How To Initiate Your Own Digital Marketing Agency In 2024

What are the services digital marketing Provides?

Digital marketing,means online marketing, is the promotion of different types of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This covers not only web-based publicizing, social media, and email, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing.

How a Digital Marketing Business Can Be Started ?

These are the steps to follow if you want to start a digital marketing agency business in India:

Step 1: Decide Your Strategy.	Step 5: Register Your Business.
Step 2: Kickstart Your Online Presence.	Step 6: Build Your Core Team.
Step 3: Get Social, Literally!	Step 7: Stay Updated. Stay Relevant.
Step 4: Focus on Building Your Brand.

What  Types Services Digital Marketing Agencies provide?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)	Re-targeting
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)	Content Generation and Optimization
Website Strategy	Quality Link Building
Social Media Marketing	Affiliate Marketing
Email Outreach	Integrated Online Marketing Strategies

Digital Marketing Business Is Profitable or Not ?

If you are looking to make a bright career out of digital marketing or If you want to get into the digital marketing world, starting a digital marketing agency business could be the most profitable for you. Initiating a profitable digital marketing agency business is a great challenge and but can be a rewarding experience for you.

Expected salary 

Digital Marketing Is a Good Career?

Digital Marketing Is A Lucrative Career

As you start working in the digital marketing industry, you can earn a starting salary between 25-35k per month. … With changing things so rapidly in the digital marketing sector, you have to constantly be ready do great work.

Who people need for digital marketing services?

In today’s high competition time, every single business or company needs digital marketing. Digital marketing is not only gives an online business  exposure but also it is helpful in reputation management for the business. Digital marketing makes marketing easier as comparison to traditional business. It is the best way to reach more customers in less time.

Become Contractor Before Starting as a Founder

Having a good job which gives permission and pay you to have brain surgery without a lifetime of debt is a luxury many of us take for granted. Taking the jump of working for yourself has a list of risks so long that it could make for isolate blog post. What reduces a lot of that risk is actually developing the base for a business before taking the decision to do it full time. I suggest doing some part time contracting job on the side for a period while holding down a full-time job for a variety of reasons, chief among them…

It allows you walkout on your own in less risk

You get a feel of the entrepreneurial life when you start doing side work. From bills to having to put aside extra amount for taxes, the small but very important parts of running your own business come into play.

You also have to manage your time smartly if you are going to do a full-time job. This means working weekends and nights when you would rather be having your favourite food watching Netflix.

Making relationships as a contractor is also precious in that it may bring you referrals down the line. If you are able to settle your bills as a contractor then doing the transition into a one-person agency is going to be a lot easier than beginning from scratch.

Another view to managing customers as a side gig is that it gives permission you to become experienced in building contracts. You’ll have to become habituated to the process of keeping a proposal together, then a contract, and then sign the important documentation (NDA’s etc). It’s a part of the game,  you’ll want to streamline so that the time spent on onboarding new customers is reduced.

It gives you permission to build valuable relationships

If you are able to do any side job through mutual connections, by simply former coworkers or networking yourself , it will give you the necessary experience  when it comes to maintaining customer relationships and building.

Having to bargaining the cost of your services is another skill that many overlook early on.

Your time and expertise are worth something regardless of how intelligently you recognize the person on the other end. Building the ascertaining skill what price you should charge for a specific project or service will become extremely valuable down the line.

Design the Correct Business Model

There are many different ideas to set up a digital marketing agency. How you charge for your work as well as for your services you provide become a critical part of how efficiently your business is managed by you over time.

The most common ways to charge for services your customers are as follows:

Hourly

In general many consultants will opt to bill their clients per hour basis. It is because a lot of their time is one-on-one with the customers, directly in person or whether over the phone. This billing model becomes more complex service offerings and muddy over longer. 

In hours spent fluctuations on digital marketing for a single particular client are common; it is going to vary widely over the time period. There are many variety of factors in play: Launching entirely new campaigns and setting up or time spent on calls, promotions, restructuring accounts and maintaining something that is working well for them.

This is difficult to say I spent “X” amount of hours on this per week so that’s how I will charge you. It also might make the customer wary if they start asking question how long certain actions take per week. Until or Unless you are offering one-on-one consulting as a part of  service offering by you, I would stay far away from the per hour billing system.

Flat Retainer

In all models the flat retainer is the most simple pricing. You assess time for a specific customer and you both agree on a fix monthly fee and how much the work is worth.

Aside from the simplicity, it allows you to reduce any friction when it comes time to send out the bill. The client  knows exactly how much he has to pay cost  and if you understand his expectations, he won’t  have any issue paying it.

The drawback to it is if you have a customer who scales exponentially over time.

I advice make an agreement in your contract that gives guarantee for that price for a limited time period (perhaps,on a quarterly basis); then after you can renegotiate once  again that time is up. The biggest upside of a retainer-based model is that it gives  you a permission to calculate your earnings and hypothetically see what exact amount you will earn if your current client stay on for a year. This is necessary to growing the business because you can prepare for set goals and set-backs.

This also plays a major reason when outsourcing work or hiring becomes necessary (Step 5).

Spend Percentage

This price charging model is very popular with agencies because it factors in the scalability of the growth potential and customer. After agencies reach a particular  maturity they are going to turn down customers with no pre-existing spend or little.

When you’re just starting out this may not be the best direction as you will want to grow your network, but over time you will realize that having larger customer is far more profitable to you for a number of reasons. The downside is if you decide to conduct business fully on a percentage wise of spend amount model because there are many inner reasons within businesses that are going to dictate budget.

Some of these reasons are within your control (results) but many others are not (seasonality, internal decisions other costs). You really don’t want to get into a situation where your customer is spending a very small amount monthly and you are getting only 10% of that amount with the expectation of putting the time into it and being on calls.

My advice is to start out with a fix retainer fee as mentioned above and then, as your agency grows, implement a percentage of spend amount model on top of the retainer. This makes it clear to the customer that if they want to spend more and  scale, it’s going to require more work on your end to make it happen.

Commission-Based

This is one factor that is often used by agencies in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage over others.

Essentially, they only get paid when the customer makes money off of a sale.

This sounds seductive early on because you want to make trust with a client that you are doing everything in your power to help them be successful. Folks with agencies who have failed experiences  often come up the useful fact that they were paying all kind of amount only to have ROI or no results. A gun-for-hire approach like this can appear truly tantalizing for a customer who’s been burned before.

The downside to this model is that unless you have great insight into the operations end of the customer’s business, it’s going to make billing them extremely difficult. For  companies  and SaaS businesses with complex sales funnels, this pricing model would be a fully nightmare. I would only advice this model for ecommerce or clients selling things directly. That way you can estimate how many sales you have driven and do the math that way. Another downside to this is the fact that it depend majorly on the product being sold. If there is an important profit margin, then it definitely makes sense. Otherwise you may be giving yourself useless pain.

The best piece of advice I like to give keep it simple. Lastly you need is to be solving math equations at the ending of each month and not knowing how much you’re going to earn.

Liability, Taxes, and the power of “having a person for that”

A couple other key aspects to know the business model are  taxes vs liability.

If you decide that building an agency is what you want to do, create a SCorp or LLC. This will give you personal  security if something terribly goes wrong (lawsuits).

It also gives you an authority for multitude of tax benefits. I would suggest getting SCorp or an LLC established as soon as possible as it also make legal your business in both  Uncle Sam and the eyes of the client.

Oh, and taker a tax person.

Do them yourself, if you are extremely savvy with taxes then by all means. However for the common person, there are many nuances to running your own business that it makes sense to push this responsibility onto an expert (like your clients are doing with you!). You can save a lot of amount by having a professional file your taxes on a quarter basis, helping you along the way with write-offs.

Your Niche

When you’re beginning it’s easy to be seduced by the prospect of working with any business.

The mind of having to turn down anyone can cause anyone a fair money of cognitive dissonance when their liveliness is on the line. With that being said, there are thousands of consultants out there and digital marketing agencies. few of them are specialize, but many of them don’t.

Unless referrals are flowing like the salmon of Capistrano, you are going to need to stand out and create a unique selling proposition when doing approach for new prospects.

Aside from the added value of being specialized client type or within an industry, there are many advantages to focusing on your services towards a clearly defined niche. Here are a few examples:

It Makes Onboarding Easier

When you take on anyone as a customer there are many variables that you require to become aware of before deciding whether it’s a correct decision to do business with them or not. When your ideal client is clearly defined, this process becomes streamlined because you know what types of information and questions you need to attain from them. You also have perspective on how these businesses run from inside as well as how much amount you would charge them on approximately.

It Steel Your Skillset Exponentially

If you got perfectness in digital marketing (paid specifically) you can essentially run ads for many businesses. However, you need to learn how to formulate effective messaging and  the target market. This can take a lot of time when the business is stranger or essence to what you are used to working with, which mandatory causes issues early on if things aren’t going so well.

If your ideal customer is already defined, you are going to make a plethora of experience working with that type of customer. This builds the muscle memory and intuition mandatory to know what decisions to make and when to make them. You can work more perfectly because you’ve seen the challenges before and you know how to tackle them. It also makes you adept at identifying customers you don’t want to do deal with them.

It gives you a ruthless advantage

As I’ve mentioned before, there are so many people out there takin’ names and slingin’ ads.

The internet has permitted for the hackiest of hacks to experience success. Due to this reason, there are many down agencies out there, it gives the customer with more peace of mind when your business caters to those who are just like them. Being the “insert niche here” Agency serves you the social proof and expertise to confidently say to the needs of these individuals their organizations. It serves you an added layer of relatability and faith that is so often lost in this industry.

Decide How You Want to Major

When you ask people that you’re going to start your own consultancy or agency , it carves into their mind that you are going to hire a bunch of employees and rent out an office space. More often than not, that is the worst decision you can take. If you’re like 99% of the population, chances are you have bills that need to get paid. If you want to grow and get started,   you are going to have to make sure you can personally survive first.

When starting a successful agency, it’s key to be highly skilled at what the agency does first. For a period of time managing the accounts for yourself  allows you to not only refine these skills but it makes finding talented help a lot easier because you know the knowledge and necessary skills for the job.

You also have to recognize what the amount of that help means to you financially. What’s your client churn rate? Average lifetime customer value? How  you acquire new customers? Hiring an employee is going to throw in an extra layer of problem to all of that.

Preparing someone to come work for you is different matter altogether. Employees are employees because they want protection. So unless you are at the point where you can offer them good payments and benefits, they aren’t going to be interested in taking on the gig. The cost-effective antidote for this problem is simple: look contractors.

There are so many fully talented people who out there who are finding and enough capable to help you out on a contractual basis. You don’t have provide these people with benefits, and they are an easy write-off on your taxes. Being able to time-consuming tasks or delegate monotonous or to a trusted contractor is a heavy load off of your shoulders when you’re focused on chatting on business. This process allows you to major to a point where having full-time employees makes more sense. The contractors may decide to join you full time if things run wonderful and they have already justified their competence to you.

All of this advice stems from beginning an agency by yourself. If you have a single partner or two that want to do this with you, then it changes things quite a bit. With that being said, you’re going to have to either charge higher rates or the profits are going to be split and  take on more clients to make it mutually profitable to the point where it’s better than having a normal day job. Just something to keep in mind.

There’s a startups culture in today’s age that higher growth is the only marker of a successful business. There’s a huge pressure when it comes to taking on more customers and you may find that you can be economically satisfied with a certain number of great clients. You may ultimately decide that fast expansion is not what’s perfect for you. Unless you have external investors breathing down your neck, the ability to live a financially stable (if not better) life on your own terms may be more enticing to you.

Running a sustainable agency by yourself allows you also the freedom of ending the business simply and on your terms if you need to (no layoffs, no office to sublet, no 45-pound bag of coffee beans). You may also find that moving an agency isn’t something that you want to do entire life. You can take it as a kind of investment for other business models you may be more mad about but take time to mature.

Having run your own business for a limited time period is going to give you a priceless amount of business experience, building healthy relationships that you can rely on in the upcoming future.

Take a Decision

If you’re reading this article, you’re thinking about it or you have probably already ventured out on your own. My overarching advice is to take a decision and stick to it.

Handling your  own business has many challenges to it and you’ll have to be able to weather the storm to enjoy the benefits. It’s a dramatic life event and you have to handle it as such. If you realize early on that you aren’t cut out for it, then don’t drag yourself along for any longer than you have to. If you take a decision but don’t believe in it, you’re going to fail surely. You will have to commit. Once you apply that you may feel how extremely fulfilling running your  own digital marketing agency.