Social Media Marketing

By reading our entire section on marketing you will have almost enough knowledge to start your own social media marketing business. In this section we will fill you in on the things you need to know to start your own social media marketing business and start getting clients that will pay you monthly.

The first step to starting a social media marketing agency is to create a very impressive website and set up professional looking social media profiles for your business. I recommend using software like wix.com for building your website without code and watching some YouTube videos that you can follow along with on building a site on Wix. Your site will want to talk about what services you offer and list all your social media pages as well as your phone number and email. I suggest searching other social media marketing agencies and looking at what their sites look like to get a good idea. The main services you want to offer are, social media audits where you look over their current social media pages, social media management where you charge a monthly fee based on how many posts you will do each week, influencer marketing where you secure paid influencer ads for your clients, website development, community growth and engagement where you focus on growing their accounts and communicating with the community and general consulting on marketing strategy. Your site should list these services as well as a brief description of how you accomplish these tasks without telling too much information.

One of the main things that you will have to provide when running a social media marketing agency is content for their social media pages. Even if you are not very good at creating graphics or videos you can always outsource this work to fiverr.com or upwork.com. You can search up social media post creation and get quotes from a few top-rated sellers in order to negotiate a good deal based on the fact that you will be doing a lot of work with them. Once you have someone that can make content for you, you are pretty much ready to take on new clients.

When you are starting out the main thing you will want to focus on is building a book of business that can leave reviews on your services and allow you to show your work to future clients. It may be difficult without any work history to secure a paying customer starting out. A great way to get some work under your belt is by reaching out to some friends that own businesses and offering to take care of their social media for a discounted rate or even for a month free just to get some examples to show other businesses. If you don’t know any friends that own a business, you can search up local businesses on google maps and look for ones that have no social media or website that you can reach out to. Once you have a list of businesses lacking in the social media marketing department you can go into the business and hopefully talk to an owner in person or get their phone number. You can also try to find an email address to reach them with or call on these businesses hoping that they will be there. If a business is struggling with social media, it will be easier than you think for them to accept a no strings attached free month of service to see what it can do for their business.

The beauty of giving out a month for free is that if you do a good job and prove yourself valuable to the business, they will most likely keep you on for another month where you can start getting paid for your services. Even if they don’t keep you though, you will at least be left with some profiles you can point to when looking for new clients and you will have some experience as well. If you can bring on 10 clients for free in your first month, you will probably retain over half if you are marketing well and those 5 clients could be enough to make a living alone!

Once you have built up some examples of social media profiles you have run from offering a free month of service to clients, you can begin sharing these examples with other businesses that you can then charge up front for your services. It is important to try and keep track of how many additional customers you are bringing to a business so that you can show that to your client as well as new potential clients as proof that your services have been worth the money. A great way to do this is by running a promotion on the social media pages for a business that require them to mention the post and message the account. You can keep track of how many people took advantage of the promotion to show the owner how much money you have helped bring in. You can emphasize the fact that there is probably a lot more business you have brought than the promotion, but it shows solid proof that you are building value for their company. You can then go to other similar businesses with these numbers and show them what you have been able to accomplish for other businesses. If you have no track record of success it is hard to secure new clients but if you can prove without a doubt that using your services is increasing the revenue of other businesses, then it will be hard for them to turn it down.

In order to consistently grow your customer base, you will want to make use of these marketing strategies on a daily basis in volume. You should set a strict schedule for yourself that will allow you to get in front of a lot of business owners each day. You should set aside 5 hours a day for looking through businesses on google and finding ones that have poor social media presence and poor-quality websites. You can call them right from their Google Business page and ask to speak to the owner. Make sure you have a good pitch memorized for these calls so you can get as efficient as possible in securing new clients. If you call 100 businesses a day you should certainly get at least a couple new clients per week and within a few months you could have enough recurring customers to make a good living. You should start with local businesses first and you can also set aside another 2 hours a day driving around to these businesses and trying to secure a contact for the owner. Another hour of your day should be spent calling on and emailing people that you need to follow up with. The rest of your day should be used to take care of any work clients that you currently have. If you stick to a schedule like this every day, you will be sure to get a huge book of business overtime. Once you have grown your book of business you can spend more time working for your clients and less time marketing. You can also start making use of referral programs for the clients you already have. Most business owners tend to know other business owners they can give you contact info for and let them know about your services. You can offer them a free week of service or an additional free service for securing a new account for you. If you offer something for their help, they will be much more willing to reach out to people and get you more business.

Another way you can gain clients for your social media marketing agency is by of course making use of social media marketing. You may want to buy some followers, likes and comments for your Instagram page to build some credibility starting out. Don’t go too crazy with this though, I would only recommend buying about 1,000 followers and then growing the rest organically. It is important also to make sure that your posts have several likes purchased that make sense for how many followers you have. Look at other profiles to get an idea of what this ratio should look like but 10% of the total followers in likes and 10% of likes in comments is a good rule of thumb. Once you have some social proof on your profile you can begin following businesses that you believe could use help on their site or socials. Once you have followed them you can reach out to them with a direct message offering to help them with an aspect they are lacking in. You should add this to your marketing routine and aim to message 100 businesses each day. You may want to offer a service or week for free as a trial to these businesses as well depending on how new you still are. I would suggest just offering a discount though to give off the idea that you are a professional already.

As we mentioned from the start, I suggest you read through our marketing section so you can learn how to use online marketing to grow your clients’ businesses. However, I will go over some basic tips here that can be useful for running an effective social media marketing agency. You must keep in mind that the goal of running a SMM agency is not just to post pretty pictures on their profiles and build them a nice site but rather to drive traffic to their business and increase their overall profits. This is what your clients will care about at the end of the day. If you are unable to do this, it will be difficult to keep clients for very long at all.

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your clients is by joining groups that pertain to their business on Facebook as well as groups that are in neighborhoods around their business. Once you are in these groups with the profile you made for them you can start responding to and building value to people’s questions and posts. After you have proven yourself a valuable member to their group you can make a post introducing yourself as the owner and giving a summary of their business with an exclusive offer for the group.

Another way to drive business to your clients is by following other competitors with the Instagram profile you have made for your client and then adding the people that follow that competitor. You should create a routine of doing this every day and sending messages to these people with exclusive offers to your client’s business. If you do this in volume everyday you will be sure to gain some followers if you are creating quality posts on their profiles and these people will already be customers in that industry. Just be careful not to over do this because it could lead to the account getting restricted.

Making use of short form videos like Tik-Tok and Instagram can also be a great way to get the word out about your client’s business. You should make a couple accounts aside from their main accounts so that you can blast videos on them each day. You should try to spend one day each week shooting creative video ideas of your client’s products and then you can use these videos to post to each account you made throughout the week. If you post 20 videos a week to a couple different Tik-Tok and Instagram reel profiles, then you will be sure to reach some people that may gain impulse to buy. If your client’s business is a brick-and-mortar location and does not sell online, then you can tag the location of your video and hashtag the city to show the video to mostly local people. You will want to start buying phones with service so you can have a lot of accounts on social media without getting them restricted. This will become more difficult to do as time goes on and you do not want to get accounts shadow banned. Make sure to check out our section on making quality video ads to learn how to make videos on large scales with cameras and AI.

Once you have grown your business to a level that you are comfortable with you can then begin to outsource this work to people on fiverr.com and upwork.com completely. At this point you may have become well acquainted with some people on there that do great work and you can message them about working for you full time. A lot of the people on these sites live in countries where the dollar is worth much more than their currency so they will be happy to work for fair wages and will be grateful enough to work hard unlike a lot of people in America. You can give them a list of tasks for each day the night before and they will be sure to get them done well. You can also quality check their work before posting and make sure it is up to your standards. Once you have hired people to do the tedious tasks like messaging, following and unfollowing, and posting content you can begin focusing on marketing your business and bringing on higher paying clients based on your new level of experience.

If you follow the steps and tips, we have laid out in this section you will be sure to grow a profitable social media marketing agency in no time. Keep in mind that the prices you can charge for your services will be dependent on the profitability of a new customer for your client. For example, you can charge much more per month to run accounts for an expensive software company than for a small burger joint. Keep this in mind as you grow and gain a track record so that you can make the most money possible while chasing new clients. Remember, just like any other business continue to stay persistent and learn something new about your industry every day. Life will reward those that work both harder and smarter than the rest.