Starting your own agency in 5 simple steps.

While the first steps to starting an agency might be described as simple, they’re anything but easy. Whether you want to specialise in web development, creative branding, social media, or search engine marketing, starting your own agency requires a series of disciplines, and you’ll need to understand them all. So how to begin?

Identify your specialism.

This will most likely be determined by your own working experience in an agency, and your area of expertise. If that’s in social media, it would make sense to start a social media marketing agency.

This in turn will determine how you’ll run your agency, the kind of business services you’ll provide, and the type of clients you’ll aim for. You can always become a more full service agency in the future as you grow and can hire people with different skillsets.

The benefits of capitalising on your existing agency skills to choose your niche are that you’ll hit the ground running, and you’ll have more time to focus on the other aspects of your growing business.

Develop your business strategy.

Before you plunge into recruiting and marketing your new agency, take the time to put a strategy to guide your hand in everything you do. Solidify brand guidelines, allocate budgets, create marketing planners, do detailed market research and a competitor analysis.

What you really want to pin down is:

• Who is your target audience?
• What problems do they have that you can solve?
• Where is your target audience active?
• How are you going to connect with them?
• What are the goals of my agency?

By laying this foundation everything you do can focused around the insights you’ve gained from your strategy and your marketing activity will be aligned with your goals. This is an important step that is often skipped in favour of jumping in at the deep end. While many will probably figure out how to swim this way, you can’t be sure there aren’t sharks waiting to pull you down.

Grow your team at the right time.

Most start-up agencies won’t be able to hire a batch of staff before they have any clients. You’re probably going to have to do some heavy lifting and multi-tasking yourself for a while. But once you have been able to secure some new business, start to assemble a small specialist team.

The agency’s success will depend on the people you do hire, so pick individuals who have the skills to help you get your agency off the ground and don’t need hand holding too much.

Start by filling out the core jobs that every creative agency needs, such as:

• Competent content writers if you’re a content marketing agency.
• Talented web developers and designers who’ll be able to produce high quality websites for your clients.
• Marketers who know their stuff and can analyse data to create campaigns that’ll engage potential clients or customers.

You’ll usually be able to tell when it’s time to recruit, because your teams workload will leave them with no immediate capacity to start new projects. Just make sure you don’t leave it too late before turning to recruit or else you could lose clients or even staff if they feel overworked.

Decide how to charge your clients.

Flat-rate. This means you’ll offer your services at a set monthly or yearly rate. So rather than paying for the hours you work or the projects you work on, clients pay a flat rate for your services.

Commission. Charging a commission means you’re only paid when your clients make a sale.

Hourly rates. This is probably the best model for a new business as you bill clients for the time you spent working on their projects at a fixed hourly rate.

Find new clients.

Start with a website that tells everyone what you offer and showcase some of your work. To start with you may need to include freelance projects you’ve done, or ask previous employers if you can include work from your time employed with them.

One of the most effective ways to raise your brand awareness and introduce yourself to lots of potential new clients is bold and creative marketing campaigns. Think outside of the box about how you can get across what your agency does but also make a statement that will be memorable and connect emotionally with your audience.

Add your company profile and website to all your online profiles and social media accounts and ask your employees to do the same.

Get active on social media and network extensively so people know about you and what your agency can do for them.

Create a LinkedIn business profile. Describe the service you provide, and mention any previous experience that you or your employees have in the field.

Reach out to your current contacts letting them know about your services. Since these people know you or may have worked with you before, they’ll be more willing to work with you. Start looking for companies you want to worth with and identify what their weaknesses are. Then try giving them a call or connecting with them on LinkedIn with a script of answers as to how you can help and the benefits they could receive.

Keep clients – with co.agency.

co.agency is an entirely new form of customer engagement platform. It’s designed by an agency who knows exactly how difficult it can be to manage clients effectively. co.agency provides you with a centralised, easy to use technologically driven solution to the common issues you can encounter when managing a client’s website. What’s even better, our Starter plan is perfect for start-up marketing agencies to help manage their clients.

co.agency software gives your clients a visually engaging user experience, it drives agency efficiency with features such as a chat and ticket system, a file transfer area for sharing larger files, and reporting tools that integrate with systems such as Google Analytics for transparency around results in one clear and centralised place.

Starting your own agency can be time consuming and stressful, but with co.agency on your side you’ll be more efficient, better connected and be able to impress your clients.

To learn more about how co.agency can help to make managing your client’s website easy, sign up for a free 30 day trial.