How to Start SMMA (Beginner Friendly)

- But trust me here, the number of agency owners I see basically mess up and trip up on this very crucial part of the process depresses me at this point. I've said this many times before, and I will continue to say it, even when I'm a withering old man raising 15 children in the Alaskan wilderness, a client is not a client until they have paid you. Ladies and gentlemen, hello, and welcome to this incredibly important video.

Now before we go any further, I wanna make it clear who this video is for, so let me go ahead and do that. This video is for anyone that wants to make money online. This video is for anyone who doesn't know what they wanna do with their life, but they know they wanna work flexibly and they wanna work from wherever they want in the world.

This video is for the 18-year-olds who are just leaving school and don't wanna be saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, or for the 40-year-olds who feel like they're stuck in a rut and they finally want some time freedom, location freedom and financial freedom in their life. My name is Iman Gadzhi and I am a self-made millionaire, and not self-made in the sense that I had daddy's credit card or my family's connections in the city. I mean that in a sense that at the age of 18 I started my business while I was still in high school to support me and my single mom.

This business was an agency, and seven years later, if I was to lose it all, I would start an agency once again. I wouldn't start an online clothing store or start drop shipping or invest in NFTs or any of the other noise that you hear out there on YouTube these days. So the video I'm gonna present to you today isn't only just a step-by-step guide on how to make money online by starting a social media marketing agency.

This video is the exact advice I'd give to myself if I was 16 again. So let's go ahead and get started. Ladies and gentlemen, how to start an SMMA in 2022.

Now here is a quick overview of the things we'll be covering. We'll start with the very definition of an SMMA, and take you right through finding clients, getting paid, and finally delivering your services. Now a quick bit of housekeeping before we start.

Every time I film these videos, I get comments beneath from people who can't believe this is possible. Even though feel free and I implore you to go watch back since 2015. I've literally been documenting every single thing all the way from sending crappy proposals, signing my first client, to hitting my first 10K month in my agency, hitting my first 100K month in my agency and so on and so forth.

But as I said, there are some negative individuals who I generally don't have time for, but some people who just don't have the confidence in themselves to succeed. So periodically in this video you will see a slide like this. Now this is gonna be your warning and my chance to preempt that negative belief you have in the back of your head.

So let's get into it. Now I'm guessing if you searched for this video, you'll have heard of SMMA previously. But if you don't know what it stands for, it means social media marketing agency.

But for right now I want you to forget that definition and instead focus on the word 'agency', and let's kind of drill into what that actually means. Now if someone asks you to define what an agency meant right now, you'd probably say a business that delivers a specific service to a client. For example, like a public relations agency.

And you'll be right in saying that. An agency is really just a business that delivers a service on behalf of another company. So let's say you run a record company and you wanna promote your new artists, you will either hire a public relations expert and bring them in-house, or you would go to a PR agency and hire them.

Now for most companies the latter choice is the obvious one, because when you are hiring someone full-time, not only are you making the decision to pay them, but you're also making the decision to pay them if they're sick, to contribute towards their pension. I mean, even if they get pregnant, a lot of times you have to partially pay their salary. Now in contrast, if you hire an agency, you can fire them whenever you want, subject to a minimum term in the contract, and you know the exact services that you're getting and you don't have to absorb any of the liability of having an employee.

Plus agency workers tend to be more experienced, right? Because they're dealing hands-on with a wider array of clients. It's said because they work with more business types, they're incentivized to stay up to date, know what's in trend and what's working regardless of the sort of client that they're working with.

So put simply an agency is just a business that offers a service to another company so that way they don't have to hire one or potentially even multiple, multiple people full-time. The agency model works and it's extremely profitable. Now let's talk about how we actually start an agency.

Play a game with me and actually follow along with this. Please, it's important. I want you to close your eyes.

Gently lean your head back. Now take a deep breath. Now I want you to pluck a name for your agency out of thin air.

And if you can't think of one, here's a clue. My own agency uses my initials for its name, IAG Media. Keep your eyes closed.

Now have a couple more seconds. Think of something abstract or forward-thinking. Got it?

Well, there you go. You have an agency. And don't listen to anyone who tells you that starting an agency is any more complex than what you just did.

Nearly every country in the world lets you operate as a business without even registering. When I was 16 and I first started signing clients for IAG Media I wasn't formally government-registered as a company, didn't have business bank accounts or this or that. I was just operating as pretty much a contractor, as a sole trader.

Clients paid me into my personal bank account and that was it. Of course there are benefits and there is a time and place to formally get registered. But if you're watching this video to start a social media marketing agency, or more importantly, just to start making money online from the comfort of your own home, I implore you not to formally register when you first get started.

Instead, I want you to focus on finding clients and making money, because you can restructure and rearrange later down the line. Ladies and gentlemen, here's your first self-limiting belief, and that's the you're too young or you're too inexperienced to be running an agency. And here's the extremely funny thing, most agency owners start their agencies after years of offering their services in the house, or more likely working for another agency.

And do you know the first people they hire? It's young, inexperienced workers who've never delivered a service before in their lives. So all you're doing is you're just cutting out the middleman.

You'd either go and work for an agency now or you'd start your own. But at the end, think about it, the same person is still delivering the services to the end client. It's just instead you're cutting out the middleman, you're going out and you're starting yourself.

So it doesn't take long to get good at something. And later in this video, I'll show you how inexperience can actually work to your advantage in the agency business. Cool.

You have an agency now, but what does it do? Now of course, most SMMAs offer, well, social media marketing services, because it's not rocket science to deliver and it can offer astronomical results to your clients. And surprise, surprise, that's what my own agency, IAG Media, offers in the form of Google and Facebook advertising primarily.

And whilst I recommend this to 99% of people starting out, it is important to note that really you can offer any service you want as an agency. Most of the time these are marketing related, like SEO or content creation. In fact, that's how my agency first started the first 18 months, which kind of makes sense because it's IAG Media and we don't really do any media these days.

I said it was a content creation agency, but there are agencies out there that made tens and tens of thousands of dollars a month by doing services such as managing sales teams, doing email marketing, and hell, I'm not even joking here, I have friends who've done this, make multiple five-figures a month by managing other people's dating profiles for them. In fact, now that I think about it, one of the most successful agency owners I personally know in real life runs a massive OnlyFans agency. So if you have a service that you already know how to fulfill or you really enjoy doing, by all means, stick with this.

But for the purpose of this video, we're gonna be looking at Facebook advertising. So now you've decided what service you're gonna offer. It's time to pick your niche.

Now this is a really simple proposition because your niche is really just the industry or area that you decide to work in. For instance, my agency works with education or e-commerce businesses, and my friend's agency works with skincare companies that sell via an e-commerce website. Examples are agency owners who run ads for real estate agents, gardeners, insurance companies, dentists, barbers, hell, even a landscaping business.

Really the sky's the limit. Picking yours really is just a matter of looking what your past background experience is, as well as looking at what things interest you. Now of course you might respond and say the best niche is the one where there's the most money.

True, but it also means there's more competition. So it's a toss up and it's something that you need to play around with. And it's fine in the first six months, 12 months to do a what I like to call as 'niche hopping', right?

You can kind of hop around. You can see what interests you, what sticks. And then from there you can kind of define and go all in on one specific niche.

So I genuinely recommend you go with what you know, and don't be scared of being too esoteric. Every business either provides goods or services. And on that note, every business wants to provide more goods and services and make more money.

So if you're thinking of providing social media marketing services for a funeral parlor, I wish you the best of luck. In fact, let's even go ahead and stick with that theme for the next section of this video. Now it's time to find a client and I'm gonna show you a few ways to do this, but please do not think that this is an exhaustive list.

In fact, there are hundreds of ways to find clients, and the best is always the one that doesn't exhaust you or your client list, and the one that you're able to do quickly and cheaply. Now, here are three different forms of lead generation. First, we have Upwork then Instagram, as well as Google.

I'm gonna run you through how to actually execute on these. Now I won't walk you through actually making an Upwork account, but it shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes. Now once you're logged on, you wanna go to the search bar and type in the service that you offer.

Now in this example I've used social media marketing. Next I've included www in the search parameters. Now this is because Upwork charges for job responses so this allows you to filter only jobs where the companies have identified themselves.

That's some big, big hack. That means that you can actually reach out to them independently to all the jobs in this list. You can actually use this as a way to find job listings and find job posts.

And once you've done that, you can find the website of basically this job listing or the business's website, I should say. And then from there you can actually just reach out to them outside of Upwork. For example, one of the jobs posted here, Lynxes jewelry website, and at the bottom there's a LinkedIn email address where you can actually get in touch with the owner without using any Upwork credits.

As I said, you can just actually independently reach out to them. Next, it's time to use Instagram, and it's actually a great way to find niche brands. Once you actually give a suggestion to Instagram, it can spit back some suggestions that are similar, and I'll show you what that process looks like.

Now to start, identify your archetypal client, and for the avoidance of any doubt, that means the client that you could realistically work with. So if you're working in the wearable sports tech niche, probably don't try this with Fitbit. Now in this example I'm going for Will's Vegan Store, a brand that has a strong following and is qualified as a client, but still one that would be reasonable to work with a boutique agency.

First, you find them and you follow them. Next, you'll be offered a list of similar brands. Click 'see all' and take note of every profile that comes up.

Now Instagram suggest these because they have similar followers and audiences, meaning it's pointing you in the direction of similar brands that, as I said, you can reach out to and work with. Now, let's go back to one example from earlier, which was funeral parlors. Now these are examples of a distress purchase.

So while those some forms of advertising do work well, like SEM, I actually wanna draw your attention to another area of business that you could potentially work with, and that's with funeral plan providers. And what these businesses do is they actually sort of sell you a set funeral plan that actually allows you to pay for your funeral ahead of time, which takes the burden and the load off of your family and your loved ones when eventually you pass. Finding these businesses is rather easy with Google.

The tougher thing is knowing that businesses like these even exist in the first place, and that's why a lot of times it pays off to be creative when you are picking a niche. Now, every single one of these results, including the adverts, is a potential client for your agency. In fact, the ones that are already running Google Adverts are great because they're showing intent to market themselves digitally.

So let's get in touch with one of them. Now the first step is to find their email or a way to get in contact with them. Now in the case of the Upwork client I gave you an example with earlier, her personal email was actually in the footer of her website.

And on Instagram, once you find these brands and these businesses, you can just message them directly on there. But in the case of these funeral plan providers, I'm gonna show you a very nifty way to find their email. Now first, I want you to download an extension to your browser.

It's called Snov. io, and allows you to search through a website for matching email addresses. Next, go to one of these websites and use this tool.

And now what it will do is it will list all the emails associated with the account. Now once you have these, cross-reference these email addresses with the LinkedIn accounts of the company, and find out who is the decision maker or the best person to speak to regarding their marketing. Now signing a client is really a two-step process.

First, you have to reach out to them, get their attention and get them to meeting with you. Second, you have to convince them that they will benefit from your service. Now let's take a look at an example of outreach.

I'm sending this to the funeral service plan provider. I'll walk you through each step of this email so you can understand the language and techniques I've used. Now first, the subject line uses something called a pattern interrupt.

It's all in lowercase and suggests we've had a previous conversation. Now this will make Jackie more likely to open my email. Next, I use an icebreaker, a compliment or a joke to endear them towards me.

Then I introduce myself and get to the point of the email, and that's that I've spotted a flaw in their digital marketing efforts. Now I offer them a solution and sell them the benefits of it. Finally, I offer them a meeting, not a pitch, and I make it a no-brainer, even offering a Starbucks voucher for them hopping on the call.

No, I have not pitched my services yet. I've not told her how much it would cost or even how many leads I could bring her. I've just suggested a friendly meeting over virtual coffee.

Now once she responds, we can get to the meeting. Now if your outreach succeeds, you will end up with a meeting on the cards, but this is also where most beginner agency owners find a little bit of difficulty. So in order for me to explain what to actually say when you actually get to the sales meeting, it's important that I show you some basic principles of sales, and I'm gonna go ahead and run it through that right now.

Now this is an example of a classic sales process. It starts with rapport and that's where you make the client feel comfortable. You joke about the weather, you comment how they've always wanted to visit where they are and you kind of become acquainted.

Then you go digging. Now this is your chance to ask everything you can about their business and its objectives. Quick little hint here, their primary objective is always gonna be to bring in more paying customers.

Now the real challenge is to listen to what's stopping them doing this. Is that that potentially their leads are too expensive or unqualified? Next, use everything you've just learned in the logic phase and reverse engineer your offer.

Explain that to your service can overcome their problems and help them achieve their objectives. Finally, it is time for the close. If you deployed every step correctly, this is where they will ask you your price.

Now at this point you need to name something realistic and based on what you can achieve for them. If you made this calculation correctly, they will either accept or come back with an objection. Now at this point you need to cycle back through each stage until you have answered this objection.

If they aren't sure you can deliver the results, cycle back to logic and educate them on your services. Now here's another self-limiting belief. Why would a business work with someone with no expertise or experience?

Now remember what I told you earlier? The businesses hate hiring people. Let's say they wanna hire a Facebook ads manager to work in-house.

They'd have to spend a fortune on recruitment. First of all, most people don't realize that recruitment agencies are charging. They're gonna have to pay anywhere from 5, 10, 15, $20,000 just to even find the person, right?

Then you wanna. . .

Then they have to induct them. They have to buy them their equipment and then rent them office space. Now most businesses are happy to work with agencies.

And if you're nervous about sales calls, you always have the opportunity to practice them beforehand. Go ahead and ask a friend or a member of your family to role-play with you before your call, then you will always be more confident going into it. Now let's talk about getting paid because you might think this is a simple process.

You give your client your bank details and you send them an invoice. But trust me here, the number of agency owners I see basically mess up and trip up on this very crucial part of the process depresses me at this point. I've said this many times before and I will continue to say it, even when I'm a withering old man raising 15 children in the Alaskan wilderness, a client is not a client until they have paid you.

What pretty much always happens with novice agency owners is they hop off the call and then they celebrate with their friends and their family, and they're like, "I've signed a client," and then the next day they send the client the invoice and they hear nothing back. A couple of days go by, the client still ignores them. And then a few days after that, the client comes back and says, "Hey, I've had second thoughts.

" And this is why it's so important to get paid while you're still on the call. Of course, this is possible through bank transfer, but the easiest way to do this stuff is a 100% my big recommendation is set up Stripe or potentially even PayPal if you don't have Stripe supported in, I think it's 35 countries in the world. As I said, if you do have Stripe available in your country, go ahead and set that up before you have any meetings.

And when you go to send the invoice, explain to the client that you'd like to get payment done and dusted, out the way, so that way you can start delivering on the services ASAP and start making them money sooner rather than later. Also another big thing is explain to the client there's actually more security when they pay through credit card because there's more layers of protection rather than a bank wire. So explain that clients usually prefer to pay using Stripe.

Now, congratulations. You started an agency. You found a client, signed the client and even got paid.

Now it's time for the heavy lifting. Now I'm about to show you exactly how I deliver the services for the client we just pitched to. But before I do, I wanna make something abundantly clear to you.

As an agency owner your job is to make sure that the work is delivered to the businesses to a high standard, on time and on budget. Now that doesn't mean that you need to be the one to do it. Trust me, there is no rule book on earth that says you are the one that has to deliver the services, and that is why it makes sense to use contractors.

They're more likely to deliver the services to a higher standard than you, and you still pocket most of the profits that you've charged the client. So if you sold a client on running their Facebook ads for their business but you have no clue how to do it, don't worry. You just pay a contractor for a fraction of the price.

And really to get this through, because people kind of really struggle with this idea. When I am traveling, let's say I'm going to Bali, or I'm going to Cape town, or I'm going to wherever, I can go ahead and independently reach out to all of these Villa owners, yet every single time I opt for using Airbnb still knowing that there's a service charge, why? Because I have the Airbnb experience.

I could go ahead and I could get a driver any moment, yet I go for Uber and I pay extra fees. I know I'm paying extra fees. Why?

Because I want the Uber experience. Why does your client work with you as an agency, rather than a contractor? Because contractors understand how to deliver the services.

As an agency owner, where your head space is and the real benefit of agencies is they focus on the client. Not only do they know how to deliver services or have the ability to deliver the services, they do it in a way that is the most convenient and it provides the easiest use for clients. So just understand and really get this through your head.

There is no difference between you, who's just becoming an agency owner simply by picking a name, doing everything that I've told you in this video, and hiring a contractor to deliver the services that you've just got paid. Let's say you got paid $2,000 a month for the service, and you pay the contractor $500 a month because they live in Columbia, Brazil, they live in Serbia. So even three or four clients like that a month for them is massive.

So as I said, this is really the simplicity of it, is you get three or four clients like that, right? At $2,000 a month. Let's say hypothetically you're making six to $8,000 a month.

That contractor delivered those services for those three or four clients. And as I said, you pay them $500 a month per client. So they're making $1,500 to 2,000 and you have 75% margins.

So you personally get to pocket anywhere from $4,500 to $6,000 a month and do it all remotely, and do it whenever you want and have the location and time freedom that you want. So that really is the simplicity of the model. And you might think no, but that makes no sense, or why would a client do that?

Why do clients pay the agencies with the New York swanky offices $15,000 a month retainer when they have interns working for them? A lot of times the people who are actually delivering the services for these massive agencies, like I said, their clients are paying them $20,000 a month, these interns aren't even getting paid, right? So at least you're paying your team.

Most of these agencies aren't even paying their interns and yet their clients are still paying them $20,000 a month. So the only thing that's stopping you from being an agency owner are the limiting beliefs between these two ears, what's going on in here. So if you ever have any more doubts, re-watch this video again and again.

Now when it comes to the funeral plan provider, I'd probably go ahead and run Facebook adverts with a simple lead magnet. This means something for free, usually a piece of content, which people need to submit their name, email addresses, and phone number to access. Then in this case I have made a simple funeral plans explain PDF on Canva.

I use the existing copy and creatives from their website and packaged it as a simple guide for anyone looking to learn about funeral plans. And although the process to actually run lead generation campaigns on Facebook is astonishingly simple, they've made it very, very easy with native lead ads, which basically means to collect. .

. To run the ad and collect all the information, a person doesn't even need to leave Facebook, okay? But once again, let's say I just wanted hire someone to do this for me and pocket the difference, here's how I go about that.

One of the easiest places to find Facebook advertisers is well, unsurprisingly, Facebook, but specifically Facebook groups. So search for a couple of digital marketing expert groups and post identical messages in each one, offering a gig and explaining your client. Now go ahead and interview everyone who responds with a set of questions, and you'll usually find someone who you're confident in.

Ladies and gentlemen, you know what this means. Right now you are thinking why wouldn't the client hire the contractor in the first place? And I kind of touched on this briefly, but in the exact same way that if you went into hospital for new operation you wouldn't hire a surgeon, an anesthetist, nurses and rent an operating theater.

You would just expect the hospital to do that for you, right? And you just pay the hospital directly. Your job as an agency owner is to curate high quality talent, take payment and ensure the task is completed to a high degree.

That is why people work with agencies. That's why clients work with us. That's why they pay us.

And that is generally 97% of everything you need to know in order to succeed with this. So ladies and gentlemen, here's your action step for today. I'm doing a massive, massive giveaway in the comment section below.

All you need to do is a like this video and leave a comment. And for every a 100 comments, I'm actually gonna be helping one of you guys. I'm actually gonna be giving away a one-hour free coaching call.

Now Kieren, who's my product manager at my education company, he's gonna go ahead and arrange all that, set up the call, get your email, et cetera, et cetera. So, as I said, for every 100 comments, I will actually do a one-hour one-on-one with you and help answer any questions you might have about starting your agency. Now the second thing I want you to do is I want you to click that first link in the description.

Now what you will find is the demo video for Agency Navigator, which is my program that has helped thousands and thousands of people all around the world start from zero and quickly scale up to $10,000 a month with their agency. Now after you watched that demo in 2x speed, I actively don't want you to purchase the program. Instead, scroll right down to the bottom and book in a call with Christian, my student success manager.

We'll have a special calendar down there specifically for this video, and he will go ahead and answer any questions or queries you might have about actually starting an agency, what the process is like and how to get from zero to 10K a month in the quickest time possible. I said that is a 100% free call with him. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you guys enjoyed this video.

If you're new to the channel, definitely go ahead and consider subscribing. I've got tons and tons more amazing content coming up, and on that note, I hope you guys enjoyed. I'll see you the next one.

Thank you so much for sticking until this point. I know that if you've gotten here, then you are hungry for more knowledge and more content. So I went ahead and specifically picked out an incredible video for you to watch next that I know you're gonna love.

Check it out right there.