How To Build A Profitable Marketing Agency In A Week [For Less Than $100]

How To Build A Profitable Marketing Agency In A Week

Building a successful business doesn't have to take years or decades to build.

You don't need to have a physical store open somewhere.

You don't need 10s or 100s of employees to run it.

You?don't need to have tens of thousands ?saved up.

You don't even need to suffer from low-profit margins or wait for profitability.

Did you know you can start and run a business within a week?

There are a?bunch of businesses that require little effort ?to set up.

In this article, we're going to discuss how you can start a successful (profitable) marketing agency in a week.

For almost a year, I ran a marketing agency and was able to experience the ups and downs of building and running a marketing agency.

It gave me an insight into how to start a business.

How to hire people to help you run a business.

I even learnt all about the challenges that?marketing agency ?owners faced.

I, for one, struggled for months and months before I finally decided to step away from the agency.

This article is going to be a crystal clear, step-by-step process to building and growing a wildly successful marketing agency in less than a week.

It's going to show you how to avoid the mistakes I made so you don't go down the same path.

I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about starting a marketing agency and building it for less than $100.

Everything in this article would require you to pay $1000s for a 'guru's course,' but I believe that this information should all be public.

I've managed to boil down the agency business model into 6 simple steps that anyone can follow.

Let's begin.

Your niche

The very first step to building a profitable marketing agency is to simply pick your niche.

Your niche is going to be the target audience that you're going to go after for your services.

Owning my own agency, I made the mistake of going after real estate agents.

On the surface, this seems like a great niche, right?

However, there were two main problems with this niche.

The first problem was that everyone and their mother was?in the same niche .

The second problem was that real estate agents, in general, don't earn enough money to afford your service.

It's important to remember that real estate agents are self-employed - they're not business owners.

In fact, a real estate agent's salary is extremely low on average.

In the UK, an agent makes roughly ￡41,000 per year. That's about $56,000.

In the US, an agent's average salary is $84,000.?

Although this sounds high, you're going to be charging $2000+ for your services per month.

This comes around to $24,000+ per year.

Already, that's almost half of the UK agent's salary and a little less than a third of the US agent's salary.

You're going to struggle to find agents willing to give up this much of their income for some marketing and advertising.

Add on top of this the fact that some agencies provide advertising for their agents, then you're in a situation you can't win.

Find a niche that can afford your services.

There are great niches like outdoor hiking brands, construction companies, surgeons, etc.

Do a little bit of research and ask yourself if this niche:

• Needs your service
• Can afford your service
• Is easy to reach

By easy to reach, I mean how easily are you able to find a lot of these businesses online.

For real estate agents, it was really easy to find agents on Facebook, LinkedIn, and on the internet in general.

For your niche, how easy (or hard) is it to find and reach them?

There may be a situation where you've started your agency and then you realise that you don't like working with this niche.

In that case, you can try different niches until you find one that sticks.

Later, we're going to discuss how?Hawk Prospecting ?can help you reach your niche.

Finding your first niche should only take a few hours.

Your service

Although we're talking about a marketing agency here, you might want to think about another service.

Marketing agencies are everywhere.

Although this doesn't mean that you can't be successful too, it just means that there might be a service that is a lot better to specialize in.

Copywriting is one of the best skills ?anyone can have.

Copywriting, alone, can make you a millionaire.

Yesterday, I wrote an article on how to?optimize your product messaging .

It shows you the difference good copy can make for a business or brand.

There are tons of brands out there, e-commerce brands, that own a large mailing list and not doing anything with it.

If you position your copywriting/email marketing agency the right way, tell them that you'll run their?first campaign for free, then you're able to land some big clients where you can produce excellent results.

Imagine that a company has 10,000 emails on their list.

They have a jumper that they're discounting which costs ￡40 now, after the discount.

You write an excellent email and you get a 30% open rate.

That's 3000 people opening your email.

Now let's say 2% of those people convert. That's 60 people from the 3000 who open your email.

60x40 is ￡2400 from one email.

Email marketing and copywriting is an incredibly simple way to grow a business' revenue without spending more on advertising.

It's essentially a free way of increasing revenue.

Marketing is a pretty broad service.

There are a bunch of ways you can market a business.

• Facebook/Instagram adverts
• Google/YouTube adverts
• Email marketing
• SEO marketing
• Pinterest ads
• Quora Ads
• TikTok ads
• and so much more

Pick a marketing service or find a completely separate service and just go for it.

Make sure, again, that this service is something that your niche needs.

For this, you're going to have to research a little about your niche.

What are some ways they advertise already?

What are their main problems?

Where are their inefficiencies?

The more you know about your niche, the easier it will be to relate to them.

I know what you're thinking - do you need to know anything about the service you're offering?

The answer is no.

You're going to have to learn the basics, but the next step I show you will flip the switch in your head.

Once the service and niche are picked, craft a short and powerful value proposition.

This should be the structure you follow: We help [adjective][niche][transformation][no-brainer].

Here's an example, because I know that won't make sense to a lot of people:

"We help mission-focused keto brands double their revenue in 90 days or less... Guaranteed."?

If you owned a keto brand, you'd instantly be hooked by something like this.

Make sure, however, your value proposition is something that is doable.

You never want to overpromise and underdeliver, you want to underpromise and overdeliver.

Your team

The most important part of this whole thing is the team.

One of the best skills an entrepreneur can have is?the skill to hire and manage people .

The role of a business owner is not to run the business, it's to?cast a vision ?for the business and put systems and processes in place for the vision to come to life.

I've been reading 'The E-Myth Revisited ', and that book explains this perfectly.

Working in your business just means that you've gone ahead and found yourself a job.

You've trapped yourself in the same thing you're trying to escape from.

The only issue now is that if you don't make it work, then you get paid zilch.

That's why you're going to have to start building an A-team.

Like I mentioned earlier, you're not going to need 10s or 100s of employees to build this business.

You don't even need 5.

To start with, you just need one person who can help you.

The great part about this is that you don't have to pay this person anything until you're getting paid yourself.

Depending on the service you have gone for, you're going to want to hire someone who knows their way around the service.

Someone who has experience with the tools you're going to use to advertise your client's business.

If you're looking for a marketer, you're going to want to find a 'media buyer.'

Simply head over to Upwork and place a new job listing.

Add a little description about your business, the job role, the expectations, and the fact that you're looking for a laid-back person you can work well with and grow together with too.

You can also go a step further and look for a commission-only salesperson or virtual assistant too.

Join a bunch of?Facebook groups ?where salespeople or virtual assistants hang out and write a short post saying if someone is interested, to message you.

That's all you have to do.

Keep checking over it day after day to see if people are replying or applying to the job roles.

Interview them and make a decision on who you think you can work with.

Here's an article about?making good decisions ?- it should give you a good idea of who to hire.

If you're able to fill both positions, then you're winning.

However, the most important role to fill is the service delivery role.

In the interview, just get to know the person, ask some questions about their experience, how they work, results they've gotten, niches they're experienced in, their style of work, etc.

Layout the expectations on how you expect to work together - you're essentially learning if you can co-exist in the same company.

You can move on to the next steps as you wait for this one to play out, so let's move on.

Your branding

Agencies are increasingly growing and so their bad reputation and service delivery is becoming more and more notorious.

With that said, you may want to build a personal brand, or a company, rather than an agency.

Think of a name, don't make it too related to 'media' or 'agency.'

If you're going for a personal brand, just go for your name.

From here, create a logo and the colours that represent your brand.

This step is important because businesses will find it a lot easier to put their trust in a business that has a social presence.

Once you've established your branding, you'll want to build a simple site.

The great part is all of this can be done without you, once again.

Go on Fiverr and find someone who builds funnels or landing pages.

You can get an entire funnel that looks and feels amazing for less than $50.

A ninja tip would be to ask your media buyer for previous results he's got and get their permission to post it on your site.

It's crucial you have your media buyer's consent for this because you'll just be lying to your clients and yourself if you don't have permission to use it.

This adds social proof that your team can really deliver on the value proposition you promised.?

Within a day, you should be able to either build a site and complete the branding on your own or pay someone to finish all of it for you.

Again, all the branding and the site can be created within a day by a freelancer on Fiverr.

So don't waste your time making everything to be perfect if you're?able to spend a bit of money to get it done professionally ?by others.

Your channel

You're finally ready.

You've got the niche down, you've got your service ready, and a small team who will help you deliver the promise, the value proposition you've laid out.

Now it's time to launch.

Launching, however, doesn't mean that people or businesses will be flocking to you for help.

You have to actively go out and find these people, your niche, and nurture them.

This is where most agency owners start to realise that the business is actually a lot harder than it seemed.

This is when I realised that, as an introvert, I had got myself into a heap of trouble, a mess that I can't imagine being in.

The good thing is that an introvert can still make it in this business model.

Here's an article outlining how you can?successfully be an introverted entrepreneur .

The first step to finding your first client is finding your channel.

In the first step where we found our niche, we also found out that it's somewhat easy to find these people online.

In most cases, the easiest way to find business owners in your niche is through LinkedIn and Facebook.

Here are the strategies for both.

On Facebook?- join a bunch of groups related to your niche.

Make sure that the groups are not full of spam by only joining groups where the number of posts is relatively low compared to the number of members in the groups.

In most cases, you'll get accepted into the group and you're going to instantly be exposed to a collection of potential leads.

You're going to want to go through the 'members' area and find people who are likely to be your target audience.

Build a list of these people, add them, and start nurturing them.

You can also make value posts in the groups asking people to comment below if they want to receive something.

This could be a '5-step strategy to automating their business growth,' or anything that they may find useful.

On LinkedIn?- you can follow the same strategy by joining groups.

However, it's better to simply use the LinkedIn search feature, filter by industry, job role, and location, then build a list of leads that way.

Here's the issue: these platforms, LinkedIn especially, are limited to the number of people you can reach per day or per month.

Previously, I could connect to 100 new people per day with no issues on LinkedIn.

Today, you can get banned and flagged for automation after about 20/25 connections a day.

That is why I recommend combining these strategies with?Hawk Prospecting ?- my B2B prospecting software.

I build?Hawk Prospecting ?to accommodate for the challenges that marketing agency owners face when prospecting.

It's a B2B prospecting software that helps you find names, emails (personal and work), numbers, social media, detailed business info, detailed personal info, and more, on your prospects.

It's great because it's a super easy, super simple way to fill up your pipeline.

On top of this, we've got the largest database out of any other software housing over 2.5 Billion+ prospects.

The data is accurate, recent, and refreshed every 90 days.

You can read all about?Hawk Prospecting ?here.

The information you find on?Hawk Prospecting ?enables you to reach decision-makers who can make a decision to work with you.

You're able to find their emails and numbers, or other social media accounts to contact them through.

This is crucial because neither Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other platform provides this information on prospects.

The important thing here is to craft powerful messages and outreach that get your prospects interested.

That's why nurturing them is important.

Learning all about their business and pain points is the best way to see if you're able to help them.

When you know this, you can craft relevant, personal messages that resonate with your prospects.

Here are more?client acquisition strategies all marketing agencies can use.

Again, LinkedIn, Facebook, and email are the three best ways to contact your prospects.

If you managed to find a salesperson to hire, you can work together to build systems and processes for reaching new prospects consistently.

Once again, I recommend having?Hawk Prospecting ?as part of your system because it's built to work with agencies.

What comes after?

Once you put everything into action, you'll start seeing interest from potential clients.

The next step is to book them in for a Zoom call.

Don't overthink ?this step too much - the first few sales calls I got on, my heart raced and I felt more nervous than I ever had before.

Even though I had a?door-to-door sales job ?before this, this still felt like the scariest thing ever.

The only way to get through it is to be yourself and be genuine.

The only way to succeed is to?step out of your comfort zone ?and do things you've never done before.

I can't promise it gets easier, but you get used to the pressure over time.

Get on the call and connect with your prospect.

Ask them about their business, get them talking about their needs and their wants.

Try to expose the thing they're yearning for.

Then, tell them what you do, how you can help them.

Remember: people buy with emotions and justify with logic.

Target their emotions, what will your service do for them on an emotional level.?

Yes, it will grow their business, yes it will make them more money, but what will this enable them to do?

Will it let them step away from their business and spend more time with family?

Will they be able to comfortably go on those holidays they want?

Only after talking to and connecting with them will you know what that thing is to them.

Once you've targeted emotions, you're going to want to logically explain why it will work for them too.

Leverage your media buyer's results.

"These are the results my team has gotten for others, they're the sort of results you can expect to see too."

Now we're not living in Narnia - there will be push back, it will never go this smoothly, and so you should prepare for the worst.

There will be resistance, questions asked, but when you overturn their objections you should?have your first client not long after.

The only thing left now is great service delivery that keeps your clients from leaving.

Congratulations, you've built a profitable marketing agency in a week!

That is how you build a successful marketing agency quickly.

Now, a word of warning - you're probably not going to be this successful within a week.

You'll have everything up and running within a week, but don't expect to get clients coming to you like bees to a flower.

You're going to get a lot of rejection, you're going to get a lot of nos.

You're going to get demotivated, but it's important that you have a?powerful WHY , a reason for doing what it is you need to do to succeed.

You need a?vision ?of what your life could look like, will look like, after you've successfully scaled these obstacles.

The important thing is not to give up.

When you have the right systems in place, it's only a?matter of time until you succeed .

Have you found this article helpful?

If so, please comment below and share this article to anyone you think will find it valuable.

Till next time,

Mohamad