Top 5 Secrets for Running a Large Niche Digital Agency

Foreign. Here we go. A new topic for a new podcast and a new YouTube show. Ladies and gentlemen, Aviarya. Father of two girls, six dogs, husband to superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Vocals. Today's topic is what are the top 5 things I learned running Internet vocals for the last 10 years? For all you digital marketing agency founders or want to start an agency, want to be a freelancer, do whatever, listen to this very carefully because this has been a great ride of 10 years. One thing that I learned was that small and medium sized agencies, it's better to stick to a niche. Like I stuck to hospitality for 10 years and that allowed us to be specialists in the market. You don't go to very large companies being specialists, but for a smaller company you're okay with working with specialists. So we were happy, we were lucky enough to be able to find our niche and that they we're digging deeper, found our sub niche and we're trying to able to do only hotels, hospitality, tourism, it's enough. Never be scared of finding a sub niche. It's never too narrow. Find it, stick to it and become an expert at that subject. Because there are so many nuances of just a niche for you to be able to perfect your craft, understanding that, understanding the softwares and tools that go around one industry, understanding the pain points, you become a champion and then your agency partners have no, your clients have no option but to work with you because you know so much. And besides, I'm assuming that you're good at what you do. So that's the one thing that I learned. Always find your hero micro niche. The other thing that I found was from day one I wanted to be a personal brand. Much before this whole world of personal branding came into being, I wanted to be the face of the company. Because I'm a hotelier myself, I used to run a very successful travel company. I learned I ran a very successful online affiliate travel network as well. So I understood this and I wanted to say the message in the right words to the right people so that they could hear me. It's just like going to a fine dining restaurant or a McDonald's or you know, any, any of your famous restaurants where you know that you're going for the recipe. Now nobody wants to mess with the recipe. So I was finding it difficult to hire people to be able to give to them the recipe to handle. So I became the face of the brand and that has helped me in the last 10 years because today, in today in the hospitality arena, and I say this with all humility. Abhijit Arya ABHI Arya is synonymous with digital marketing. It's synonymous with Internet mobiles, is synonymous with hotel digital marketing. Any new hotel or company that opens up means at least get an opportunity to pitch to them. So that's been a huge sort of branding exercise for us. Sometimes these things were not very deliberate. We didn't understand where they were to take us. But today in hindsight it's easy to tell you what are the five things I learned. And so this is the second thing. Always be the face of your company and tell people who you are, what you feel, what are your values, where you're coming from. Let people connect with the human behind the company. That's point number two. Point number three. What I realized was that in between I made a mistake of hiring salespeople and I thought I should corporatize the company and have those people work and I went into the back end. Whereas I realized that an agency always requires an ace batsman, somebody who's always scoring runs. So if that is you, then don't change the model that's working. Find people to do the operations, find people to do other things. But don't leave sales into anybody else's hand because the agency starts plummeting. We were going sky, you know, we were, we were, we were going, going up and then there was a time that we were, you know, almost, we found some turbulence and then I got back into sales and now every Tuesday I make five new sales calls to absolutely brand new clients who my team have prepped up. So 20 new clients every month and that allows us to close a few very good deals every month from there. So that is very important to be on top of the game and understand, understand what's happening. The fourth thing I would like to say is that as an agency founder you must always understand who are the people that you're hiring. Because it's very important to have a team. Because if the team keeps breaking, which it does because mid sized agencies like us always have competition from large agencies. People come and join our agency, work with a few very large brands, build their portfolio and leave all the best to them. But what about the agency? You have to keep it running, right? So you have to always find yourself talking to people all the time to be able to see if there are partners in the agency network or in any ecosystem in digital marketing who resonate with you and would like to join you because they love you and they love your values and they understand what you stand for and what you wanting to build. So always keep a lookout on the kind of people that you want to join your agency so that when you're traveling or whatever you're doing with your sales and all of that, you have somebody who has similar values, who's taking care of things in the company. And point number five is always remember that it's never, never enough to go and meet people you know off. If you're running a digital marketing agency or a social media agency doesn't mean that you skip offline events. If you're part of the hospitality industry, if you're part of the travel industry, if you're part of the photography industry or the real estate industry, whatever industry that you've chosen to be a part of, an agency, you know, whatever agency that you're opening or whatever for fraternity you want to be a part of, make sure that you're shaking hands, meeting people, wishing them on their birthdays, going for industry events. It's a lot of time. It's a lot, it's very time consuming, but somebody has to do it. You need to be there, out there, showing your face, telling people that I am here. All you agency, all you hospitality people, or all your travel people, all your hospital people, or your, all your real estate people. Wherever you're meeting a marketer is also coming in there. Initially, you might feel unwelcome. This happened with me because, you know, people said, why is a marketing agency coming to all hospitality events? Although I was a hotelier myself, I built my hotel business, so I was an insider. But because I was always portraying myself as a digital marketing guy, a social media guy who was coming and helping out agencies, I was always seen as an outsider coming for these events. But I love people and I love having conversations. So I, I, regardless of that, of what I thought people thought of my presence at these events, every time I was invited, I landed up and I made more than an effort to make a presence. My presence felt. Sometimes it was by giving a free talk on something which would really help people, sometimes for giving them ebooks or really virtual books. But I always went to every single event. I did make a mistake a couple of years back. I stopped going for events and I thought social media is going to help my brand go out there. But whatever you do doesn't matter unless you're shaking hands with people, asking them what's happening with their birthdays and anniversaries and condoling them for, you know, unfortunate events that might have happened in the, in their lives. Unless you go out there in the community actually being part of of of the fraternity, people are not making relationships with you and your agency suffers. So I learned a lot of things in the last 10 years running Internet moguls, but these are the five top things that come to my mind. If you ask me this question again after a month, maybe I'll come up with more options. My name is Avi Arya, father of two girls, six dogs, husband two superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Moguls. Thank you very much for watching this video and listening so far. I hope you like all the other episodes that I've made for you on this channel. Thank you very much. Signing off for now.