How to Start a Marketing Agency (Updated with Video!) - Ep. #267

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School.

I'm Eric Siu. And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about how to start a marketing agency. So this is something that both Neil and I can speak to, and I'm going to ask you first, your first agency called ACS, why the heck was it named ACS?

Dude, it's such an amazing name, don't you think? So ACS stands for Advantage Consulting Services. My co-founder and I weren't too smart when it came to picking domain names. But we did think this way. We're like, oh, if it starts with A, you know, next letter is D, it's going to be high up on lists when people sort things alphabetically. And that's how we came up with the name. This is 15, 16 years ago.

Wow, you were a teenager.

Yeah, I was a teenager. But back then, I know domains are hard to find now, they weren't that hard back then. So it's like there's no reason for our domain name to be advantageconsultingservices.com. That's too long of a domain name, even for today's standards.

So how do you start a marketing agency?

Yeah, so I'm starting up another one again, but I'm probably a bad person to ask that because I kind of cheat. I just use my brand and I get like 4,000 leads a month, and out of a portion of them, they're qualified. But if I had to do it all over again, I would do the same process. When you started Single Grain, did you want— technically you took it over and now it's yours, but when you took it over and you were doing agency stuff before, Didn't you want like a fancy website and like have all this cool copy and content? Well, that's all bullshit.

Yeah.

I remember I wanted a website like iProspect because they were the biggest when I was first starting off. Actually, they're still probably one of the biggest right now, but their copy sucks. What iProspect does, you can't do. You have to figure out your own unique angle. And don't worry about a fancy website or any of that. Like just keep it really simple. Go out there, go on Crunchbase, go find all the people who recently funded, Go email them all the shit they're messing up on, break it down into a really detailed Word document or PDF, tell them what they're doing wrong. From there, you can get money because you can just be like, here's how to fix it, and give them everything with screenshots and be so detailed that these guys are like, oh, we don't even need you. Because you know what? Most of those guys will be like, okay, let's just hire him. Then from there, you'll get clients and now you have the start of your agency. Then you can figure out your name, a website, all that kind of stuff. Before that, you don't need anything. Just break down how people are screwing up and people will just start hiring you.

Yeah, so first and foremost, we're assuming that you guys are good at marketing or fairly competent at it. So first step, be competent at marketing. And the second step, I mean, it's basically what Neil is saying. You have to do business development. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody should care who you are. You haven't done anything worthwhile yet, at least in front of these other big clients' eyes yet. What you can do is, for me, I mentioned using the tool Mixmax. I like using a tool like Mixmax. If you're starting out, use the Mixmax sequences. Set up a bunch of sequences and then reach out to these people. Have a bunch of templates set up and then just reach out. It's almost like you doing cold outreach. You are the sales rep in the beginning. There's different stages to entrepreneurship, right? You're the solopreneur in the very beginning. This is how you're going to get off the ground. Then you're going to start to hire people, then you're going to put processes in place, and then you're going to scale out the team. When you get to 7 figures or so, getting from one $1 million to $10 million, it's all about process from that point, right? But going from $0 to $1 million, it's all about, okay, making sure that you have the right people in place first, but it also starts with you making sure that you have— you're actually executing on work well and you're starting to get these things rolling. So reach out to these people first. Business development, I remember I got a client from Quora. I just basically answered a couple questions and one client was paying me $30,000 a month for SEO.

Wow.

And that was through Quora. So, think about where your people are hanging out too, right? You have, for example, if you're selling influencer marketing, maybe it makes sense to do BD through Instagram. I actually have a friend right now that does, you know, he's doing a lot of video stuff. He's just reaching out to a bunch of people through Instagram. He's picking people's brains and he's actually getting work through Instagram too.

Is it working well for him?

It's working well for him, yeah. It's just a couple thousand bucks here, a couple thousand bucks there.

What do you think he's making per month?

He's probably making about $4,000 a month right now.

That's pretty good. All right, so I got a better question for you.

Sure.

We give people too much shit. So if you were starting out today, what's the one thing you would do to get your first client? Just one thing.

Yeah, it would be free.

One strategy or tactic or whatever.

Free advice every single day. It's, hey, something's wrong with your website. You don't have a Facebook pixel on your site. You can just add Facebook Pixel Helper or Google Tag Assistant. Hey, you're missing this. And this is why it's important, right? Keep it really brief. Keep it custom tailored to them, maybe a couple sentences. People don't want to read a book, right? And then just keep doing the same thing over and over and over. Eventually, even though like people don't respond to you, I've seen people eventually cave. Like in the very beginning when I was doing this stuff, I'd see people respond. They'd be like, okay, I give in to your persistence. When do you want to talk? It's almost the same thing as when I first started talking to Neil, as a matter of fact, right? I sent a bunch of emails because I was so confused by some of the stuff that he's writing on his blog. What is link blending? Sending them an email. What is this? Sending them an email, right? Eventually it becomes a phone call and it becomes something better from there. You got to show value first and then from there you can scale out. So I don't know, what about you?

Yeah, so the one thing that I like doing if I was going to start off right now, it was the same thing that you mentioned. I'll just email people, give them free advice and just send them the email with this subject line, first name. So it'd be like, Eric, and then you put their company name in there, but here's it all together. So let's say I'm sending an email to Eric. I'd be like, Eric, comma, is there something wrong with Single Grain? Question mark. Or another version of it is, Eric, there's something wrong with Single Grain, and no question mark. And then he's going to open it, right? Who wouldn't open something when you get an email saying there's something wrong with your business? You're like, oh, that's my baby. There's something wrong with it. And then you're like, yeah, what's wrong with it is you're not paying me.

That's exactly what it is. The thing is, the thing is, it's funny to us right now, but like in the early days, like it's going to be a struggle. But using a tool like Mixmaxx or Outreach or ZenProspect, you can just make sure that you have a CSV with the company name, with their first name in there, and you can scale out this kind of outreach. It's really a numbers game at the end of the day. It's like, you know, how many people, what's, how many people are going to actually open? How many people are actually going to reply? And then from there you figure out, okay, you know, if you're starting out, you have nothing to do. All you have is time. Why don't you send out 100 emails a day? In the beginning, I was actually making videos for people and it would take me like 10 minutes per video, but it actually worked. I actually got some clients that way. So think about that. Like, it's gonna be hand-to-hand combat in the beginning and then you can start to think about all the other crazy stuff. Oh, you need a nice website and all this stuff. Right now, I mean, just have a Squarespace site with a form on it, whatever it is exactly. Reach out to people, start to build up, you know, start to build up your portfolio. Do some work for free, get some referrals that way, and it'll start to snowball.

But it's—

stuff's not— I mean, once you get it going, yeah, it's pretty smooth sailing, but it's going to be tough sledding in the beginning, just like anything good.

Yeah, and when Eric talks about it being like a funnel, think about Tinder. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I had a reader who told me they used my funnel articles to get more dates on Tinder, and I was just like cracking up. And they're like, yeah, it's like a funnel. You just keep swiping. The more people you like, the more responses you get from there. The more people you converse with, the more dates you get, right? So it's like the same thing. The more people you email saying like, Eric, there's something wrong with Single Grain, the more opens you're going to potentially get. The more opens you get, the more people reading your email, more people reading your email, more potential responses from there, more conversations from there, higher likelihood that someone's going to pay you.

I'm a Tinder user right here, so I'll speak to this a little bit.

Yes, please tell me how it is like using Tinder because I want to learn.

So with Tinder too, I mean, you have the ability to super like.

Wait, what's a super like?

A super like is saying, Oh, this person has basically favorited you, and they will see like a blue star. It's like, oh wow, that person favorited me. So you're standing out, right? So Neil talked about having a good headline first of all. So how can you stand out, right? If you have a good headline, people are gonna click through. If you super like, you have a higher chance of getting them to actually say yes to you, right? Last thing, you have to make sure, I mean also, I mean with a thing like Tinder, right, you gotta have a good image too. So image, you gotta test your images too. It's the same thing with your headlines. So the super like, the images, all that kind of stuff. But keep messing with it, and then keep slogging away. I mean if you're gonna give away, Give up in one month, saying that you sent oh like you know 100 or 200 emails or whatever. That's not the way to do it. It takes a lot of work upfront. Even when I took over Single Grain, like most of the leads were coming through Neil, and you know eventually we had to figure out like another way to to start generating leads again. And we can save that story for for another time. But yeah, I mean getting started in the early days for anything, it's hard to get your name out there. Just go do some pro bono work, do good work, and then things will start to happen. And that's it for today. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.

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