master your own script because you’re going to be able to listen to it subjectively.

When you’re saying things, you’re not actually hearing what the other person is hearing. You’re only hearing what you’re saying in your own voice, and you’re actually thinking about what you’re going to say next. You’re not actually paying attention to what’s really coming out of your mouth.

The only way to truly judge that is by recording yourself. It’s super uncomfortable, but it’s where you’re going to see the most growth in your sales delivery.

I hope it gives you enough to go on to create your cold calling script. I hope you’ve got a ton of value from this.

The post SMMA Cold Calling: The Ultimate Guide in 2024 appeared first on businessolution.org.

Today, we’re going to be talking about the SMMA cold email outreach method. If every single one of our social media marketing agency or SMMA clients fired us tomorrow, I would spend no minutes panicking. Why? Because I know exactly where I would go and get the leads, the clients, and the invoices paid to rebuild our agency from scratch, even if that happened tomorrow.

The best part about the email outreach method is that it’s actually crazy simple. You can start doing it basically immediately, and it’s almost free to get started with it.

Here’s how cold email works. Put simply, you’re going to find contacts in your niche, send them emails, follow up on those emails via email, and receive responses that turn into meetings; they turn into deals and, ultimately, money in your bank account.

So, let’s get into it.

SMMA Cold Email Outreach Strategies: Manual to Automated

Before we start the cold email outreach, let’s first talk about outreach strategies.

There are three main ways to go about emailing those contacts.

1. Manual Outreach

Number one is you manually email them one by one. This is free, easy, and you can start right now. This is what I did first. I literally would Google our niche, such as fitness studios, local to my city; I passed through Google local search, find businesses, email them one by one.

2. Mail Merge

Then, over time, I got a little bit smarter. I discovered something called a Google Mail Merge. In short, you can either do this directly through Microsoft Excel and Outlook, or you can do it with Google Sheets and Gmail.

If you choose the Google Doc option, check out yet another Mailmerge or GMAS. They’re great platforms that natively email all the contacts on your list through your G Suite account.

With one click, you can email hundreds and thousands of people all at once. You can customize it with different data points called merge fields, hence the name Mailmerge, that customize and personalize email based on who you’re emailing.

It could either first name, last name, company name, the city in which they live, or that you live in.

Once I discovered this, all of a sudden, I could do a very high volume of emails at once.

Doing a mail merge is a great starting point and it’s a lot faster and more efficient than manually emailing everybody, but it lacks one key piece: follow-up.

Follow-up is essential. It’s really where all of your deals are going to come from, whether that’s your email follow-up, whether that’s your deal follow-up. That brings us to the next point.

3. Automated Cold Email Outreach

What we’re looking for here is a platform that actually helps us automate all of our cold email outreach. These days, our team actually manages these platforms for us, and it’s super easy to train people on how to do this, which makes it super scalable.

Basically, all you need to do with these platforms is import your list, create a little touch point sequence, and it’s going to have a full-blown follow-up going on without even having to be involved at all.

Identifying and Acquiring Quality Leads

All cold email outreach campaigns start with lead generation. So the first thing we need to do is to figure out a place where you should get leads. A few good places are Apollo.io, LeadFuze, and Google Local Search, believe it or not.

Now, I’ll show you how to generate leads with Apollo.io. Here is what this search could look like.

Let’s say we are searching for agencies, and then we can filter companies in the size of, let’s say, 10 to 20 people.

Then we want to target agencies in the United States and narrow it down to, for instance, just marketing and advertising agencies.

And as you can see below, we have over 300k leads we can reach out to.

It’s also important to narrow this search even further because we can’t target all of them.

For example,  we can target the CEOs, founders, co-founders, etc. Now, I’ve got a total list of 4.4K, which is a lot of leads you can reach out to.

And then, you can save this lead list and export it as a CSV because you’ll need it for an email outreach.

Then you’re going to choose a platform or method I’ll talk about in just a moment on how to sequence them and get in touch with the people who have those email addresses.

Setting Up SMMA Automated Cold Email Outreach Campaign

Once you download this file as a CSV, you can import it to your favorite email automation software and start your outreach.

Here you have tools like:

• Instantly.ai
• Hunter.io
• Reply.io
• Woodpecker

I personally use Instantly.ai because it’s super easy to use compared to other cold email outreach tools out there.

All you do is import the contact list that you generated in the previous step.

Next is the copy you can put in with the variable that you’ve imported from the lead list, like for the first name.

Then, you can put in the variable first liner. When your offer comes into play with the risk reversal and then maybe a Calendly link, this could somehow be the structure of your email outreach.

You can pick guidelines for business hours in which they should go out, exactly what time of day you want them to be sent, how many emails should be going out per hour, you name it, you can completely customize it.

So, this is how to set up an SMMA email cold outreach campaign.

SMMA Cold Email Outreach Script Template

Now, I’m going to talk about some free cold email script templates that will help you get SMMA clients.

“Hi [Name] with [Your Company]. I came across your website and noticed that [Add a brief note or a hole in their strategy: not running ads, the issue with their site, lack of social media [presence, etc.]

Many attorneys I speak with have been focused on three key areas for business growth in [Insert the year] – referrals, SEO/Google search, and video content. Has this been an area of focus for your practice as well?

Best,

[Your Name] [Your Company].”

So here what you can do is look them up on Facebook ad Library and see if they are running ads, Google their business, maybe go onto their website, find some kind of hole in their game that you can add here to see how we’re speaking to them and actually talking about how this can benefit them.

You don’t want to be saying we do this, we do that. So right away, we’re addressing that, so put one brief hole in their strategy, and then you could just leave it at that see if they respond. If they do not respond, you can follow up with them in about 48 hours and say

Here’s what an example follow-up email could look like:

“Hey,

The reason why I’m asking is that I own a marketing agency specializing in sustainable growth for the legal space. We’ve seen large conversions and first-time customers come through search and social selling.  [If you have any case studies or any numbers, this would be a great opportunity to include them here; if not, move to the CTA].

If predictable net new revenue is a focus for you and your team, we should connect. Let me know if you have a window this week or next, and I’m happy to share further insights.

Best,

[Your Name] [Your Company].”

Now, as you can see, we’re talking about ourselves. We weren’t doing that in the first message. We were trying to establish curiosity and elicit a simple response. Many times, you will get a response from that first message, but if you don’t, you’ll want to continue following up with them.

Also, notice how we talked about how it could benefit them, and then we had a call to action: ‘Let me know if you have a window this week or next, and I’m happy to share further insights. We should connect; we should set up a call,’ or whatever verbiage you want to use. This is how you get messages to convert.

Understanding the Timeline of Emails

Now, let’s go ahead and review the timeline. Most of your meetings are going to come from follow up emails. This is a mistake that I see all the time made by agency owners.

They think they send one email, they don’t hear back, and that means that the prospect’s not interested. Actually, that prospect is probably just busy.

They probably saw your email, may have been interested, and never got back to you. So you want to make sure that you’re following up with them.

Effective Email Cadence for Maximizing Responses

And this is the cadence that we use.

1. Day 1 – Email 1
2. Day 4 – Email 2
3. Day 9 – Email 3

This is a totally respectful cadence that is not going to cause a lot of friction, and it’s going to increase the amount of replies that you receive. Probably about 90 % of your replies are going to come from emails two and emails three.

You might get a couple of quick hits off email one, but most of them are going to thank you for following up and then reply to one of your later emails.

Cold Email Outreach Best Practices

Now, let’s review some guidelines and rules that we can follow when it comes to cold email.

Keep it Short

The first thing that can make or break a cold email is you want to keep it short. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen agency owners write out long paragraphs where they want to talk about everything that they can do to help, the extensive audit that they did, how amazing they are, how much the business needs their help, what they can do, and so on and so on and so on.

So you want to keep things short, punchy, and to the point. If you’ve never worked in business before, your first corporate job can actually be a little bit shocking when people send you sometimes three-word emails, or sometimes they don’t even have a body for the email; it’s just a subject line.

This type of candor and this type of dialog happens in the business world all the time. So think about how it’s perceived when you send over an essay in a cold email. So keep it short, keep it to the point.

Keep it Clear

The next thing is it needs to be clear. You want to clearly state:

• Why it is reaching out to them,
• How you can help them, and
• What the next step is if they’re interested 

Take a surgical approach to any other words that are in your email that can be removed.

This is actually one of the key pieces that I look at when I’m doing revisions on my cold emails: how can we make it shorter.

Convey Expertise

The next thing that you want to make sure that you include is conveying some expertise or knowledge in the niche. It doesn’t need to be specific to their niche.

So a lot of you, I’m sure, probably don’t have case studies yet. You’re just getting started. But there are a million ways to convey authority without needing to name all the clients you’re working with.

If you talk about the fact that you specifically focus on helping fitness owners and you’re targeting a fitness owner, it’s 100 % fine to say that without saying that you’ve worked with a ton of fitness owners.

See what accomplishes the same goal while still remaining truthful.

Have Time Sensitivity

The next thing that you want to have is some time sensitivity. You can have a call to action:

• I can get you more clients before the end of the year
• I can get you more clients before the end of the month
• We can book out your business before the New Year starts

There’s all these different ways that we can have some urgency. Where the recipient sees that, and thinks, Hey, I should get started to respond to this today. There’s some time box around this. Otherwise, it’s totally open ended.

Include a Call to Action

You definitely want to make sure that you include a call to action of some kind.

What action do you want the person to take?

Do you want them to just read the email and move on with their life?

Or would you like them to read the email, reply to you at some times that would work well for a meeting?

Or would you like them to read the email and get back to you and answer some questions that you have to qualify them as a potential lead for your agency?

You always want to make sure that you have a call to action.

The Power of Persistence: Securing Replies through Follow-Up

As I mentioned earlier, almost all the money you will end up putting in your bank account will come from your follow-up emails. What I mean by that is most of the meetings you’re going to have will come from follow-ups, and then you’re going to have those meetings. Those are going to turn into your booked opportunities.

It will be in that revenue or the dollars you will put in your pocket. So, if you want to put dollars in your pocket, make sure you’re following up on your emails.

Setting Daily Email Goals for Consistent Outreach

A huge rule that I like to follow is to always set a daily goal for the number of emails going out. This is especially true for young, aspiring agency owners.

I’ve seen a ton of agency owners get started with their agency and they feel like they’re sending 50, but they aren’t keeping a tally, they aren’t actually tracking it, and they end up sending 15, 20, 25.

That means that they’re only sending 50 % of their attention and they’re only seeing 50 % of the results. So always set that goal, track it, and make sure you hit it every day.

Ramping Up Email Volume Responsibly

You’re definitely going to want to make sure that you ramp up your email slowly. This isn’t a key issue if you’re manually sending your emails, but if you’re using any automated email service, you’re definitely going to make sure that you start things slow and ramp them up.

Email servers are smart these days, and they know to look out for bots and spam. So the best way to make sure you don’t get caught doing that is to ramp it up slowly, adding 10 or so emails every day for a couple of weeks. Pretty soon, you’ll be ramped up. You can be sending hundreds of emails a day, no problem.

Ensuring Email Deliverability and Avoiding Spam Filters

Another thing that you want to do, especially if you’re sending a high volume of emails, is always verify your emails before sending them. There’s a really inexpensive service called Mailercheck where you can take a large email list, import it into there, and for a couple of dollars, it’ll make sure that all the emails on the list are verified for delivery.

This means they won’t bounce; they won’t return to sender, any of that stuff that can cause spam issues and end up having your email be blacklisted.

If you’re sending your emails manually, this really isn’t as much of an issue just because you’re sending your emails manually; you won’t have as high of a volume, but still keep an eye on it.

Personalization vs. Efficiency: Balancing for Agency Growth

The last tip that I’ve got for you guys is when it comes to scaling your agency. Early on, make focus on personalizing your emails. Take these scripts, customize them, and make them even more personal.

Add in some things that you notice about their Facebook page, their Instagram account, or areas that they could improve.

Spend a little bit more time when you’re first getting started. As you close your first couple of clients, then you can focus on increasing throughput increasing efficiency, and you won’t need to personalize as much.

But in the beginning, think low volume high personalization. As you start scaling your agency, think high volume lower personalization.

Why Cold Email Works for SMMA Agency Owners

Now, let’s talk about why cold email works.

1. Building Confidence and Preparing for Discovery Calls

First of all, especially for new agency owners, gets even the most inexperienced agency owner in front of your leads.

Because it’s in a written format, you can put a lot of thought into formatting the email and what exactly it is you want to say.

Versus a live conversation where you might not be super confident and you might fumble over your words a little bit just like I did the first time I was cold calling for our social media marketing agency.

You avoid all of that with an email, and you can have a succinct airtight pitch in written form directly in front of your lead. That way, they can reply to you.

Now you know that they’re interested, you got a little bit of confidence and you can get prepared for your discovery call to find out a little bit more about the needs that they have for their business.

2. Reaching Prospects Where They Are

The second reason is it meets prospects where they are at. Every person on the planet has email, and email is where business is done. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. You email enough of them, you’re going to start getting responses and good things are going to start happening for your business.

3. Crafting Empathetic Messages for Better Engagement

The next reason is because you can actually spend time thinking about what you’re saying, it’s very easy for you to craft messages that lead with empathy. When you craft messages that lead with empathy, it means that you’re understanding the challenges that those business owners might be facing and you’re putting it into terms that they can understand and how you can help them.

It moves it from a sales-y type outreach to an inbound type outreach where people actually want to sign up and do business with you.

4. Scaling Outreach for Increased Success

The fourth and potentially the most important thing is that it’s just easy to hit insane numbers of outreaches, which is going to increase your chances of finding success. Any sales effort is a numbers game and the more people you contact, the more chance of results you have, and the more money you’re going to end up putting in your bank account long term.

The best part is that’s just one email address. You can create more email addresses, you can buy more domains where you set up even more email addresses, and you can really scale this thing to tens of thousands of emails going up per day if you want.

Cold Email vs. Cold Calling: A Comparison

Why do we choose cold email over other SMMA outreach methods like cold calling? It’s just going to be a lot easier for you, especially as a new agency owner, to start landing your first couple of meetings through cold email than it is through cold calling.

For a new, inexperienced agency owner who has never really handled rejection in that way before, cold calling can be rough, and cold emailing just eliminates a lot of that friction.

When is Cold Calling Better?

However, once you get some experience and confidence in yourself, there’s a sweet spot where cold calling can be super effective. There’s just really no better way to convert people to that next meeting than SMMA cold calling, where you have the opportunity to handle objection live on the phone.

The problem is after you start having some success, you start getting really busy and it becomes difficult again to find time to make those phone calls. You might find yourself again flipping back over to cold email just because of the time savings and how quickly it is to email thousands of people at once.

Cold Email vs. Cold DMs: Adapting to Changing Platforms

Let’s talk about cold email versus some cold DMs or messaging people through Facebook Messenger or Instagram message. Cold DMing worked really, really well for a while, but become less and less effective over time.

The reality is every time that you go and you log in to Instagram or Facebook Messenger, I feel like the interface has completely changed.

It might work one day, it might not work so well the next. In the last year or so, we basically saw Instagram go from everybody being able to DM everybody to all of a sudden having a primary and a general inbox. And then all of a sudden a lot of those that were going in the general actually went into message requests.

Email, on the other hand, as long as you actually are not showing up in spam, you’re going to be inboxing. You’re going to be showing up in that conversation.

The post SMMA Cold Email Outreach: The Ultimate Guide in 2024 appeared first on businessolution.org.

If you’ve just launched an agency and you’re following one outreach strategy, you’re undoubtedly missing out on hundreds of potential customers.

So today, I’ll show you the multiple SMMA outreach strategies you can use to get the most out of every single lead on your list.

1. Cold Email

Cold emailing is an age-old outreach strategy that so many businesses use from all corners of the world. Cold calling consists of 2 parts: lead scraping and outreach.

Lead scraping means that you go to a website or a tool, and it’s able to scrape name, phone, email, and business name of people inside of a specific niche.

If you’re looking for the best softwares for local business lead generation, it’s going to be:

• MeetAlfred
• LeadFuze
• Apollo

Once you get all of that information, then you can plug it into one of these outreach methods and have a ton of scale that way because you’re able to reach out to, let’s say, 500 people a day instead of trying to cold call 20 people a day.

The Importance of Personalization in Cold Emails

Cold emailing can be extremely effective. In fact, it is currently the number one most effective cold outreach strategy we’re using in our agency. But there are a few reasons why I don’t think it would be the most effective strategy for new start-up agencies.

The key to successful emails is personalization. Gone are the days when you could get a list of thousands of potential customers and just copy and paste an email, merging it out to everybody. That used to work, believe me, because I used to do it and I was able to get customers from a completely copied and pasted email script.

But these days, it just doesn’t work at all. People don’t like feeling like a number; they don’t like receiving spammy emails in their inbox.

They are wise to it, so we have to personalize every single email that we send out. We have to add a line of personalization at the start of the email, mention a blog article on their website, one of their products, or their stance on a world affair that they’ve mentioned on their website.

Just say something that shows you have done your due diligence, that you have done your research, and earned the privilege for a response. You cannot expect somebody to invest their time in responding to you if you’re not even going to invest the time into researching their business.

Now, we’re having an incredible amount of success with email outreach at the moment. We have two full-time team members whose dedicated role is to send emails and DMs to potential customers. These emails are always hyper-personalized.

But we can still automate this process using tools like Instantly.ai. We can build a big list to send out in a merge and add our personalizations to that list.

If you want to learn more about this SMMA outreach method, I’ve put together a super in-depth guide on SMMA email outreach.

2. Text Messages: SMS, WhatsApp & iMessage

The great thing about lead scraping is that once we’ve scraped a list and we have their name, email, and phone, why would we email them if we can just send them a text?

There are three ways to do this:

• SMS
• WhatsApp
• iMessage

So for SMS, you’ll send text or software like GoHighLevel (30 day trial).

And for iMessage, there’s an app called Reach, which you can just automate messages coming from that app.

And the really cool thing about iMessage is obviously that it shows up as a blue bubble for people with iPhones, and so it seems way more legit.

And for those of you who may be worried about the SMS legal laws and regulations, this is not legal advice. However, pretty much all of the lawsuits around this have been targeted at businesses sending messages to consumers. So B2C, not B2B, which is what you would be doing.

Secondly, in the worst-case scenario, if this actually gets a huge crackdown and you’re getting fined for sending text out from GoHighLevel, you could just hire somebody to go into GoHighLevel and send the text manually for you.

I feel like government has bigger fish to fry than you sending out 500 text messages. However, I will say that SMS is getting a little bit more regulated. However, most of those things aren’t necessary for your first campaign, and you can still get clients this way very easily.

But overall. sending out messages that people literally get on their phones right next to the messages that they get from their wives is unreal. It’s almost unbeatable, in my opinion.

3. Cold Calling

Cold calling is still one of the best ways to get SMMA clients for agencies on any level.

The problem with this outreach method is that it’s literally just manual labor, and it doesn’t build on itself at all. When you cold call someone, they’re not going to remember who you are or your name.

They’re not going to think to call you when they need an advertiser or a marketer. You’re literally just an annoyance in their life. And to get anyone to listen nowadays, you have to have a ton of tricks up your sleeve, some crazy offer. You have to speak very quickly, very confidently.

But it’s not to say that it doesn’t work. I just think it’s a tough SMMA outreach method.

And if you want to know how to do it the right way, check out this guide on SMMA cold calling, where I break down the entire script.

4. Cold Walk-Ins

Now, this one is a little bit bolder, and it’s a lot harder to get ignored, so it’s a better option than cold calling. That said, there’s absolutely no leverage as well.

In fact, there’s less leverage than cold calling because you have to actually physically move your body, and you’re going to run out of local businesses very quick.

You’re going to have to drive a lot of places, etc. But it can be good to build your confidence, just actually interface with local business owners and just get out of your head, which a lot of us get stuck there when we’re just at a computer all day.

5. Facebook Messenger

This one is beloved to me, and it’s because this is the strategy that got me my first SMMA client.

There are three huge benefits of Facebook Messenger outreach.

First of all, you can cold message people on Facebook, and you can actually automate this. There are software like Friend Connector Pro that actually just allows you to automate friending and sending messages.

Secondly, you can cold call. Now, this is a pretty crazy strategy but if you’ve friended somebody and message them in the past and perhaps they haven’t gotten back to you, you can literally just click the call button on Messenger and it will call them and your face will come up.

Then third, people can reach out to you when they see that you’re posting good stuff on your profile. We’ll go a little more in-depth on how to do that later. But I love Messenger. I think it’s amazing. The delivery rates are awesome.

Yes, you have the potential to get banned. Don’t be stupid about it, but it can have a lot of success.

6. Cold Voicemail

With cold voicemail, all you do is record a voicemail of yourself saying something like,

“Hello, this is [Your Name]. I help concrete lifting companies get more clients. Would you like to discuss this? Go ahead and give me a callback if that’s good.”

Then you just upload that and send it out as a voicemail drop to 500, 1,000 phone numbers.

There’s no legal regulations around this. It’s just like cold calling, so it’s pretty cool. I’m not personally that interested in people just calling me back. And I think voicemails get checked way less than phones, etc.

7. Cold Loom Outreach

Cold loom outreach is all about sending pre-recorded Loom videos pitching your services. Like with any other SMMA outreach method, not everyone will be interested.

Maybe 10 out of 100 will be like, Wow, this is very cool. I can’t believe they recorded this video for me. We should get in touch with them.

But the problem is you have to record a loom video for 100 people, whereas you could text them and get that one out of 100 to text you back and then make a Loom video for them without wasting all the time on the other people.

Now, what you could do is record a generic video and then record a unique 30 seconds for the specific business that you’re sending something to.

8. LinkedIn Cold Outreach

The thing with LinkedIn is that everybody is just pitching everyone. It’s super fake, but that makes it perfect for prospecting because people are already in this mindset.

People are on LinkedIn to transact business. If you get in front of them while they’re in that mindset, it’s pretty powerful.

If you want a really good way to automate LinkedIn outreach, MeetAlfred is a great software to do so.

It has the most automation capabilities and built-in stuff that allows you to prospect. People end up being reasonably easy to find here.

9. Instagram Cold Outreach

For this, I’m going to say it totally, totally depends on the niche. If you’re going to do Instagram, you should easily be able to find the pages and then outsource the outreach to a virtual assistant who can do it for you, or use a bot like Axiom.ai that can go through and message people inside of that niche.

Now, for some hashtags or niches, this can be very difficult. However, I have a friend absolutely crushing it in real estate in this niche because almost every single realtor has an Instagram.

They check it regularly, and they’re quite easy to find there. It’s easy to outsource. What my friend does is he has a few virtual assistants that he hires. He creates fake pages, and then he messages real estate agents, and his profile looks like a real estate agent, so they end up connecting with them, and then they nurture that into a phone call.

10. Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are hands down one of the best ways besides texting to get clients. Free niche groups. Do I need to say more? There are literally thousands of people inside of groups, inside Facebook, that belong to the specific niche that you’re trying to target.

They’re active and they spend time on there every single day. The reason this one is so awesome is that you can do one input and get massive amounts of output. This is what you do.

Go to Facebook and find the groups with your niche. First of all, get familiar. Don’t post something right away. Just start commenting, reading what other people are talking about, and getting a feel for the niche in general.

As you’re doing this, start posting some valuable stuff to your personal Facebook page: marketing tips, how to grow in a specific niche, etc, just basic stuff that helps people out.

Then you’re going to go in the group, and you’re going to start posting polls, stuff like:

• What’s the biggest problem you have in your business?
• What have you tried for marketing in the past?
• Who’s having the most success with X project and landscaping?

And then see all of the comments trickle in.

There are some massively successful and active Facebook groups where you get tons of comments right away. And then, lastly, depending on where you’re at in your journey, you just start posting precious stuff in that group. It could be like.

“Hey, I worked with this client. These are the things we did. These were the results.”

Just post a case study. You’re going to get tons of people reaching out to you from that. Here’s an example of one that I posted and I got a client from. Then, you can take some of the value posts you’ve put on your personal page and just put them in the group. If the group has really strict rules, just interact, friend people, comment. Then eventually, they’ll start to see your personal posts once your friends and you’ve talked to them on Messenger a little bit, and then they’ll ask you questions.

11. YouTube

This isn’t really an outreach strategy, but it’s one of the best ways to get your first SMMA client.

I wanted to put it in here because many people are just stuck on this treadmill of outreach. When really they should be thinking of, how do I get people to reach out to me. That’s how I grew my agency and they reached out to me. I wasn’t begging them to become my client; they already trusted me.

Once this gets going, it’s amazing. There’s almost nothing as good as YouTube at booking appointments, building your brand, etc, but it does take a long time.

It’s very good, but it’s a very long-term thing. If you’re just starting out, it’s probably not the best thing to focus on.

12. UpWork

Upwork is a freelance platform where you can sign up as a freelancer. And the great thing about this is all the people that you would be reaching out to, you know are looking for the services that you have because they posted a job post about it, and you’ll be applying to that job post.

Now, the drawback is there’s also probably 8 to 10 other people will apply for the same post as you. However, it’s not that hard to stand out if you know what to do. Make a personalized Loom video or the person going over their business being like,

“Hey, I think I can help you with this and this service.”

And then just bid whatever they set the project at; if it’s $25 an hour, bid at $25 an hour.

Then you get on the phone with them and build some rapport. You help them realize

“Hey, this is the right thing for you. I can help you with this. Look at the people I’ve helped before. This is the plan we have for your business. Then you say, instead of hourly, how about we do a monthly retainer? It’s going to be this much.”

One massive drawback with Upwork, however, is that they will take a lot of fees. But what a lot of people do is just move off of Upwork after the initial hire. I’ve never seen anybody get in trouble with that, even though it is against terms of service.

The post 12 Best SMMA Outreach Methods for 2024 appeared first on businessolution.org.

You know that your agency has the potential to do more work and increase your revenue. The problem is clients don’t just drop from trees or to be a little bit more modern about it; they don’t just land in your inbox when you need them.

So, how exactly can you find new clients to add to your roster? Well, that’s what we’ll talk about here coming right up. I will give you different strategies you can implement to bring clients to your social media marketing agency starting today.

#1. Find SMMA Clients

The goal here is to find and make a list of your potential clients. You want to start local, you can go broader later, but start local and just create a lead list. Collect information such as:

For this, you can use Google sheet, Google Docs, or it can even be pen and paper

So, let’s take a look where you can find potential clients for your agency.

1. Manual Lead Generation

The first way where you can find clients for your SMMA agency is through Google. Here, all you want to do is just go on Google and type in your targeted niche and the city you want to target. Let’s say it’s a chiropractor.

All you do is type “chiropractor near me” and see what ads pop up in the Google map pack.

And so you can click on the profile, go to their website, reach out, contact them, and see if you can help them.

2. Automated Lead Generation

If you want to save hours of researching, prospecting and all types of repetitive tasks, I highly recommend you use some kind of lead generation tool like Apollo.io, or LeadFuze.

With these lead generation tools, you can find thousands of highly targeted leads with just a few clicks of a button.

All you have to do is just type in the targeted city and industry you want to work with and you’ll get all the necessary information needed.

Then you just download this list, and you can upload it to any marketing CRM software you use like GoHighLevel.

This way, you will save literally hours of painful researching so as an agency owner you can focus on more important tasks like reaching out and getting your clients results.

2. Facebook Groups

Another great way to get your first SMMA client is using Facebook groups. This method is all about identifying Facebook groups where your prospects are hanging out. And what you want to do is you want to join groups in your targeted niche.

Search for keywords for your niche, and then you want to add people or connect with people who might be looking for a service.

Then what you want to do is once they accept your friend request is you want to send them a private message (more about it later)

 So, what should you be searching for or looking for in these groups?

We’re looking for businesses so here are some phrases that you could type in:

• “Need help with Facebook ads”
• “How to set up Google ads campaign.”
• “How to create a website.”

You can do a combination of these or you can type these in with your niche.

You want to get creative here because there are a ton of keywords people are typing in. You’ll start to notice what people are commonly typing in.

So what you could do is once you’re accepted in the group is you would just scroll through the groups read what people are writing and see if anybody needs help with digital marketing.

3. Yelp & Groupon

Groupon and Yelp are huge platforms with thousands of customers where you can find local businesses in your area.

What you can do is go to Yelp, or Groupon and search for example a restaurant and you’ll find their contact information.

From here, you want to start collecting all the information that you will need for an outreach.

So that is the process of lead generation in a nutshell. It’s just collecting as much information about those businesses as possible, so that way you can have the highest likeliness of setting a meeting with them.

4. Networking Events

Now the next strategy I recommend isn’t something I actually do, but it is a good strategy nonetheless. And that is going to networking events.

I’m a computer nerd, so I would just rather not do it. But it is a good strategy because, again, this is a people business.

So if you can attend networking events and meet your potential clients, whether it’s BNI or Meetup.

But by doing this, you can meet your potential clients directly, introduce yourself, and, like with all methods mentioned earlier you don’t sell to people at these events.

You just open the door to a relationship where you may potentially land them as a client in the future.

You may not like to do this, but the better you are at communicating with people, the more success you have in this business.

So maybe it’s something worth considering. And certainly worth trying out even if you’re not naturally good at those types of things.

5. Partner with a Related Non-Competing Company

This step right here is my absolute favorite one. The challenging thing about pursuing clients is that sometimes it’s hard to know if they’re spending money at all in marketing.

Do they even have a marketing budget?

What are they spending?

Are they even interested to hire an agency?

Is it worth calling them up again and again and again?

I’ll let you in on a shortcut. Aside from cold calling business owners, the company that you need to approach must not be a direct competitor. You should be offering different services or specialties altogether.

For example, if you own an SMMA business that specializes in PPC, why not approach a digital marketing company that specializes in SEO.

Ask if you can offer your PPC services to their clients. This way, you can already get a clue if there is even a budget there and if they have a need for your services. At the same time, offer to do the same for them. Pitch the company to your existing clients.

Both companies will benefit. You get access to their clients, and you give them access to yours. Gain new clients for your agency.

The most important thing that you can do, honestly, is to offer value, whether that’s to direct clients, to business owners, local businesses, national clients, or other agencies. It doesn’t matter. Just offer value. Offer to be genuine, helpful, be open, be trustworthy, be honest. That is the best way that you’re going to be able to grow your agency and have a strong reputation.

#2. Choose the SMMA Outreach Method

You’ve put together a list of all potential clients and you need to start reaching out to them. And for this, we can use cold calling, cold emailing, social media outreach, or even door-to-door.

The goal of outreach is selling the meeting, not the service.

So, let me show you the most effective SMMA outreach methods.

1. Cold Emailing

Essentially, the way cold emails work is you’re sending out emails at scale to businesses in certain industries, and then a small percentage of those businesses will email you back. Then you have a dialogue and proceed to sign them up as a digital marketing client.

What I did was create a list of essentially all the real estate agents in London using Apollo.

And there were thousands…

And once we got our list of prospects list, now we would do, is every day, we would send out approximately 300 emails to these real estate agents.

The emails were customized. We pulled the names from our Excel list so that when each individual real estate agent received the email, it was addressed to his or her name.

Here is an example.

And we found that about 1 in 100 real estate agents would genuinely be interested in working together.

But you can send out 200 emails at the click of a button every day, and you can actually send out much more of this depending on the software you use.

I personally use and highly recommend Instantly.ai.

And the way it worked is he got the email, he responded to the email, I gave him a call, we had a preliminary discussion on the phone, we met in person, I got to know him a little bit, got to know what he needed to create created a proposal for him, and then we signed on to a monthly agreement.

So that is SMMA cold email, which is the old way of generating leads but still one of the most effective one depending on your niche.

2. Social Media Outreach

These are just a few examples of platforms where you can look:

There are obviously tons of other places so you could look at things like Reddit and blog forums.

I recommend you focus on Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin because those are the most popular.

And why would we want to look at social media is because if you’re looking to a brand and you’re coming in and saying,

“Hey, I run a digital marketing agency. I can help you grow on Instagram or we can help you run Facebook ads.”

It’s a lot easier when they’re already set up on social media, right?

Whereas if you go to a business that is not on social media is going to be a harder sell. They’re maybe not even convinced of social media and how powerful it can be.

When you’re starting off, you want to look at brands that don’t have a big following.

So let’s say you’re offering social media management because that’s a very easy service to offer. You don’t need a whole load of results or a case study to do that.

You just need to be able to know how to manage an Instagram page effectively.

So, find ones that are not doing too well and you’re just going to come in and say,

“Hey, we can help you to manage your account, and get you more clients.”

And you can do this on Facebook, Pinterest, and any other platform.

The goal when you message them is you want to jump on a quick call to discuss business needs.

3. Cold Calling

This is the simplest, basic, and some would say barbaric method of getting a digital marketing client, and this is the simple cold call.

And what you do for this is you make a list of relevant potential clients in a given area. You can do that manually or using the tools mentioned earlier, Apollo or LeadFuze.

So let’s say we’re doing chiropractors in LA or dentists in Houston, Texas, etc.

You make that list, and then you simply get them on the phone, ask to speak to the owner, and then give them a pitch about digital marketing.

And the goal of your first call is you don’t want to sell them at all. You want to arrange a meeting.

This call is not for selling. You just want to screen them to make sure that they’re a good fit.

So here’s what you want to find out:

• Current monthly income
• Target monthly income
• The biggest obstacle to hitting their target
• If they’re willing to work with you
• And how soon you can start

So after you gather all this you can either close them or you can just schedule the next call immediately.

Here is what you can say to your potential customer.

So you just talk to them normally and once you’ve done your prior research, it will be easier.

Obviously, have practice, and the more calls you make, the more comfortable you will get with talking to these clients.

SMMA Services Difference in Selling

Now, the main difference between cold calling a business and selling them a website versus cold calling a business and selling them a digital marketing plan is that when you’re talking about websites, you’re going to be talking about things that are wrong with their current website

For example,

• It’s not a mobile device optimized
• It loads slowly
• It looks like it was designed 40 years ago, etc.

When you’re talking about digital marketing, you’re talking about return on investment.

You’re talking about how if you spend X dollars in Facebook ads and in Google ads, then you’re going to make Y dollars back in revenue.

And the math is going to make sense that you’re going to make back significantly more than you spend.

So that’s the pitch you want to lead with.

What You Need To Know About Cold Calling

Now, in my experience, I have done this to get website design clients, because my agency started off building websites.

And then about a year into its life, we transitioned it into offering digital marketing instead.

So, most of my cold calls- well actually, all of my cold calls- were done in our website design phase. When I was in that phase, it generally took me about 50 calls to get one person who was interested.

And then when I got the interested person, there’s about a 25% chance that that person would actually sign on and become a client.

So if you do the math, that is 1/50, and then 1/4 (25%), so you’re looking at about 200 cold calls before you get a client through that method.

And this was how we got our first handful of clients. And when I’m working with a coaching client and coaching them on how to start their agency, this is one of the places I suggest starting.

4. Approaching Businesses in Person

The benefits of approaching a business in person are that it shows the business owner, you’re confident and dedicated. And it shows them that you care about the success of their business.

Because most people don’t have the drive to actually knock on a business’s door and try to pitch them digital marketing or a website.

Now, if you remember my guide about how to sell websites. When I talked about cold approaching in person, I talked about talking about how the prospect’s website is not mobile device optimized.

I would open up my cell phone, I would walk into Simon’s Bike Shop and have his website open on my phone, and show the owner that it doesn’t show their property on the phone.

Now that works if you’re selling SEO.

For other SMMA services, this is what I recommend. If you’re trying to sell a monthly digital marketing contract to a business what I would do, let’s say, a chiropractor.

What I would do is stand outside that chiropractor’s office, I would bring up my phone and I would type in Google “chiropractor near me.”

Chances are the chiropractor in question is not going to show up because the reality is most businesses are not optimized for SEO properly, and they’re also not running Google ads.

So I would put on the phone “chiropractor near me”. Then I would walk into the business I would talk to the owner, and I would say:

So that would be my strategy.

And if you did that plan, and it turns out the chiropractor you’re approaching does show up, I probably would just move on to the next one.

Because when you’re doing something like a cold approach, whether it’s through phone, or whether it’s in person, you’re gonna need some leverage to work off of and that can be your leverage.

For example, your leverage is to find a business that is not optimized for the front page of Google and is not showing up anywhere in Google ads.

What Next?

Now, at this point, that should be enough to get some leads coming in, it’s not going to be quick. And it’s not going to be easy.

But it will work because I do this myself and it is still working today.

It does take time, especially in the early days, when you don’t write emails well, and you don’t know how to communicate well with people. But as you get more into it, it gets quicker.

#3. Arrange a Metting

Now it’s time to speak to a business. Meetings can be virtual, especially now.

And what happens once you’ve set a meeting? This is the biggest challenge as an agency owner. The good news is just like everything else. There’s a system for it.

So let’s say you’ve got the sales manager on a Zoom call.

Step 1. Set Up a Rapport with Your Client

The first it’s called the rapport stage and it’s basically where you make friends. You get to know the person you’re speaking to. You need them to like you and to trust you.

You’re going to learn and get fuel for later on in the meeting.

So what you’re going to do is you can have some small talk first of all with the business owner. You can talk about the weather or some common interest.

What I’d recommend you’re doing actually is researching that business owner on social media beforehand find some common interest that you may have with them so you can throw that out there.

Then you’re going start talking about their business so

well find out what their existing marketing strategy is this is something

Step 2. Go Digging

Next up, it’s time to go digging. And this is where you ask for more information about the company and you try to work out what they’re trying to achieve.

You want to ask them questions about the business and find out:

You want to learn about the issues that they’re facing as a business.

Start thinking about maybe how you can help them to solve those problems. Write down all of this stuff that is going to be ammunition for later on in your meeting with this business owner.

Step 3. Present Your Services

So you’ve learned about the business, you’ve got some ammunition you’re now going to present your service to the business owner.

This is whatever services you are actually offering it the business owner and what it is you think they actually need.

And here you’re going to educate them. This is your chance to show them exactly how it is you can do what you do.

And what I always recommend you doing is getting it a simple set of screenshots together. Teach them about maybe Facebook ads. You don’t need to create some fancy presentation. All you need to do is be able to explain this very simply in a series of screenshots.

Finally, it’s time for the close and that leads us to the next step which is to close the deal and actually sign those leads as potential client.

#4. Close Your First SMMA Client

Finally, we have the close. So let’s run through how exactly to do this. There are really just two steps to closing a deal on digital marketing services.

Here we’re literally going to ask for the sale. and here’s what I’ve found. I used to think I need to have a whole bunch of objection handlers or something like that.

Here’s what I do: I get to the end of the presentation, and I say:

Okay, here’s our pricing, here’s why our pricing is this. This is what I have for you; if you’re interested in this, let me know. And I know you probably want to think about this, so think a little about it. And let me know when you want to go ahead with a campaign.”

And by simply going through this whole process, and not being pushy in any way compels them to want to work with me.

I’m not trying to push them to sign the deal, I just want to provide some information and help them out. And they know I can help them.

If they want to hire me, that’s great. If not, who cares? There are tons of other clients out there. I’m not struggling for clients. So it’s not a problem. And by having that approach to sales, I actually found it converts better and it’s way more fun.

Create a Proposal

Now it’s time to create and deliver a proposal. I recommend actually create a detailed proposal, not just some generic, but actually explaining the issues you already have. Here’s exactly what we’re going to do over the next, let’s say, 12 months to get you results with this campaign.

I prefer selling this way, and it becomes very easy to sell when you do it this way. By doing that, you just build up a ton of credibility.

#5. Rinse and Repeat

So step number five is all about customer acquisition strategies. You sign a client, you get the results, and then that client will go ahead and give you referrals. And trust me, the longer you are in the agency game, the more and more referrals you get.

And your goal at this point is to ask for referrals because as an agency owner, these are your bread and butter. It’s an easy way to get more clients without having to do much outreach.

In fact, a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 25 – 95% increase in company profitability.

Ask For Referrals

Referral marketing is probably the way to get clients for any business.

And here’s an example of an email you might send to a client after you’ve gotten them great results.

Once your business has momentum, this is for most agencies, the primary driver of growth.

And the reason why this works so well is that these prospects are, I would say, anywhere from 5-10 times more likely to actually close and become a client, than people that we contact through cold outreach methods.

And the reason for that is there’s so much more trust when someone is contacting you through a trusted referral from a friend or colleague of theirs.

Follow Up With Your Customer

What I would recommend is that at any given time you inform your customer what you’ve done so far on that campaign and what you’re working on currently.

By doing that, by giving that level of communication, even if it’s just automated, not specifically emailing them, it allows the clients to really see what they’re paying for and increases the trust and credibility and effort so much more because retention is a big part of this business.

Partner Up With Other Businesses

If you’re just starting out, there’s nothing stopping you from finding other businesses that also serve the same types of clients you want to serve, and approaching them and saying,

If you can win the trust of this potential partner, and they start sending a few clients, and then you do a good job for those first few clients, a few key partnerships could literally give you all the new business that you need for your agency.

Best Way to Get Your First MMA Client: Offer Free Consultations

A lot of people are scared of commitment, and that applies not only in marrying someone or taking out a mortgage. This is also true when hiring a marketing agency. For many business owners, hiring an agency is a huge step.

They have to make sure that they’re getting their money’s worth. However, many potential clients often chicken out of hiring an agency because they do not have a thorough understanding of what you can do for them.

They’re not really sure if you can deliver or if they can afford you or if they don’t even like you. That’s why they don’t even bother to take the next step and to set up an actual meeting.

One effective way to power through this is to offer potential clients a free consultation.

Here’s a warning. Free consultations do not always work, so you have to make sure you know what you’re doing. Instead of just giving them your standard sales pitch, why not show them what you can do for their brand?

A free consultation is very advantageous because you get to personally connect with your potential client. You get the chance to convince them how you can help them with their business by giving them solutions to their problems. It’s like a teaser or a movie trailer of what your future agency client relationship could be.

But don’t worry, the free consultation itself does not need to be long and it can be done over the phone or a video call. Just make sure to inform your client at the beginning of this call that it’s going to be a simple 15-minute meeting—this way they’ll know what to expect right from the very beginning.

Getting SMMA Clients Final Words

So this is how to get clients for SMMA agency. At this point, you know how to collect potential leads, how to do the outreach, and arrange a meeting. And how to approach a business and eventually close every deal.

The post How To Get SMMA Clients in 2024 (5 Simple Steps) appeared first on businessolution.org.

To date, most of our clients now come from referrals from past clients who had an amazing experience working with our agency. And that really begins with our onboarding experience.

So today, I want to share a little bit of what we’ve learned from onboarding so many clients into our business and what’s made the difference when it comes to comes to providing a great onboarding experience that makes them want to stick around for the long haul.

First of all, we’re going to review the importance of onboarding. Then we’re going to talk about the different steps: legal, setting expectations, taking payment, access and onboarding, and as well as communication. Every single one of these steps is important and when executed, can provide an amazing client experience that your clients get super excited about.

The Importance of Onboarding in SMMA

SMMA onboarding is taking a client from a signed contract and a signed deal into doing business and becoming a part of your client base. It’s also the first impression your clients will have with your agency, and it can really make or break the engagement.

If the client feels that they are just a number or they signed up for something and aren’t being shown love, if you will, it can be a really disheartening experience. Think about if you were to make a great big investment in something and as soon as you signed up for it or as soon as you gave somebody your money, you felt like you were being neglected or ignored. It’s very easy to do with SMMA.

Onboarding is the first impression that your clients are going to have when doing business with your agency. It’s in your best interest to make sure that that is a good first impression. Most guru on YouTube talk about sales. They talk about getting clients. They talk about closing clients that pay you the most per month.

But when you do the math, the most valuable client to your agency is the client that stays with you the longest. I’ve seen so many agency owners churn out because all they do is focus on closing clients, and they don’t focus on keeping those clients around.

And it all begins with onboarding. You can have a client who will be your number one client who’s amazingly excited about doing business with your agency. But if you fumble onboarding and don’t make it seem like you know what you’re doing or care about them, they can be the first out the door. So onboarding really sets the expectation of what they can expect in the coming months of doing business with you.

We want our clients to feel like they’re becoming a part of something, like they’re buying into something, and like they made the right choice. It’s not hard, but most agency owners overlook it.

So again, I can’t stress enough the importance of onboarding and the importance of getting this right.

SMMA Client Onboarding Process

So, what does the SMMA onboarding process look like from start to finish? When it comes to our agency, our onboarding process begins as soon as the contract is signed.

1. Payment and Contract Signing

The first step is they have to pay the invoice and sign the SMMA contract.  You should never, ever begin working on a client project and you haven’t gotten paid yet, or if they haven’t even signed the contract.

Now some people actually have a client sign the contract, and then they charge them and bill them out.

I believe that you should at least get a deposit. Maybe you get 50% upfront, especially if you’ve never worked with them before. Like, you don’t have a history, you don’t know what they’re about. What if they don’t pay you? Okay, and you just started working already?

At least get a 50% deposit or some form of deposit. It could be less really up to you. And typically, I tell people to charge for the first month upfront.

So let’s say you’re doing a six-month SMMA contract, and every month, you’re going to meet together to help them with a strategy. On the first of the month, they have to pay for the entire the next 30 days.

Then after that, you’ll bill them again for the next 30 days. So really you should just charge if you’re going to do monthly work upfront.

Now, when you have a contract, that is a legally binding contract. And if something were to go wrong, if there was a disagreement, you could take that to court and actually fight for that.

Understanding Service Agreements and Contracts

Now, I want to tell you right now, I am not a legal professional. I’m not an attorney. So I’m going to give you a few tips, but you can use something like Creative Contracts, where you can learn about legal contracts from actual attorneys. They have have nice templates for service business providers.

But overall, when you have a service agreement with your client, you want to include things like:

• The scope of work
• What’s going to be included
• At what price point, and
• Whatever package they decide to choose

You want to be clear about that because you don’t want the client to start working with you and then start telling you to do extra things that you never agreed to.  You don’t want that. That’s called scope creep.

So, in your contract, it should be clear they signed up for this package that comes with these five things, and this is how much it costs.

Payment Terms and Communication Protocols

You also want to include in your service agreement how you’re going to accept payment digitally. How often you’re going to be billed? When are the invoices due?

Like, typically in my contract when I was doing more content marketing, I would say if we don’t receive payment within 7 days, we’re not going to be moving forward with working with you. I would tell them clearly so they had to make sure that they paid the invoice by a specific date.

You also want to be clear about how you’re going to communicate. Are you going to have a monthly strategy call, monthly meeting, are you going to have weekly meetings? And then how often they’re going to receive status reports, if you’re going to include status reports or not.

And also what is the method of communication? Are you going to communicate through just email? Can they call you?

So be really clear about how they are going to communicate.

Refund Policies and Confidentiality Agreements

And what you also want to be clear about is refund policies.

Are you going to offer refunds?

What is your refund policy for work?

You could decide that. You can say we don’t have a refund policy or we do, we’ll give you 50%, whatever it is, it’s totally up to you. Very personalized, but you want to include that as well in the service agreement. And then you also want to have a confidentiality agreement as far as, like if you’re going to be working with a client in their business and you’re going to be exposed to their trade secrets or their information, like data, you want to put that in the contract so that you’re protecting them and you’re also protecting yourself.

Like I said before, I have some links in the description of this video for you to purchase templates from attorneys that have actually written them. So if that’s something you’re interested in, feel free to go and check that out.

2. Sending a Welcome Email

As soon as the client signs the agreement, we immediately and as quickly as possible send them an onboarding and welcome email welcoming them into our agency. This rallies the excitement and confirms the trust they gave us by signing that contract moments ago.

There’s a whole automation sequence that kicks off, questionnaires that go out, emails and operations people that reach out to them, and team members who begin doing the work.

So the sooner you’re able to do that, the better. If you don’t know how to send over an agreement, there are a lot of easy ways to do it, but it can be done via PandaDoc or even signed in person and copied and sent out to the different parties, your agency and the client who sign it.

Setting Expectations Early

The next thing that you want to do is immediately set expectations. So, as soon as that contract is signed, we send out an onboarding email that’s mostly templatized but customized, specific to the client, welcoming them in and setting expectations on what will come next. This means our onboarding call.

This goes over what the process will look like and the access that we will need to begin getting access and doing work for their business. It goes over our communication channels, like we’re going to be setting up a Slack channel or we’ll be communicating with you via email or on our weekly calls and setting up those times.

Communicating Your Process

Another important thing you want to include in the welcome email is your process.

So, for SMMA, if let’s say I’m doing social media management, my process is that I first do a kickoff call with the client.

I have their questionnaire, I do market research on their ideal client and target market, and I start coming up with a content calendar of ideas that we’re going to talk about for the rest of the couple of months that we’re going to be working together.

Once the client approves the initial content calendar, I give that information to my team, and then we start creating content for them every month. That’s typically what you would do for ongoing digital marketing services.

So when you do website design, there are a lot of dependencies that have to be met that affect the dates that you will be able to deliver and publish that website.

For instance, you’re going to need to have the company logo to put on the website. You’re going to need to know their brand colors. There’s a lot of preliminary stuff that has to happen. And if you don’t receive that information ahead of time, it will affect your ability to actually even start.

So you could be waiting weeks and weeks, and if you don’t have this stuff, you can’t even work. And so this is why you want to explain to the client in that welcome email that they have to give you certain things by a certain day in order to receive the outcome, and the outcome is the finished product that you are creating for them.

Invoice Issuance and Payment Terms

And most importantly, it sets expectations on when they can expect us to begin doing work for their business. As soon as that expectation email is sent and the agreement is signed, we send an invoice. We send it over through Stripe or Bill.com according to the payment terms in the agreement.

3. Kick-Off Call and Access Provision

The next step is what we call access and onboarding. So, the next thing we’ll do is set up a kick-off call. And on that kick-off call, we’ll go over permissions; we’ll go over access; we’ll go over getting your business manager, ad account, and all that good stuff set up.

Now there are a lot of guru out there that will argue that you can handle all of this with a templatized form. If you just send them over a questionnaire, they can provide all of this access and you’ll be good to go.

Now we don’t really subscribe to that. While we do have questionnaires and onboarding documents that we send over that we ask them to begin filling out, we find that the onboarding is best handled hand to hand. This way, we can answer any questions that they have, get over any hurdles, and the client doesn’t end up getting frustrated.

In working with dozens of clients at this point, we’ve noticed that the onboarding and the provision of access to different:

• Ad accounts
• Websites
• Funnels
• Social media accounts

All of these things can be frustrating for clients. So what we realized is if we do this over a quick 30 minute call, it saves them a ton of time.

Oftentimes, it’ll take them several hours to get us access if they do it on their own. And it’s a great way for us to build trust and build authority by showing them that we know what we’re doing. So they give us all this over a 30-minute call and we’re off to the races, and we can begin doing the work that we need to do.

The reality is that your clients are trying to outsource this to you. They hired you for a reason. And by sending them a long checklist of steps to do makes it feel like they are doing your job for you.

So by doing this over a quick 30 minute call, it’s a great way to build trust and for them to feel like they’re already getting value out of the engagement before you even really get started.

Establishing Communication Channels

Now, as soon as you have access to everything, the next thing that you want to do is set up your communication channels. We’re big users of Slack. Most of our clients are on Slack at this point.

If you aren’t familiar with Slack, it’s basically just a group chat where you, all the stakeholders for your clients, as well as all of your team members can all chat in one group area.

It saves a lot of email threads and back and forth, and can really become a major time savings. However, not every client is going to be tech savvy enough or be on Slack. In those cases, it’s best that you use email, text, or phone calls.

Scheduling Regular Client Meetings

What I want to talk to you about is why having a policy as far as how you’re going to communicate with the client is so important. So this is where you will have your weekly meetings or monthly calls to stay in contact with the client.

If you’re doing advisory or coaching, you’re going to be meeting with them every week. Or if you’re doing that twice a month or once a month, that’s how you’re going to deliver the work.

If you’re doing done for you services, you have to decide if you’re going to be sending them a weekly report or a monthly report for their marketing.

We like to set up a weekly chat with our clients where we can quickly review the progress of what’s been done and answer any questions that they have, as well as strategize on new ideas.

This also gives us a quick 15 to 30-minute chat each week to have FaceTime with the client, continue enjoying a great relationship together, and show them all the great work that we’re doing for their business. We’re big fans of talking with our clients as frequently as we can.

They are our clients after all. They pay our bills. And we like to provide a premium level of service for them. So after all that’s done, you can go about setting up your ads, you can go about fulfilling services.

4. Setting Up Ads and Fulfilling Services

So once you finish that kickoff call, you’re going to start doing the work. And so it depends on the type of SMMA service you’re offering. If you’re doing done for you services, let’s say you’re doing marketing or website design.

Now if you’re doing more business consulting or coaching or strategy, you’re not doing done for you services because you’re doing more advisory services where you’re meeting with the client to help them with a system or help them with mindset, coaching, whatever it is, then it’s going to be a little bit different.

5. Concluding the Client Relationship: Offboarding

All right, so the next step is simple. It’s the offboarding process, and this is where you finish working with the client. And now you want to have a great kickoff meeting to just kind of go over everything you worked on together, finalize that project, make sure the client’s happy with the work, and then say bye-bye and give them a handoff. Now, here’s where it’s really, really crucial.

Opportunities During Offboarding

This is where you can upsell the client into working with you more for a longer time or doing other projects or giving them other services. Or you can also ask them for a referral if they have a referral to their friends and family. And you could get additional business.

You can also ask them for a testimonial or ask them to be part of a case study so that you can put the testimonial on your SMMA website and on your proposal and on your marketing collateral. The offboarding process is also really important to just establish that trust with them so that they can refer you to people over and over again.

SMMA Onboarding Final Words

So that’s really all that there is too when it comes to providing an amazing experience when onboarding your SMMA clients. I recommend creating a checklist that goes over those things so that you can make sure that you don’t miss any steps.

There’s nothing that makes you fumble onboarding more than missing something that you could have just had as a check on a checklist. You’ll be glad that you did.

The post SMMA Client Onboarding Process (5 Simple Steps) appeared first on businessolution.org.

Today, we’re talking about everything you need to know about SMMA agreements. And if you get this right, your retention will increase.

Here, you can get access to the SMMA contract, then download it as a PDF or Word , adjust to your social media marketing agency and move on. But instead of just giving you a copy of my agreement and saying, ‘Hey, this is what it is,’ I really want to dive as deep as we can today and talk about the principles so that you understand how to set one up for yourself.

None of what I’m sharing today is legal advice, just experiences that I’ve had,

So, without further ado, let’s get into this guide on SMMA client contracts.

Why Contracts are Crucial in Client Onboarding

So, let’s talk about why and when to sign a contract with a client first. Why even use a contract when you onboard a new client?

Well, you want both parties, meaning you, the agency, and the client, to agree upon what’s going to be done, delivered, and included in this service. It sets the right expectation and also shows that you’re experienced, taking your business seriously, essentially.

So, that’s really the main thing when you onboard a new client. The reason why you have a contract is that you want to set the framework. You want both parties to agree upon what is going to be included and what is going to be done.

Also, you agree upon the price, which is very important. You have a time agreement. All of these things are super important, and that’s why we have an agreement or a contract.

The Right Time to Sign a Contract

So, when to sign? Immediately after the sale is made. Once the payment is completed and the contract is signed, that’s when you schedule the onboarding call and get to work. So, it’s very important that when you have your sales call and they agree that they want to work with you, you get the payment in immediately and also get the contract signed.

You can either do that on the call, or you end the sales call and then send them an email afterwards. As soon as you get the contract signed and the first payment is in, that’s when you start the work. That’s when you start the SMMA onboarding, not before, but when the contract is signed and the payment is in, that’s when the onboarding call starts.

Key Elements to Include in Your SMMA Contract

Okay, so what to include? Well, the most important things to include are details regarding the:

• Service
• Client requirements
• Compensation and Payment
• Time frame

Service

Service, the most obvious thing that you should include in your contract.

You want both parties to agree upon what is going to be included and what is going to be done.

Are you going to help them with advertising only? What is included in that?

Are you going to set up the campaigns and help them with the ad copy?

Or are you going to help them with the website as well?

You have to specify that in detail.

So, the services can be divided into two parts: setup and ongoing management services. As part of the setup services, the company will:

• Setup Facebook Business Manager & Optimize Facebook Business Page;
• Setup Retargeting Campaigns;
• Setup Marketing Automation System text & email;
• Setup Call Tracking;
• Create Custom Ad Campaigns (Copywriting, Images, Audiences, and Ads)

So here, you would obviously adjust it to your service, and then you can just outline what you’re going to do here in terms of the setup.

And then, as part of the monthly ongoing management services, we will do this:

• Manage and optimize the Facebook campaign daily;
• Manage and optimize the retargeting campaigns daily;
• Forward leads (calls & opt-ins) to client;

Client Requirements

Then we have some client requirements:

• Provide required intake info requested through an on-boarding call or survey.
• Provide the Company with requested photos for ads.
• After 30 days of no contact from the Client to The Company, the Company will assume that the Client no longer needs The Company’s services. The Company may terminate the Agreement; in this event, all unpaid fees will be due and collectable at the time of termination.

Compensation and Payment

You also include the details regarding the price, obviously. If you have a setup fee or not. Then you’ll have a monthly fee. So, you have that included.

So, you have the setup fee that you mention here and also you have the price per month.

• Set up Fee: For the Services described in Section 1A-F, the Client will pay [$ SETUP FEE] in setup fees. Set up, as outlined in Section 1A, can take varying lengths of time, but will usually take around 14 days (MAX).
• Ongoing Management: For the Services described in Section 1G-J, the Client will pay to The Company [$ PRICE PER MONTH] per month for ongoing management per advertising campaign location. The fee will be due every 30 days and will be automatically deducted from your payment method on file each month. The management fee does not include the ad spend to the advertising platforms.

One thing that you can do with the setup fee is that you can have a setup fee of one to two thousand dollars. It depends on how much work is included in your setup. But then also, what you can do if you have a setup fee is an incentive-based pricing. So, for example, on the sales call, you can mention that you have a setup fee of two thousand dollars, but if you get a decision on the call, then you can waive the setup fee, and it’s not going to be a setup fee for you. So, you can have something to basically tell them that if you make a quick decision, then there’s not going to be a setup fee because we won’t have to follow up with you, and so forth.

Time Frame

The next last thing that you want to include in your SMMA contract is the time frame. For how long does the contract last? What happens after that, for example, month to month?

The reason why you want to have a time frame that you agree upon, that the client is going to stay with you, is because you want to find people who are serious enough. You don’t want to get somebody onboarded and then work with them for a month, and then they just leave you because they want to do something else and they’re kind of all over the place.

But you want them to be committed to a specific time frame because sometimes you might have to test a couple of things, and in some campaigns, you might not get results within the first two weeks, or you’re getting them results, but you can perfect them a lot better over the next six weeks. So, if they leave you after two weeks, they’ve wasted everybody’s time.

So, it’s very important that you set a time frame in the contract to find people who are actually serious and are willing to commit to this, essentially.

SMMA Client Contract Wrapping Up

That’s basically the SMMA client contract, and again, you can download it to your computer as a Word document or however you want to do it, and then you can adjust it.

Then we’re going to upload it to DocuSign gn and get it signed, essentially. Right, so that is the contract. It’s pretty straightforward, super simple to use. We use this exact contract to this day, and it works like a charm

The post SMMA Contract: Everything You Need to Know (+Free Download) appeared first on businessolution.org.

I’ll go through each service one by one, give my opinion as we go, and highlight the ones that are the best for starting with the SMMA agency.

Let’s get into this list.

1. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is one of the absolute best services an agency can offer clients across the board. It’s the art and science of taking a business’s products and services and getting them in front of targeted audiences on platforms like:

• Facebook
• TikTok
• Snapchat
• YouTube
• Google

The best thing about paid ads is that you can track the precise return on investment and quantify exactly how much revenue you’re driving for each client. Any dollar amount spent, any dollar amount returned – it’s all crystal clear, which clients love.

While it may seem intimidating at first, honestly anyone can pick up the skills with a little training. When I first started out, I didn’t have a clue how to run Facebook ads. But I landed a local restaurant client for $500 a month and needed to figure it out fast. I immersed myself in courses and within a week found an effective strategy. The results were killer.

By the way, if you’re learning from a particular influencer or a particular course, you need to check when that Facebook ad module was filmed.

Having a 2024 ad strategy is all about manipulating, growing, and putting that content in front of your targeting options and less on the targeting aspects of the ad campaigns.

2 or 3 years ago, before iOS 14, it was all about stacking targeting options and how to find these hidden pockets of targeting options, which was super crucial.

However, now, the actual targeting and the algorithm behind the ad campaigns is fairly simple. It’s more about the ad creatives, design, copy, etc. The good news is that there all of these AI tools like AdCreative.ai that make creating ad creatives super simple.

So, having a strategy that works in 2024 to generate sales, bring in high-quality leads, or use paid ads to grow a brand is essential.

And that’s a high-paying, in-demand service because so many different agencies offer paid ads but don’t have a paid ad strategy that actually works long-term for their clients.

2. Sales Funnel Building

Next is a long-standing service we’ve always vouched for: sales funnel creation. If you work with a client, any lead gen business, whether that be a law firm, a mortgage company, a hair transplant clinic, or a med spa, the ability to create a high-converting sales funnel that converts the traffic you’re producing through your ad strategy is going to be so essential.

If you’ve communicated with any client, whether you’ve signed them or not, most clients’ websites are shocking. They’re not designed to convert. They don’t have the particular elements that are needed on that web page to convert the traffic at scale, let alone the after-process of what happens once they submit their lead.

• Are they getting text messages?
• Are they getting emails?
• How are they getting follow-ups?

So building a sales funnel and sales process around that campaign is a highly high-paying skill that once you understand how to do it, clients will be queuing up to work with you, especially if you’re good at it.

3. Lead Conversion

So as the SMMA world progresses and as more and more people are getting on social media, even if they’re not running paid ad campaigns, even if they’re getting their leads through social content or emails to their website, how do they convert those leads into paying customers, which is a problem that so many businesses have.

They’ll be generating loads of leads, whether that be through an agency, whether that be through ads, whether that be through organic content, or emails, but they don’t know how to convert those leads into paying customers.

So if you can do that through your sales sequences, through good sales processes and strategies, whether you have a sales team that does that conversion for them, that is an incredibly high-paying skill you can implement for your business.

We do it at our agency by having a sales team and an appointment setter that we implement for every single one of our clients. So we’ll have someone that calls up the leads. We will ring all of the clients’ leads for them.

We have GoHighLevel sequences that, when a lead comes through, we nurture that all the way to a booking.

Our sales team works with every single one of our clients so that their sales process is on point, they’re contacting them in the correct way, in the right time period, and they know how to convert them in consultations for particular clients.

So having that after-care support of how to convert leads into paying customers is essential.

Now, if you’re a beginner agency and you’ve been listening to these gurus on social media that say sign a client, get a media buyer to run your Facebook ads for you, and that’s all you need to do, this is where your business is really, really going to fail. It’s not okay just to run paid ads to a lead form on Facebook and expect Facebook to convert it for them.

You need the whole point of what a social media marketing agency is an overall marketing team for that business. And the business and that lead isn’t closed just by bringing in a lead that then they contact and can’t get hold of. You need to build the infrastructure and the support to convert every single one of those leads into a paying customer over time.

4. Short-Form Content Editing

Many have taken the plunge into long-form content land – launching podcasts, getting on other shows, creating YouTube tutorials. Noble efforts for sure.

But we live in the age of short-form snackable content. TikTok has us all fiending for quick hits of information right here, right now. We want it fast, concise and captivating.

This is where you come in as the short-form sensei. Take existing long-form content from brands and transform it into bite-sized posts for platforms like Instagram and TikTok. You can easily do that with tools like Repurpose.io.

Short-form edits are the perfect top-of-funnel play – exposing brands to expansive new audiences in an algorithm-approved format. Plus, you get to maximize content businesses have already invested in creating – a true win-win.

Rates range from $30 to $100 per video edit based on your skills. And most importantly, any brand creating long-form YouTube content is a potential client.

5. User Generated Content

User-generated content or UGC is all the rage in influencer marketing these days. I’m sure you’ve seen brands running ads on TikTok and Facebook featuring authentic, selfie-style videos from real people. These candid customer testimonials and product demos make for some of the most effective and engaging ad creative out there.

UGC delivers the highest return on investment, making it a must-have for any e-commerce brand or business looking to boost their marketing results. Even local mom and pop shops are getting hip to UGC for spreading brand love.

Now you may be thinking – how do I get the ball rolling on UGC if I don’t have influencer connections? The good news is, for most brands, your best assets are right under your nose: your existing customers!

You can launch a simple campaign inviting customers to create UGC on your behalf, maybe offering an incentive for their time. Suddenly, your loyal customers become your digital sales force and micro-influencer squad. Pretty cool how that works! UGC takes word-of-mouth marketing to the next level.

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing – it may seem old school, but don’t be fooled. This OG strategy is back and better than ever. 59% of marketers say email is their most effective channel for raking in new revenue. Things have come full circle.

I credit a lot of email’s resurgence to AI tools and algorithms that weren’t around 5-10 years ago. These innovations allow us to set up incredibly targeted email automations to squeeze every last drop out of existing customers and re-engage past visitors who didn’t initially buy.

Whether you use GHL, ActiveCampaign, or even free platforms like Systeme.io, implementing effective flows is plug-and-play. Segment your lists, trigger personalized campaigns, and watch those profits pile up. When I ran my own agency, email marketing generated hundreds of thousands in sales for clients. Cha-ching!

In today’s crowded digital space, a solid email strategy cuts through the noise. There’s just something more personal and trustworthy about an email versus an Instagram ad or Facebook clip. Leverage that to your advantage. Don’t sleep on email marketing. Do it right, and it’ll pay off in spades.

7. Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization is the art of turning website visitors into customers. It’s all about taking existing company sites and pages and sprucing them up to boost that all-important conversion rate. This can involve adding persuasive reviews, installing conversion-friendly apps, improving website design, and enhancing the overall user experience.

Let’s break out some quick math to show the power of CRO. Say an e-commerce site has a ho-hum 2% conversion rate, and their average order value is $100. They get 100,000 visits per month. At 2% conversion, that’s 2,000 customers spending $100 each, so $200k in revenue monthly.

But boost their conversion rate by just 1% to 3%, and boom – suddenly they have an extra 1,000 customers per month. That’s an additional $100k in revenue monthly or $1.2 million extra yearly, all from a small 1% CRO bump! See how valuable optimization can be? The numbers don’t lie.

So if you or a client have a website that’s leaving money on the table, CRO is your new best friend. With some tweaks and tuning, you can turn more of those site visitors into delighted customers.

8. Copywriting

Copywriting – not just stringing words together, but crafting sentences that sell. Sure, lots of people can write something coherent, but compelling copy that converts readers into buyers? That’s a true art form.

Effective copywriting goes way beyond website text and landing pages. We’re talking words that persuade and influence across ads, emails, sales scripts, explainer videos, you name it. When done right, copy catalyzes sales like no other.

Here’s the kicker – literally every business needs copywriting. But that doesn’t mean you should go spraying and praying your services everywhere.

Instead, pick 1-3 SMMA niches you genuinely interest you. Become a copy master for those specific audiences. Learn their pain points, goals and dreams. Then work your literary magic, crafting copy that really speaks to them. Once you perfect your copywriting superpowers in a niche, you can always expand your reach.

Remember – the jack of all trades is a master of none. For now, focus on dominating copywriting in just a small corner of the market. You’ll stand out from the sea of generalists. When it comes to compelling copy, think niche, not broad. Targeted words sell.

9. Landing Pages

Landing pages really are the new website. I think gone are the days where you needed this large index website with multiple pages and all these layers of complexion.

Nowadays, the average and modern website is just a young pager with short, concise information, good copywriting on it, and great content as well.

Someone needs to create those landing pages, and there are a plethora of companies out there with outdated, overcomplicated websites that are crying out for somebody to come and modernize and most importantly, simplify them.

10. Content Marketing

Content marketing encompasses 3 things

• Graphic design
• Photography
• Videography

We’re in the digital age, but many business owners out there were not born into this modern world. They do not understand how to create high-quality content, and therefore, they cannot keep up with their more content-aware competitors.

They seek that innovation and that skill in agencies and in freelancers. I’m talking social media post-design, product photos, promotional videos, and obviously ads. I know content agencies that charge upwards of $10,000 for one single video shoot.

It’s a precious service and it’s also very creative. I’ve always almost envied content agencies out there because they get to be very expressive and creative with their service. They’re essentially getting paid to create art all day. If you’re content-minded, this is a very good option.

11. Social Media Management

Social media management – the art of crafting compelling organic posts for brands on platforms like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. It’s taking existing content and breathing new life into it through smart scheduling, strategic captions, and an innate understanding of what makes audiences tick.

While on the surface it may seem simple – just posting content, right? – effective social management is far more nuanced. You’ve got to become a master curator for each unique brand. Build an editorial calendar that seamlessly blends entertainment, value, reviews, and sales-focused posts. Lean into what resonates most with their community.

The great part about social management, especially when starting out, is the value is crystal clear for clients. You’re handling a task they don’t have bandwidth for – keeping their feeds fresh and engaging daily. It’s tangible time saved. However, most local biz owners only cough up around $500 per month for the service.

The real money is with bigger brands pulling 100k+ in monthly revenue. Their budgets can easily justify $2-3k per month for rockstar social management. But breaking into that echelon typically requires a more robust service, like coupling social with in-house content creation.

Overall though, social remains a solid basic offering if you want to get your feet wet with clients. Just be ready to really dive into each brand’s audience and voice. Successful social management goes way beyond just scheduling posts.

12. Business Consultancy

As an SMMA agency owner, you need to have the know-how to consult a business on their marketing and really on their business in general. We’re talking about their:

• Storytelling
• Content
• Email marketing
• Social media
• Branding

All of that comes into play regarding how profitable a business can be from your marketing campaigns. We’ve worked with two practically mirror-image businesses in the same industry, except one had a really nice brand. They had loads of content. They had 9,000 followers. Compared to a starter business that didn’t have all of that, the results were dramatically different.

We made the first, the existing brand that had it all together, about 25 grand in profit in the first month. Whereas this one, we didn’t make them any money for the first three months because they needed so much consultancy on their brand,  how it was positioned, and their story. And that does take time.

But suppose you’re a social media marketing agency owner and you’re just going to run ads to the brand that you’re just given. In that case, you’re going to struggle because for most brands that we work with, a lot of consultancy goes into that first month to get them to a place where we even want to run ads.

Most businesses aren’t at a point to run ads. They need help with content, branding, message, and all the stuff. And that’s an incredibly important service that you need to have under your belt in order to get your clients results, because that’s the only way you’re going to get them long term is by giving them consultancy on everything that comes under the marketing umbrella.

Best SMMA Niches in 2024 Final Words

So these are the best SMMA niches you can sell. And before we wrap up, I must warn you that even though all of these services can be used to build a profitable digital marketing agency from scratch, I strongly advise against using more than one service until you’re making decent money.

Otherwise, you’ll be running around trying to juggle everything instead of just nailing one thing and doing it well. When you’re first starting out, the key is to sign up as many clients as possible with just one service instead of having multiple services and just a handful of clients.

All the services we’ve covered can build a lucrative agency if you fully dedicate to one. Just don’t make my mistake and get lured in by offering a little email marketing, a little copywriting, and a bit of content creation. All that did for my agency was add stress and chaos.

The post 12 Best SMMA Services to Offer in 2024 appeared first on businessolution.org.

The key is just knowing the right criteria of a client for you to look out for. That’s what we’re going to be going through today.

The ideal client criteria when you start an SMMA agency and how to pick the best niche for you based on your interests.

Let’s get into it.

Why Niching Down is Crucial for SMMA Success

When we are referencing a social media marketing agency or a service-based business, when we talk about choosing your niche, we are simply referring to choosing an industry that you would prefer to work with or offer SMMA services to.

The Strategic Goal of Specializing in a Single Niche

Now, as an agency owner, our goal is to work towards a point where we can specialize in just one niche.

We do this because it gives us a competitive advantage over other agencies out there. For example, in my agency we specialize in lead generation businesses.

If I approach a business and I’m trying to sell my Google ad service to them and another agency out there is trying to sell them as well, I specialize in their niche. That other agency doesn’t have a niche they specialize in and will take anyone and everyone, and I’m going to get that client.

Because the perception of my ability to get results will be higher. That business owner is going to be more inclined to speak to me and give me time and go ahead with our agency because we specialize in their industry, so we’re going to be able to get them better results by default.

From Generalist to Specialist

Now, it doesn’t always start off like that. When you’re starting off an agency, it’s very hard to just pick one niche and go into that, and I wouldn’t actually recommend you to do that.

You have to work to a point and work with multiple niches when you start out until you realize what industries you enjoy working with and what industries really click for you.

A lot of people will take a long time to establish what niche they eventually want to specialize in. For example, when I started my agency six years ago, I literally would take on anyone and everyone. I went through every single local business in my area that I could possibly sign up. Then, I found out through what industries I enjoyed working with.

Mastering Services for Targeted Niches

The key is mastering a service for one specific person, so it’s very hard to say no to you. That way, it’s very easy to scale your agency because you have an irresistible offer specialized for one individual niche.

I want to lay the foundation for you today to be able to go out there and pick a few niches to get started, dip your toe in the water, and then hopefully, you’ll be able to specialize in one after you start signing up your first few clients.

But the key, regardless of the niche, regardless of the industry, is actually knowing what kind of client is going to be good for you, and what criteria you should look out for. This is way more important than the industry or the niche.

The Criteria for Selecting an Ideal SMMA Niche

Like I said at the beginning, the niche is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. It’s about the criteria of the client. On that note, I want to highlight five things for you to look out for. As a beginner, you should look out for five things in your ideal first client.

1. Look for Businesses with Good Reviews

Generally speaking, the companies that have happy customers are easier to market for. Those customers will engage in your ads, promote the content you are putting out there, and become salespeople within themselves. And so look out for businesses that have a good reputation.

If you work with a business with a bad reputation, generally, the ad account is just not going to work. You are fighting an uphill battle from the get-go. And the more customers you get, the more unhappy customers you get, and the whole thing spirals out of control. Look out for businesses with great reviews and a good reputation.

2. Prioritize Local Businesses for Initial Leverage

The next thing is that that business is local to you. You’ve probably heard this time and time again, and it’s very important when you’re first starting out that you reach out to local businesses. Because as a new start agency owner, we need leverage. We need a reason to be able to build a relationship with somebody.

If we’re just approaching a random company from 1,000 miles away and we’re saying, I’m going to run your ads, we have no leverage, no common ground whatsoever. We don’t even have case studies that we can use.

Whereas if we speak to a local company, at least we can build a relationship based on the fact that we are close by to them. We have an in, and that’s what we need to focus on, is getting as many ins as possible when we’re first starting out.

Our first in is being local. Our second in is getting a case study, and then we can sign up clients elsewhere. Make sure this business is local, regardless of their niche.

3. Steer Clear of Startups

Unfortunately, according to statistics, 90% of startups fail. I’ve seen it time and time again where agencies come, and they’ll sign up their mate business, which literally just got started.

The issue is that business has no proof of concept. There is no proof that it’s a viable business. They don’t have customers, they don’t have data, they don’t have a proven marketing strategy. You are literally doing all of that for them. You might as well be their business partner, be taking a percentage of their company because they haven’t proven they actually have anything tangible yet.

As a marketing agency, it’s very hard to work with startups. Startups need to understand that they’re probably going to advertise for up to six months before they even turn a profit on their advertising. That can really have a detrimental effect on agency owners who then think they’re not delivering a good service. Trust me and hear this from me because I’ve done it and I’ve learnt from this mistake. If you sign up a startup or you’ve worked with a startup and you’ve ever felt like you weren’t able to deliver a good service, pick yourself back up.

Do not beat yourself up over that. The problem is the client and not you. Nine times out of ten. But just avoid startups like the plague. Trust me on that one.

4. Target High-Ticket Services and Repeat Customers

Next is choosing to work with businesses that offer a high-ticket service, so they offer services to people for multiple hundreds or thousands of one-off service, so you can generate leads for that business.

The next option, it’s looking for companies that have a lot of repeat customers. They have a high LTV, which means lifetime value. It’s the amount of money that someone will spend over the lifetime of shopping somewhere. If we’re working with, for example, a restaurant, we want to make sure that we’re working with a restaurant that has the opportunity for people to come back again and again and again.

A gym is another good example of this because when they get a customer, somebody is signing up to a monthly membership.

If we’re working with a gym, they’ve got a $30 monthly membership and it costs $10 for us to get them a new customer via Facebook ads, they’ve profited $20 on the front end.

But on the back end, because that person will stay with them on an average of six months, there’s another five months to add on top of that, another $150. That business actually will have profited $170 from a $10 investment because the lifetime value is there.

Having businesses or having clients with repeat customer is a sure way to ensure a very profitable ad campaign. We always want to pay into the future with that. We want to think about which businesses we can actually get results for. Because that is the most important thing. When we can deliver a great service to people, we get reviews, we get case studies, and we can leverage that to get bigger and better clients.

5. Capitalize on Current Trends and Movements

People as consumers and buyers love to buy into trends. It’s just who we are. And so look out at what is going on in the world.

At the moment, we’ve got a massive rush of environmental-based products, and sustainable-based products, and these businesses are flying. And when businesses can leverage that standpoint with their ads, they perform better because people like to be behind a movement and trend.

Similar for vegan restaurants about a year or two ago, they absolutely flew with digital marketing agencies because it was a new trend that people wanted to try out the new craze.

Now, technically speaking, these are things that will be around forever, but it’s whatever people are speaking about in that moment in time.

So keep your eyes peeled. Have a look out at trends and jump on them if businesses are adopting them or if they’re just backing world crises and world affairs that are relevant to what’s going on right now.

6. Align with Personal Passions

Pick your passion. This is really, really important. As an agency owner, it is no good you are starting to work or you are picking some niches to work with that you have no interest in whatsoever.

If you want to work with fitness practitioners and gym owners, but you literally have no interest in fitness whatsoever, you’re probably going to resent actually working with that business.

This is so important when you’re first starting a new business. You need to be enjoying what you are doing. If you have no personal interest for the initiatives that you’re working with, you’re going to lose motivation and everything is going to fall to the wayside.

When you’re starting out, think about the things you’re passionate about in your personal life.

• Do you have certain hobbies?
• Do you have certain interests?
• Do you like to read about certain topics?

If so, then look for industries that are relevant to those interests. If you can work with an industry you are genuinely passionate about, you’ll be able to get much better results because you personally invested in what that company is doing.

You’re actually going to be interested in it. You’re not just working with them for the money alone. Pick your passion when you are considering whether or not to work with a business or put them on your lead list.

That’s the criteria. So what are the best niches? Well, let’s get into it. I’m going to highlight some niches that are certainly suitable for SMMA owners in 2024 and beyond, which have worked time and time again, and also some that are trending right now.

But what’s really important to highlight, and just please take this advice, you can make any industry work. You truly can. As long as the business falls into the criteria that I have just gone through. With that in mind, what niche should look out for.

Classic SMMA Industries: Food and Beverage, Fitness, Health

Firstly, let’s look at the three classic SMMA industries, and we’re going to break these down a little bit more to give you some idea. That is

• Food and beverage
• Fitness
• Health

And everything underneath that, all the sub-niches within that or the micro-industries.

Now, it’s important to note that within these three major industries, they are more saturated than others out there. They are the classic. They are the basic that people go for when they’re first starting an agency.

It’s very important that you are local to these companies if you are reaching out to them because that’s what’s going to give you that in over somebody else.

Food and Beverage

• High-end restaurants
• High-end bars
• Street food vendors
• Food subscription services

But I emphasize high-end because if the restaurant has an average order value of $20, it’s going to be really hard for you to get a customer for that business and actually be able to sustain a profitable ad campaign at that level.

Fitness

• Membership gyms
• High-end coaches
• Online fitness coaches
• Supplement businesses

Any membership gym is always a great client for social media marketing agencies. Coaches as well, but they have to be high-end coaches, not somebody that’s charging $20  a month. Somebody who’s getting at least a couple of hundred dollars per month for a coaching service, they’d be great for you. Even online fitness coaches.

Then also we have supplements: any company selling supplements, great supplements within fitness.

Health

• Dentists
• Chiropractors
• Hair transplant clinics
• Spas
• Nails and hair

I find hair salons, they need to be high-end. Men’s barbers just don’t really work. They’re too low-end.

High-end hair salons that are doing colors and things like that can be great clients.

Real Estate

• Real estate agents
• Property developers

Real estate agents are great. Now, I personally haven’t worked with any real estate agents in my agency. That’s because I was really good at selling them back when I worked in corporate sales. I was sick of them by the time I started my agency. But I know many people who have built multiple five-figure-a-month agencies and six-figure agencies from real estate agents, both on the buying side and on the selling side, these are lead generation clients, definitely one to look out for.

Homeware and Furniture

• Homeware
• Furniture
• Kitchen showrooms
• Bathroom showrooms

These businesses do need to be established if they’re not selling products online already. But if they have the capacity to sell products online, you could upsell them to help them build a Shopify website, for example, or outsource that and then start running their ads, but they need to be established.

Automotive

• Car dealerships
• Car detailers
• PPF wraps
• High-end valet services

We also have the automotive industry. Car dealerships have more of a brand awareness standpoint. We also have car detailers, PPF, and high-end valet guys who can be really, really great clients. Not somebody you’re spending or paying a few bucks to clean your car. High-end guys that are charging at least $50 per person. It can be really, really great clients.

Other Contractors

• Roofers
• Construction companies
• Bricklayers
• Landscapers and gardeners

Emerging SMMA Niches

Under emerging SMMA niches, we have things like:

• Cryptocurrency businesses
• NFT platforms (Non-Fungible Tokens)
• Businesses leveraging blockchain technology

I’ve already highlighted that cryptocurrencies can be great. NFTs could also be really good if you know someone running NFTs. Quite a hard industry to get into. Anyone with blockchain technology is a great trend to look into right now.

Advanced Niches for Experienced Agencies

Software

And linked to the technical side, we have SaaS products or software as a service. Software businesses can be really great clients. Certainly not for beginners, though. I certainly wouldn’t advise software for beginners.

You need to be an established agency and be able to get results. Because anyone who’s running a software company is pretty tech-savvy, and you’re going to need to prove yourself to them. So get some case studies before you reach out to them.

E-Commerce

E-commerce isn’t even really a niche because e-commerce is just online commerce. It’s online sales, any business that sells products online.

Within e-commerce, we have every possible sub-niche you could think of. We have pet stores, you have apparel, which is a great niche that people like to go for. Avoid startup apparel, though. Trust me, only go for apparel that has good reviews.

The Holy Grail SMMA Niches

E-commerce, info products, and lead generation are the holy grail niches for you to reach out to as an agency owner, but they are not for beginners.

I’ve seen so many agencies start and fail because they want to run before they can walk. They go for e-commerce businesses from the get-go. It just doesn’t work out because e-commerce business owners are people who are starting online businesses.

They are tech-savvy, similar to SaaS. They understand that they need to be running ads. They’re not going to let some jumped-up guy who’s just started an agency who’s never run ads before. If they do, then you’ve got extremely lucky and you positioned yourself very, very well.

Strategic Approach for New Agencies: Start Local

But for most people out there, you can’t just jump into e-commerce unless you have worked in a previous marketing agency and have other case studies that you can leverage that may be arms, even yours.

My advice would always be, if you want to move into e-commerce, start local with local industries, with local businesses, and then get case studies, leverage those case studies to move into it later down the line.

High ticket lead generation is also an exceptional niche for you to get into. But again, you’re going to need experience to start local with some of the normal players, some normal industries, any of the ones I’ve just gone through, and anybody else that fits the criteria. Get enough case studies to then move into high-ticket lead generation, e-commerce, or info products.

Final Thoughts: The Key to Success in SMMA

I hope this has given you some food for thought, and I hope this has given you the ability to think about some businesses in your area. I just want to remind you again, there is no set niche that is going to make you kick off your agency in 2024.

Hard work, resilience, determination to speak to your targets, your outreach to follow a sales strategy that works and is proven time and time again. Learn from someone like myself. That is what’s going to help you be a successful agency owner.

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