10 Steps to Starting SMMA

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this very special video. Now, once you’ve watched this video, not only will you understand how to start an SMMA, but you will have 10 actionable steps in order to do so. Now, before we start, I’m going to leave a link down below to the glossary on my website. So if there’s any term that you’re not familiar with, or you don’t understand, you can have it open next to you and just cross-reference. So with no further ado, let’s get straight into 10 steps to start in SMMA today. Now the first and most fun step is to name your agency and quite simply name it, whatever you want. When I started four years ago, I named my agency IAG media. That was, you know, IAG is my initials and media because I actually used to have a creative agency these days. We only ever do advertising.

Now I will say over the years, I’ve been tempted, countless amounts of times to actually rebrand, rename my agency. If I could go back, I would not have my agency. You know, there’s a great book and I’ll just pop it on screen here called built. And I believe it’s built to sell. I forgot the author’s name, but at the end of day, my agency is my cashflow, my lifestyle business. It’s the thing that allows me to live the kind of life that I have. But it’s also nice to be able to know that I could sell it further down the line. So maybe just a little piece of advice to you, or you can use your initials or habits something to do with your name, but then a day you should have some foresight. I know it may not be something that you’re thinking about right now, potentially as a beginner, but hell in three, four or five years, when you could be doing six, multiple six figures, seven, even multiple seven figures a year in revenue from your agency, that is a sellable business.

So you might as well start with the end in mind. So what a little mistake I made was having it associated to my name, which obviously makes it a hell of a lot harder to sell. So yeah, pick a name. It can involve your initials or your name or something like that. Well, my recommendation to you is that it doesn’t, but after that knowledge in mind, I cannot stress this enough. The name of your agency does not matter. When I first started offering marketing services, I actually didn’t even have an agency name for five months. I was just me, you know, just almost operating as a contractor. And finally, when I got around to it, as I said, I ended up using my initials, which is a pretty easy bet, but I’ve already given you my word of warning about that. And now years later, as I said, I’ve been attempted multiple times to change it to something much more dramatic, but I also take a weird pleasure in my agency, which consistently brings in six figure profits and has made my clients millions being named something.

So in conspicuous and you know, we’ve, we’ve kept our roots. Now you’ve chosen your name. You need to decide what your agency is going to do now, technically you couldn’t offer anything. And I increasingly see the term SMMA being applied to everything from intellectual property to web development, but generally it’s a marketing service and more specifically social media marketing. Now, of course there are multiple services you can offer, including paid traffic, lead generation, email marketing, SEO. You know, the list goes on and on now agreed. And c.com, which is my online education company has said. We have, you know, successful agency owners who have web development agencies doing multiple five figures a month email marketing agencies. But what I always tell my students and what sort of a advice I’ll give to you is offer a service where you’re generating leads or you’re generating discernible ROI for your clients is that I used to have a creator.

And you know, I was making at the age of 17, 15 grand a month, which back then to me was life-changing money but my gripe with that was a very fluffy, the service. You know, there was no end of the month where I could go. These are the amount of leads we brought you. This is the amount of sales that we brought you. So with that in mind, when you’re picking a service, you should ask yourself three questions. What do you already know? What can you, or would you like to learn? And do you already have someone in mind who could potentially deliver the services for you? Maybe that’s a friend, a family member will run the most important things about getting started with your agency is once you get up to a critical mass having service delivery done for you through a team member or contractor, so you can focus on sales operations and growing this next it’s time to choose your niche.

But real quick, we’ll cover here what a niche is and how to go about choosing yours. Now in the social media marketing, a niche is simple. It’s the industry you operate in. The worst mistake you can make as an agency owner is to offer everything to everyone. The best agencies offer one service in one market. It makes finding clients and delivering your service a thousand times easier. Now, funny enough, I actually technically break that rule because my agency works with infoproduct businesses. So online education companies or e-commerce businesses now, for me personally, there’s close enough. The affinity between those two niches and 80% of our clients are in the info-product space. So for us, when we work with an e-commerce business, it’s actually a hell of a lot easier now to actually go about choosing your niche. You need to ask yourself too, right questions, the first, what are your interests?

Now you don’t necessarily have to be interested in your niche, but it really does help. For example, if you love cars, yeah, you’re going to understand the language and interest of your clients and their customers. Next, ask yourself where your experiences again, if you’ve never ever done marketing before, it’s incredibly useful. If you’ve worked in another industry, let’s say it’s restaurants you’ll know the concerns of manager and the typical discounts and cycles that they run. Now let’s get on to step. Number four. Your web presence is a little bit like your agency name. It’s fun to make, but remember, as it’s not a hundred percent necessary, a big mistake I often see with agency owners is them spending endless hours, designing perfect agency websites and trying to replicate the look of massive businesses with hundreds of images. When I first started out, I had no website and I was able to during my agency to 15 grand a month with no agency name, as I said, and no website, in fact, over the next few years, my website would go down because I would be too lazy to update the WordPress and then a plugin would break.

And even before that, it was just entirely sloppy. And even to this day where I’ve actually now made a conscious effort, you know, after four years in this game to have a good looking website, if you go look on my website, really there’s not much functionality. It looks pretty, but it does a one main function. And to get people to book in a 15 minute demo call with my chief marketing officer, Danny, and remember to, you don’t even need a website. As I said, Wix is a great tool, which has allows you to build free websites. Now, granted it does have the dot Wix suffix, but even if you don’t want to do that, just take 10 minutes to make an Instagram account for your agency. And honestly you should be square next it’s time to register your email address. Now, unlike a website, a professional looking email address is a must.

So for less than $10 a month, I think it’s like $6 a month. You can have a personalized domain and G suite account using Google domains. Now I’ve used most email providers and consistently G suite beats Microsoft and some of the other competitors. So as I said, whereas, a website I’m like, look, if you want to do this on a shoestring budget, that’s fine. I’m telling you, you do need a professional business domain because here’s the thing. Realistically, someone is not going to respond to you if you have a at Gmail, all right? So for $10 a month, you can get a domain. And then from there you can get a G suite account created. Now we’re in the second half, and this is where the real work begins. Now it’s time for you to find your leads again, remember to reference the SMA glossary in the description, but lead sourcing is basically just a fancy way of saying, finding names, numbers, and emails for potential clients.

Now let’s say you’re in Miami and you’re working in the orthodontist niche. The best place to start as a beginner is Google maps. Remember you don’t have to work in your local region, but it’s often the easiest place to begin. Now, once you’ve searched for orthodontists in Miami, create a list of their business names, phone numbers, email addresses, and next workout who is in charge. For example, let’s take a look this. Now I went onto their website and the company LinkedIn, and found out who the owner was. And then from there, it was as simple as using Google to find his email address that remember, if you’re struggling to find and scrape email addresses, there are multiple tools which can scan a website and even validate emails. The best free one is called snob.io definitely recommend you check them out. Now you’ve got your leads.

It’s time to put them to use. Now, there are multiple different ways of getting in touch with businesses, but the easiest three are direct messages, calls and emails, and each one has advantages and disadvantages. Personally, my favorite is emails. It’s easy to find. Someone’s email. They’re most likely going to see it and you can include links for them to click on. Now, when you do outreach, always remember that you’re never trying to sell your service in the initial messages. You’re just trying to get them to book a meeting with you. And that’s where you’ll sell them on your services. Very, very important. Remember with your outreach, you’re not selling the service. You’re selling the meeting. Now, once you’ve got a lead to express interest via messages or over the phone book, a time and date with them for a followup meeting to discuss. Now, once you’ve got the meeting, you need to convince the business owner.

And not only that they need your service, but they you’re capable of providing it to them. Luckily, there’s a formula for this. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you go through my YouTube channel or you go check out the link below my three hour long behemoths free training, you will see that I’ve put out tons of sales training, but real quick, I’m going to summarize three points for you here. Step number one is to build a rapport. Now, if you’re new to sales, I cannot stress enough how useful it is to practice with a partner beforehand. So you don’t get nervous. But when you do speak to the client, remember to quickly build a rapport and establish information that you can use later in the call, or if you’re doing it in, in-person obviously in the meeting. So, you know, right off the bat, you’re going to want to know things like where are they based?

What do they get up to on the weekend? Do you guys have any shared experiences in commonalities next? You need to diagnose their problem. Now this is your chance to let the client sell themselves on your service. And you need to ask them what they’re trying to achieve with their business and what exactly is stopping them. Now, 99% of the time, they want more customers and they have trouble finding them. And this is when you come in and offer them the cure. Now they’ve told you they want more customers. They’ve told you that they have trouble finding them. This is where you explained that your service can do just that deliver more customers and allow them to grow their business. Now, sales meetings are seldom this simple. So remember to cycle back through when necessary, if the client has an objection, build rapport with them again, remind them of their problem and why your service can help.

Now, ladies and gents has said that is a very condensed down simplified version. So if you go on my YouTube, you’ll find many more in-depth trainings, or if you want the real juicy stuff, go ahead, check out the description, watch that three hour behemoth free training. And I even give you guys plug and plays, script, all that sort of good jazz. So congratulations, you signed your first client. Now it’s time to get paid. And as an agency owner, you should consider this your number one task and the way you do it is of paramount importance. Now, personally, I use Stripe for all of my client payments. It’s a payment processor that takes a small percentage of your retainer, but ensures prompt payment. However, in many countries you can’t use Stripe. So PayPal and traditional bank transfers are an alternative, but just remember that when you send an invoice to a client, include your bank details and don’t begin work until the client actually pays.

Remember a client is not a client until you have received that money next, it’s the fun part, actually delivering your service again, I’ll leave a link to another more in-depth video on Facebook ads, which is what my agency does. But right now we’re going to cover the easiest ways to get results for your clients. It’s called lead generation. And to get started, all you need is a business manager account and access to your client’s Facebook page. Once you’re inside, you’ll need to get them to insert their card details into the ad account. And then you’re ready to go. You can start running some ads for them. Next, you need to set up a Facebook lead. Gen advert. Facebook makes this easy and all you need to do is insert your offer and an image for the business. Now, once your adver is ready, you just need to tell Facebook how much you want to spend and who you want to see your advert.

Then use an automation tool like Zapier to send the lead straight to your clients. As I said, Facebook lead gen ads are by far the easiest place to get started because Facebook does all the heavy lifting for you. You just set the targeting, set an image, what the offer is. So, you know, whether that be three sessions for free at a gym, or whether that be a free dessert or a free cocktail at a restaurant, whatever sort of offer your client is putting out there to entice and bring customers through the door. You go ahead and you advertise that for them. Now, ladies and gents, as I said in the description down below, I’m going to leave a link to 30 minute plus in-depth Facebook ad training. I uploaded right here on YouTube. So you can go ahead and check that out. As I said, I’m have to get through a lot in this video.

So I’m just having to oversimplify a couple of things and there you have it, ladies and gents, those are your 10 steps. Now action. Step for today’s video is I want you to leave a comment with why you started SMMA. When you leave this comment, you are going to be automatically drawn into when an item from my bespoke clothing line gadgets. As most of you guys know, I do a giveaway on every single video. In fact, in the comments on the pin post, you can see who the giveaway winner is for last video. So yeah, all you have to do is leave a comment with why you started SMMA. Now I actually started my agency back in 2016. For any of you guys who know my story a little bit more intimately, it’s just one of those common situations, son, single mother, financial distress. I just needed a way out.

I just needed a way to take care of me and my mom and I needed something. I could start with zero capital and while I was still in high school. And that is why I started my agency back when I was 16. Go ahead and let me know why you start an agency down below and you’ll be drawn into when the next action step is. I want you to book in a call with Christian he’s actually my student success manager here agreed and.com. His entire role is to speak to potential good fits for agency incubator, answer any final questions you might have. So down below, you’ll find a link to agency incubator on that page. If you go down and you’ll actually see a 15 minute demo of the course, when you have the best product in the market, and you know it, you are not afraid to show it off.

So I show you exactly everything that comes with the program, the plug and plays the cheat sheets, the 25 hour course, the community, the live calls, everything. And then if you scroll further down, you can actually book in a call with Christian. As I said, just to speak with someone about agency, life, what it’s like, and it’s a no pressure, no salesy kind of call just for you and Christian to get to know each other. If he thinks that you’d be a good fit for agency incubator, he might make you an offer to join. So ladies and gentlemen, I hope you guys enjoy this video, really looking forward to seeing all your comments on behalf of Christian, the rest of the greens, you.com and myself. We look forward to seeing you inside the program. And as I said, I’ve dumped a bunch of additional free training and links down in that description. So you can just check that out and whatever I’ve discussed today, that you feel less confident about. I’ve created resources for those, and you can check those out. So really appreciate all you guys I’ll see you in the next one.