In this article I will show you how to start a social media agency. I reveal my own story of how I was able to build up my company starting with no experience, no clients and no results to be able to sell to potential customers.
It’s not easy, but it’s certainly worth it.
How to Start a Social Media Agency
So you’ve decided that you want to try something on the side to eventually replace the income you earn from your 9 to 5, and you are sure social media marketing is how you want to achieve that.
Where do you start?
Well firstly, don’t worry if you’ve never run a company before, never done social media marketing before, and never had any clients before. That was my position too. So let me take you on my journey from the situation described above to where I am today.
Invest in Yourself First
The first place to start is by learning the required skills for social media marketing. This is true of any agency/consultancy style business, learn the skill inside and out, live and breathe it, and then sell it like it’s something you’ve always been doing.
I started with a few generic books on social media marketing, they taught me the general principles but they were hardly worth the paper they were written on. 90% of the contents of these books, I already knew. “Don’t over-sell”, “Engage with your customers”, “Provide value” etc. Hardly anything more than the generic marketing principles I had studied during my MBA.
I knew I had to get into the gritty details with some in-depth online courses hosted by people who had already been there and done it. 3 or 4 courses (and a few refunds) later and I was confident I could take on multiple social media channels (certainly the big 4) and produce results.
I used free platforms in the first instance which contained surprising levels of detail. Sites such as the Open University-owned Future Learn are a good place to start with several free courses on social media. There are also plenty of helpful channels on YouTube that teach you how to set everything up, get social ad campaigns running, and the basics of how to attract followers.
But if you want to learnt the “secret sauce” you are going to have to get your wallet out. I used Udemy to purchase my courses, because, as you’ll discover, these YouTuber “Gurus” charge absolute fortunes for their courses (I’m talking £500+ here) and if you get more than 33% through the course there are no refunds.
Now, having already had to ask for a refund for a $20 course on Udemy, I didn’t dare risk taking that chance on a course that expensive, besides, I had already learnt everything I needed to.
I took a course on Facebook Ads, Instagram marketing and finally Twitter marketing. I then took a few more on how to actually set up the company in an agency model and learnt how to make contracts, service agreements, and how to set up and automation social media schedules.
The refunds actually were requested on the latter courses as they were pretty much charging you $20 for a PDF template I could have found for free on the internet, and they were very USA-centric, meaning the information on setting up a company was useless to me.
How to Get Results with No Clients
So I was ready, I’d completed my research and learning phase now it was time to go out and win some clients. But I had no results to prove any kind of success and I didn’t know any business owners (except the people I worked for at the time).
Whilst it is true that I was doing some social media marketing where I worked (helped me do some small scale testing). Social media was hardly a marketing tool for them, they are an industrial service provider selling to large companies tied into long-term contracts, so trade shows, buyer events, cold calling, door knocking and emailing were their main marketing strategies.
Social media was only a branding tool for them, nothing more. This meant I didn’t spend any meaningful time on it to produce results as it was, and still is, never going to gain them new business.
So what do you do when you’ve learnt all of these new social media skills and you have nothing to show for it? No results, no case studies you can present to clients, no word of mouth about your services from existing clients.
The answer?
Get results for yourself.
I had to prove I could achieve results by using my own social media accounts. I started with Instagram and using the knowledge I had acquired within 6 months I had built my account up to over 6,000 followers just using photos taken on my iPhone of the local area and editing them using the in-house filters they provide. It even got to the point of an agency working for the national outdoor clothing and camping chain Go Outdoors asking me to work with them in return for free goods.
Finally, results I could use.
How to Get Meetings with Potential Clients
The second part of the plan was to leverage my (tiny) network. I cold called businesses I knew would recognise the company I was working for if I dropped it into a conversation. I hated cold calling (still do, by the way), but when you have something you can both relate to (my current employer) it builds an element of trust and buys you enough time to pitch for a meeting.
My first meeting was with a local estate agent, the meeting went well, but I didn’t sign them up as a client because they had a conflict.
Their long-standing marketing company offered social media marketing services (at a huge premium over my prices) and the the owners of the respective businesses were friends, so he didn’t want to endanger their relationship by undercutting them. Understandable, but frustrating, and something totally outside of my control.
However, I managed to glean some useful information from that meeting. There was a local entrepreneur who he had just sold a house to close to where my parents lived. Again I got on the phone using the Estate agents name and the fact I lived further down the same street to gain trust before managed to get him to agree to setting up a meeting.
Whilst all of this was going on I had a second tactic, approaching businesses directly using Instagram, after all it was the platform I had most success on. This tactic also got me a meeting with a local pub/hotel.
How to Sign Up Social Media Clients
Now, getting someone to buy your service when it is almost totally unproven is a really tough sell. So what are your options? To be honest I could only think of one. Offering a free trial.
As this was my first shot at gaining some business I was perhaps unduly lenient, giving the client a 30-day trial. I think if I was starting over again I would only offer a 2-week trial.
The trial was a huge success, I got them to over 1,000 followers on Twitter and Instagram and gained them hundreds of likes for their Facebook page using ads, which spiked engagement and enquiries for restaurant and hotel bookings. I think they only had a few hundred followers on each platform previously, so this was huge for them.
The client was genuinely impressed and wanted to get me signed up to look after social media for not just this business, but several of their others in their group (they owned upwards of seven businesses). You can imagine what I was thinking, I was rubbing my hands, “I’ll be able to leave my job using the money from this client alone!”
How wrong I was.
I had a sit down meeting with the “big boss” of the business group to discuss my services. I got torn to shreds. It was like an episode of Dragons Den on steroids. What I now know, is that it was an act to get me to reduce my prices.
He used my own honesty against me. He knew I didn’t have any clients and I was trying to get my services for next to nothing, and in return I could use the names of his businesses (some of them were quite large) to sell other potential clients.
After much toing and froing over the next couple of weeks, including visiting those businesses, he got the price down to something like £30 per profile, per business.
After visiting the last business on the list (a bowling alley) I realised I was going to be spending so much time making nothing on these businesses that I was never seriously going to be able to make anything on any other companies I could bring on.
So I walked away, frustrated and pissed off that I had got sucked in and wasted all of this time. I also learn one of the most important rules, make sure you are working for the decision maker!
It was after this episode that I had my meeting with the local entrepreneur who lived local to my parents’ house.
First Social Media Client
What I didn’t appreciate whilst in my sulk about the shenanigans with the large business group what that I had gained something I’d never had before. Social media results for a client.
I finally had something I could present, something tangible from another business.
I set up a PowerPoint presentation on my MacBook demonstrating where the client was before in terms of follower numbers and where they were after I had finished, and emphasised the increase in business as a result. This went down well at the meeting with the local entrepreneur, and we agreed to the same 30-day trial on his wedding venue business.
The trial was another resounding success, and this time, finally, after months and months of trying and failing, I managed to get a client to sign on the dotted line, at a price I was happy with.
This relationship has since blossomed and I now look after not one, not two, but three of his separate businesses. I guess I got lucky with my early targeting by accidentally finding people who had multiple business ventures, but maybe it’s a legitimate tactic? Do well on one business and win the rest? I’ll leave that one up to you.
That was it then, I was up and running.
I used this portfolio to sell to other clients and pack in the job to go full time with it. It had not been an easy journey, but I would say I learnt more about running a business, dealing with rejection and closing clients in those 6 months than I have ever since really.
It was incredibly daunting, difficult, frustrating, upsetting, depressing and lonely. But I came out on the other side much better for it and with a business I could be proud of aged just 25.
2 years later and it has allowed me to expand my knowledge and services to include things such as blog writing, email marketing and SEO.
Conclusion
So there you have it, that’s the condensed story of how I went from working a normal job to owning my own social media agency. It was bloody hard, and for a long period not much fun, but I got there in the end.
Obviously, I have left a myriad of details out, but I will be writing lots more content on this subject in greater detail so you can learn for yourself if you are interested in setting up a digital marketing agency/consultancy (or something similar).
To any of you reading who want to start this style of business (it may not be social media) go out and work hard for that first client. Make sure you do such a good job that they can’t say no after the free trial and then use their results to gain another client and so on and so forth.
It’s not easy, no one has ever said it is. But if you want to live a life where you answer to yourself instead of a boss, then you are going to have to put in the hard yards I am afraid.
Oh, and work way more hours than your standard 9 to 5!