How To Start A Social Media Marketing Agency (SMMA: Step By Step for Beginners!)

Whether you want to build an eight figure business like I was able to, or make a little bit of money on the side starting your own social media marketing agency, SMMA might be the right business model for you. It has been for me. And the great thing about it, you can start with literally Nothing, not a dollar to your name and you can scale to making 5, 10, 15, 20, 50, $100,000 per month in a short period of time. So in this video I'm going to break down the five steps that I use to scale up and my social media marketing agency and how you can actually take that and start today. Hey, my name is Dylan Vanez and I run an eight figure SMMA or social media marketing agency. Now let's take a step back here and talk about what an SMMA is. Because simply put, an SMMA is just a social media marketing agency, digital agency, whatever you want to call it. And it's a business where I go out and I help other businesses do better online with social media and digital marketing. Now the crazy thing about social media and digital marketing is that I know how to use it. You watching this video probably know how to do it. And it's not that complicated for the kind of people that grew up with it. But there are tons of people out there, business owners that know they have to be using social media and using the Internet to make money, but they have no idea where to start. There's so much to do. Social media management, advertising, paid media, building a website, email marketing, funnel building ready goes on and on and on and on. And you can actually go ahead and offer these types of services to clients and get paid to do it, which is amazing. And there's actually ways for you to do this. Even if you have zero technical experience, if you don't know how to build a website or even how to make a social media post, you can offer marketing solutions to your clients. So let's go ahead and dive into this video. So first off, you need to determine what you're actually selling. There's a ton of different services that you can offer as an agency owner. So you want to make sure you're starting with either a few services or a really specific industry, which we'll talk about in a little bit here. But here's some of the services you can offer. SEO, pay per clip, right? PPC ads, Google Ads, Facebook ads, content marketing, social media management, email marketing, web design, logo design, graphic design, anything you can think about that's helping people do better online are services that you can offer. Now here's the cool thing if you know how to do the work yourself. So let's say, for example, you're a photographer. You can go out and actually offer photography services for clients and then take that content and put it on social media. And the great thing about this is it's 100% profit, meaning you keep every single dollar that comes in. But if you don't know how to do the work, let's say you've never built a website before, you can go out and hire someone else to do the work for you. And we'll talk about that in a little bit here. But you can hire someone who will do that work for you. And so one great thing about having an SMMA is you can do some of the work yourself and hire other people to do some of the other work. But really what you're doing is managing the whole project and seeing, making sure that it looks good and does a good job for your client. When deciding what service you're selling, there's a few things you got to keep in mind. So first you got to make sure there's demand for your service. You can't go out and sell something that no one wants. Right? And then you have to make sure that once you sign your first client, you're going to get them results that they are wanting. A lot of times social media marketing agency owners, especially new ones, fail to deliver for their clients and they end up in a place where they have to offer a refund or the client's not happy and they'll never get referrals from that client. One of the fastest ways to grow your SMMA is by having clients stick with you time and time again over a long period of time. An average client can stay a client for 12, 18, even 24 months. And if they're paying you a few thousand bucks every single month, that's quite a bit of money. But if they only pay you one time, that client's only worth, you know, two, three thousand dollars. And so it's really important for you to be able to actually deliver to your client, make them happy. That way they stay on for a long period of time. All right, next up is the age old question. When it comes to social media agencies, which is too niche or not too niche? That is the question. All right, that was a terrible joke. I'll show myself out. No, but seriously, the question that a lot of new agency owners ask is like, hey, should I pick an industry or a niche they say to just focus on? Should I sell just to plumbers or just to cosmetic surgeons. And so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to outline whether or not you should niche down. But first I'm going to break down if you do want to select an industry or a niche to select how you can do it. So first off, you're gonna wanna ask yourself three questions. Number one, can the niche that you're looking to work with afford your services? If you go work with like a local restaurant, for example, it sounds like a good client, right? There's someone you could maybe even know, like you know the owner. You could just go down and work with them in person. You could get results and they might even let you have some free food. But the problem is they're not able to pay a high amount of money. You want to work with clients who can pay you thousands of dollars a month, not hundreds. And if you work with clients who can't really afford your service and you're going to be spending all this time working for not a lot of money, we're looking for high value, high end clients to work with. And that's where the majority of your profit is going to come in. Now, the general rule of thumb I go off of is to look for clients and industries where people can pay you at least a couple thousand dollars a month. 1500 bucks, $2,000, $3,000. And the reason why is if you're only able to charge and cap out in the hundreds, 500, $700, you're going to be stuck with clients that are really just scraping by. And in my experience, I've found that the clients that have more budget to play with tend to be better clients. They stick on for a longer period of time and they don't become pain in the butts when they're always up your ear about everything you're doing. The clients that are just scraping by and they're giving you literally every last dollar are the ones you're going to hear from endlessly, day in and day out, wondering where their next client is or what the next thing you offer them is. Okay, and then the second question is, what do you have a natural passion for if you have these interests, things you used to do? For example, for me, I love soccer. I played soccer my whole life. I played college soccer. And so for me, my inclination was like, hey, how can I do something in the sports industry? Now obviously I didn't end up doing that, but at least it was on the list. Now when you have passions for stuff like this, you end up accumulating knowledge about it. And it's actually something that can set you apart from other people just out there trying to do the same industry. So again, for me, my knowledge was around sports, soccer, but I also liked real estate. And because I had an interest in being a real estate investor or selling real estate, and I loved houses, I was able to accumulate knowledge around it. And it actually made me excited to get up and actually work on this business. And then the third question here, defining your niche, is about your previous experience. So, like, what do you have experience in before? A lot of new agency owners, they find success in a niche that they worked in in the past. So, like, if you used to work in restaurants, maybe you could go work with restaurants. Or if you used to be a mechanic, you could work with mechanics or you worked at a dealership. All these options for you to actually work with something you have experience in. And so here's the way I look at it. It's kind of like a Venn diagram. You take what you're good at, right? Maybe something you have experience in. You take what your passions are, and then you take an opportunity of some people who could actually afford your service or people you have connections with. And you want to find the what's in the middle of that Venn diagram. And that would be the industry that you'd work with. So if you found something that you think could be your industry that you work in, or the question is, okay, should I specialize in this one thing? Because some people have more success being a general agency. I started out in the real estate marketing niche. That's how I got my first 20, 30 clients. But after a while, it made more sense for me to actually be more broad and target a broader audience. And so the question you need to ask yourself is like, all right, should I focus on one thing or should I be more broad to start? Eventually, the likelihood that you'll go broad is pretty high. You might end up going more broad down the road. Well, you can carve out a small section and a good recurring income stream by being specialized. So here's the thing. If the industry. This is kind of like the rule of thumb that I go off. If the industry that you're selecting to niche down in is something that requires or could you could benefit from having specialized knowledge. It'll help you. Let me give you an example. If you're working with dentist or cosmetic surgeons, and you know the language that the dentists use, you know what a crown is, you know the different kind of terms that dentists Cosmetic surgeons or whatever it is use, you're going to be able to set yourself apart from everyone else when you're out there pitching them. So if you walk into a dentist and you know the language that they use in their business, and then someone else walks in and doesn't know, you're going to stand out. And so I think the only major benefit to niching down is if it's in an industry where there's specialized knowledge that you actually know or can learn that that will help set you apart from everyone else. The main thing here, though, is do not let this idea of, like, what's my niche gonna be, what industry I'm gonna work in, stop you from taking action. It's one of the biggest mistakes I see new agency owners make is they think about, oh, what am I gonna name my agency? What's the domain, what's the logo? And then they never actually take any action. Our goal here is to get past the friction, get past the point of not knowing what to do, and get straight to the point of getting some kind of results. Okay, so where do you find potential clients and how do you actually prospect for them? Once you have established what you're selling, who you're selling to, and what that process is going to look like, you can start actually doing outreach. Now, there's literally dozens of ways to do outreach. I'm not going to dive into all those in this video. I'll do another video in the future about it. But I think what you want to be able to do is identify what's one or two things that you're able to and willing to do that consistently over time for 30, 45, 60 days, with the possibility you might never get a single client until, you know, 45 or 60 days later. Because this isn't a get rich quick scheme. If it was make Fast Cash now, everyone would be doing it. But obviously there's a process to doing it that if you can follow, it will work for you over time. But you have to be willing to put in the work over a long period of time to make it happen. And so for me, here's a couple examples. You can go on LinkedIn and do targeted outreach. You can find people in your industry and actually reach out to them. You can go on some of the freelancing sites like Upwork or Fiverr, or you can literally just pick up the phone and dial and call these people on my team that work for me that do all of that. I have a whole team that just picks up the phone and Calls people. I have a team that does LinkedIn outreach, and so I know all these methods work. You just have to pick something and work through it and. And become good at it. Now, keep in mind that different types of services and niches require different kind of outreach methods. You can't go into a local restaurant and do all these outreach methods of, like, cold email, because these restaurants don't often check their email. But you could have a lot of success going in and actually talking with them in person. Whereas if you're trying to target, let's say, online coaches, then you can actually do things like cold outreach. You can go in Facebook groups, you can do social media, because that's where your client lives. So think about, where does this client live? What's the place where they actually exist on, and how can I speak to them or talk to them in that place? All right, so the next step is to get your first client. Once you pick one or two methods that you can actually start doing for outreach, then you're going to start getting responses. All we look for early on is what I call a positive response. All we want to know is we want someone to say, hey, yes, I'm interested in, and then you can take it from there. Now, the first client is typically the hardest one. It can take you months, and you might feel like you're making zero progress. But the key is to stick with it and keep doing this over and over and over again and keep putting in the work. But you want to make sure that you're putting in the work in the right direction. If you put gasoline in the wrong hole in your car, the car's not going to go very far. So you want to be able to make sure that you're doing the right action and in the right way. Sales is ultimately a numbers game. When you have a lot of volume and what I call outflow, right, you're doing a lot of outflow or outreach. You're going to get a lot of inflow and people interested. And so if you're not getting enough inflow, go ahead and increase your volume. And again, make sure you're following a proven system so you're not putting your gasoline in the wrong hole. The good news is, is that once you sign your first client, the confidence is there, and it only becomes easier to move forward after that. So if you already have a client, you're in a great spot. If you don't have any clients yet, it's okay, I believe in you, and you can get there soon enough. And then the Fifth and final point here is to build your digital marketing team. And so what does that look like? You know, do I need to hire people? Should I use freelancers? And I'm going to break that down for you right here. So if you're getting clients, you're building that revenue stream, you can't do everything yourself. There's this idea I have called the growth fulfillment paradox. It's where new agency owners typically fall in new business owners in general, where they try to do all the fulfillment and they're trying to do all the growth. You can't do both. Eventually you're going to fail. Right? The man who chases two squirrels catches neither. And that's the same as your business. So as you're scaling, you need to focus on kind of one thing that you do well. Is it client acquisition, customer relationships, or, or is it the actual work, like actually building the websites or doing the social media content? So you need to determine, like, what are you best at and how can you focus now if you don't have any clients yet? Don't worry about that just now, but you will have to think about it in the future. Getting people to replace you can be tricky, especially if there's little things that you think only you know how to do or you're holding the knowledge in your brain. And there's a lot of agency owners out there that are never able to scale because they. They don't know how to add people to their team. Executing and actually building this team can be one of the hardest parts about building your smma. But when you do it successfully, the sky's the limit and you can have ultimate potential. And so here's a couple of tips when it comes to hiring. You can start just by hiring people for simple tasks. It's pretty common now for people to hire what's called a VA or virtual assistant. You can find someone that lives overseas in a country, for example, the Philippines, and they work for three or four or five dollars an hour, which by the way, is a very livable wage in the Philippines. And it can provide someone a really good income. And so you can find someone and you can have them trained up to be someone that can work for you and handle things like emails, client communications, and simple tasks. Once you've been able to actually hire someone for simple tasks, you can actually look and hire more technical people and freelancers for other roles. The thing is, when you're building the business, you want to be documenting the entire process of what you're doing in every phase of the Business. It's called building an sop. Basically, it's a standard operating procedure for how things are done. And so if you're the only person on the team, start by documenting what you do. Okay, here's how I outreach. Here's step one is I go to LinkedIn. Step two, I type this into the search bar. Step three, I do this and eventually you'll have a whole system on how to do a certain task. Once you do that for all the tasks you're doing, it becomes a lot easier to plug and play someone into your system and have them actually do those tasks. The only time you can't do it is if it's something you literally don't know how to do and you're having to hire someone like a freelancer or you know, someone else, like an employee to do for you, in which case you'd have to have them build the SOP for you. Now, here's the best and safest option when it comes to building your team. You actually want to work with freelancers first instead of full time employees. What you're going to do with this is you're going to keep your costs lower and it's going to give you more flexibility. Let me give you an example. When I first got started, I brought on my first employee way too early. I had a couple handful of clients and I brought her on to do social media management. The thing is, she spent half the day twiddling her thumbs, the other half of the day trying to do client work. And it didn't make sense. It actually made more sense for me to go find a freelancer who would do the work on a per project basis and basically like sub out or subcontract the work to them. And so if I got 500 bucks to do social media management for a client for a month, I would go find someone who could do it for 150. And I was keeping $350 just for kind of being like the person who got the deal and the project manager. And it's a really great way for you to actually get started building your team with much less risk. Now when you're doing this, this is the way I do it, is I actually give people I'm looking to work with a sample project. I give them a pilot project to work on. And what I do is I test them out, I pay them for it, but I see, hey, is this person high enough quality that I'm willing to put my name and my reputation behind it? If not, I look for someone else instead of, you know, working with that same freelancer. As long as you test out people before you actually engage with them and get into a commitment, you're going to save yourself from hiring the wrong type of people. Because if you bring on the wrong type of people now you have someone that's working for you and it just could be a major mistake where you have to fire them or, you know, I don't know what people's personal lives look like, but it's not a fun time to have to sit and actually lay someone off. So you want to make sure you're doing a lot of due diligence before you bring someone on. Here's when you should go from having contractors that to full time employees. Basically, once you can determine that, It'll be about 25% cheaper to have a full time employee instead of a freelancer, that's when you should look to hire someone full time. What's going to happen is you're going to save money and you're going to have someone working with you full time. The downside of it is that that employee that's working for you, you're actually taking on risk by having to pay them. Even if you don't get paid. That's one of the upsides of actually having a freelancer is if you don't get paid a certain month, you just give them less money because they're doing it on a per contract basis. But the upside of having an employee is you have someone that's hopefully loyal to you and your team. They're going to work with you for a long period of time, you can trust them better and you can keep more of the profit. All right, so that's pretty much it. Starting your own agency is not rocket science. It's actually a simple process, as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 or 5 in this video. So if you like this video, you got some value, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. I'd love to see you in the next video and hit that like button so that it boosts up an algorithm and I'll talk to you guys in the next video.