Start A Social Media Marketing Agency From Scratch In 2024 (SMMA) | Step By Step Guide

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very special video by the end of it, you are going to know everything you need to know about SMMA and how to get started straight away. And not only that, if you stick around until the end, I'm going to be doing the best giveaway I've ever done on this channel. So trust me, you're going to want to stay for that.

Now, before we get started, I want to go over a couple ground rules for this video. The first is that if you look in the description, you're actually going to find the GrowYourAgency glossary. So if I say any terms in this video, just go ahead, open that tab, have it opened by this video.

So as I said, if I say terms that confuse you, or you don't understand, you can actually cross reference it with the GYA glossary. Next you'll actually find chapters in this video and actually go over a table of contents for this video coming up shortly. But I strongly recommend you actually press the button to add this to your watch.

Later, that way a week down the line a month down the line, whatever it may be, you can actually come back to this video. Anytime you have any questions or queries. And finally, this video took me a long, long time to put together.

So honestly it would mean the world. If you go ahead and just aggressively smash that like button down below ladies and gentlemen would mean the world to me, and would really encourage me to make more of these videos where I have to do a solid one to two days of prep between the slides presentation and actually recording it. And before I even get into this video, I want to tell you a bit about myself.

For those of you guys who don't know my name is Iman Gadzhi. I started my digital marketing agency, IAG media at the age of 16. Of course it's evolved a little since then, but the fundamentals really stayed the same.

I want a hundred percent of the business. I don't have an office. I have minimal overheads.

And at the moment I only have two full-time team members on top of IAG media. I'm also a founder of GrowYourAgency I started this in 2018 and it's evolved to become the largest education company in the world for agency owners, with thousands of students from across the world, many of whom pull in six figure profit from their agency yearly. And when I say we've got the greatest community in the world, I'm really not lying.

Let's take a look at some examples on the left. You can see who our inaugural community party that we hosted back in 2019 before the whole world went crazy. This is open to every member of the GrowYourAgency community and was one of the weirdest wildest parties of all time.

And whilst obviously we can't host one right now. I thought I'd share this photo on the right, because that's neat. Literally a few days ago with Paolo one of our students inside of our community.

And I make it my mission to get to know my students as well as possible and any chance I get, I love meeting people in person, but now let's get into the nitty gritty of this video. Here's what we're going to cover. So we're going to go over what an SMMA slash agency is.

Starting your agency, picking your service, picking your niche, pricing, your service, finding your clients, selling to your clients, getting paid, servicing your clients and the next steps from there. So let's get started with one of the most important questions. What does an SMMA and what is an agency?

So first let's define agency and I'm sure in your head, you've got an idea of Wolf. One is, but actually let's delve into a little bit more. You see if we think that an agency is anyone who offers a service, you could say that anyone who offers a service owns an agency, but if someone came round to your house and offered to mow your lawn and said, they were an agency owner, you laugh at them because you would know that they were just a gardener.

So let's think a little bit more critically about what this means. I've made this diagram so you can see a bit more clearly what I'm talking about. This is the big difference between a service provider and agency owner.

On the left. You can see someone who offers a service, that's it on the right. You can see someone who manages the delivery of a service in short service providers create work, agency owners curated.

So now we know where an agency is. Let's define an SMMA in the very infancy of the SMMA revolution. It was super easy to find.

As you can see the letters simply stood for social media marketing agency. Now I'll explain shortly why this technically doesn't make sense anymore. But before I do this, let's look at some of the key differences between a traditional agency and an SMMA.

This is the agency that looks most familiar to most people, a big office with a massive team of people, which offers everything from public relations to web design. There may be a few hundred truly successful traditional agencies in the entire world. Some have been running for almost a century and are even publicly traded.

Now in order to make any money, they have to hire employees for virtually no money in charge of their clients. Fortunate. Now this right here is the typical breakdown of an agency's revenue around 80% of it will go to their office, their expenses and their staff leaving only 20% for the agency owner.

If that, by the way, that's a very generous number. I know a lot of traditional agency owners out there that literally only make a three to 5% margin, but these are, as I said, being quite generous. These are common margins in the types of agencies you see on mad men or in real life in contrast this an SMMA that's me, Saturday, kitchen table.

You can't see, but actually to my right, I have one of my team members sitting with me, but majority of the time, I never see them in person. We don't have an office. We have minimum overheads, and this is a really big one.

Unlike traditional agencies, we offer one or two services and we do them extremely well. Now I don't want to be particularly crude right now, but this is arguably the best thing about being an agency owner by minimizing costs and complexity. You have a massively higher piece of the pie when it comes to profits.

And if you start an agency by yourself, guess who gets to keep a hundred percent of it. Yup. That's right.

You so we know SMMAs are great, but what do they actually do? Remember when we spoke about what SMMA stands for? Well, it's true that they originally only offered social media marketing services, but there's a big point that I want to make here.

And that's, if you're watching this video right now and you have an expertise in graphic designer, SEO, don't turn this video off whilst I agree and see, we really specialize in teaching people. What we have experienced doing at IAG media has said four years ago, I was a creative agency in the past two and a half years. We've been a exclusively Facebook and Google ads agency.

So really that's what we teach our students inside of our programs. But as you're going to see very shortly service delivery is just one part of your business. Here are just a few examples of some of the services.

Some of our students offer. And these are only growing. The important thing is to take the same principles of running an estimate and apply them to your new agency.

And really that's why my company is called GrowYourAgency and not grow your Facebook ads agency or grow your smma. com. Now, as I said, it's quite obvious that I'm a big fan of social media marketing, and it's what my agency offers at its core.

So let's look at the two types you can offer. The first is social media management, and I'll be honest. It's pretty easy to do if your client has nice pictures and you have a decent command of your language, you know, it's really not rocket science to grow an account and post irregularly.

The second is paid traffic, and it's a little bit more complicated. It involves paying the likes of Facebook or Google to put your content and your adverts in front of more people and sending them to your client's websites. It might sound super complicated, but the reality is anyone with a credit card and a Facebook account, you can do it.

And the best part of this service is that because you can track what people do on your website. You can, at the end of every month, exactly how much money you've made for your client, the result you can charge higher retainers. Now that you've picked your service, it's time to decide something else.

And that's actually your niche. Now this isn't a word you come across every single day in day to day life, but it is so critical that you decide on one with your agency and explain why let's imagine you bought some incredible steak quality, a one Kobe, and obviously you want an amazing chef to cook it. Well, you're not exactly going to go for a vegan chef are you and the vice-versa applies.

If you want to incredible plant-based dinner, you're not going to get a chef that specializes in cooking steaks. Likewise, F crazy weird alternate universe. You've been arrested for murder.

You're not exactly gonna call it. Who specializes in parking tickets are you. You're going to call a lawyer who specializes in criminal defense.

These are known as niches and for agencies, they are incredibly important. You really need to have a good understanding of the industry and you really need to know how it works inside and out. So you can not only service these clients properly, but that way, so you can become a specialist in your area.

For example, if you work in the medical industry, you'll know that there are certain trigger words that for example, if you're advertising, you're just not allowed to say. And that's why it's so important to specialize with one niche, because you're going to be able to serve your clients better. Now here's some examples of popular niches in SMMA.

Now my own agency actually specializes in education companies and e-commerce businesses. And it's important to note that these are only a few examples and then agree and see, we have students who specialize in everything from yoga retreats to, I'm not getting private jets to pet hotels I don't know what the technical term is, but a pet hotels. It's ridiculous.

Just the wide plethora of different niches, sub niches, different industries that our students are targeting. Now, in order to find your niche, you have to ask yourself a few questions. The first is where do you work now?

Now, if you're thinking of leaving your job to start an agency and you already work for, let's say a hundred or a restaurant, it might make sense to continue to work with restaurants, obviously with everything that's going on in the world, you know, use a bit of common sense. You know, you might be watching this the day after it's uploaded or six months later. So obviously just take into consideration the situation going on in the world.

In some countries, the restaurants are open. Some countries they're fully open, absolutely no issues. So, you know, just use a bit of common sense at the time of, but just as a general rule, that is a good example.

And the reason that's a good example is for example, if you've already worked at a restaurant, you'll know their busiest periods, you know, their most popular deals and promotions and the ones in your town that need more customers and next ask yourself which industry, you know, well, because if you're obsessed with cars or fitness, look at dealership or fitness products, and finally ask yourself where you can get the best results for your clients, because you know, you might love fashion, but if you've already previously designed websites for accountants, guess who you should be offering your services to. Now that you know what services you're going to be offering your clients, who your potential clients could be. It is time to get onto pricing.

Now, the first question to ask yourself is this is the service I'm about to offer my client one, which will save them time or make them money. You see services that save you time are known as convenience space offers. They don't directly contribute to your client's bottom line.

In contrast, results-based offers actually make your clients money and you can track the result of every dollar they spend and how many abroad back to them. Now, this isn't an absolute rule and ladies and gents, it totally depends on whether you're running ads for local businesses or whether you're running ads for e-commerce SAS businesses, online businesses. But here is just a bit of general guidance.

Agency owners can charge more for results based offers and less for convenience based offers for individual clients. There are few questions you have to ask yourself, for example, how much does the client make? It's great if you're the best Facebook advertiser in the world, but in reality, if you're working for a local cafe, realistically, you're not going to be able to, to charge them $5,000 a month.

Likewise, I mean, you could work for Nike, but if you can only increase their sales by $500 a month, you can't charge them higher rates. And finally, you need to set your own base price. You know, what's a hygiene standard for you.

What's the minimum. You're happy to work for finally, it's time to find clients for your agency. And I know this is the most daunting aspect of this entire process for people, but it is by far the most important.

Why? Because I've said this before, and I'll say it till I'm blue in the face, an agency without clients is like a plane without a propeller. So here I've listed some of the most common ways of finding clients.

Now, if you're working with local businesses, a great place to start is actually Google maps. So type in restaurants in your local area, as an example, and start collecting names and phone numbers, or if you're looking to service e-commerce businesses, look on Amazon or Google shopping and find a list of brands you can reach out to. So I'll give you a couple of examples of finding clients right now.

Step one is to use a Google maps. So if you're offering Facebook adverts to Botox clinics, start in your local area and make a list of at least 10 clinics. Another method is to look at an online directory like Amazon and search the product you want to sell.

Let's look at this example with smartwatches, interestingly, there's a brand called lets fit, who are promoting their products on Amazon to get more sales. Let's go with them. The next step is to find someone who owns the business or anyone responsible for their sales or marketing.

So LinkedIn is actually a great tool for this. Find the name of the person you want to speak to and start researching to find their email. And if you can't find their email, then you can just kind of take a wild swing in the dark at their email format for the company, for example, their first name, full-stop their last name at whatever their business name is.

Or for example, their first name at their business. Now a great tool to use is called snov. io, where you can actually verify whether the email you're going to is deliverable.

Now it's time to speak to the business. Now there are multiple ways you can do this, but we're going to focus on to sending emails and sending DMS. Now here's our first example.

It's actually to the sales manager at let's fit. I followed a very simple structure for an outreach email, which incorporates four elements, personalization problem solution, and making the meeting a no-brainer and email like this is a hundred percent more likely to get a response than an email which tries to make a sale. One email in here's another example, this time it's a direct message to the owner of a jewelry business, where you're trying to pitch web design as a service.

I followed a similar format here and what happens once you've set a meeting, this is the biggest challenge as an agency owner and it's selling to your clients. The good news is just like everything else. There's a system for it.

So let's pretend you've got the sales manager for let's fit on a zoom call. What would that look like? So first it's called the rapport stage and it's basically where you make friends.

You get to know the person you're speaking to. Now, this might seem silly, but in 20, 30, 40, 50, maybe an even an hour, if you're going be asking this person for a decent amount of money, see me, them to like you and to trust you next up, it's time to go digging. And this is where you ask more information about the company and you try to work out what they're trying to achieve.

So if you're speaking to the business owner, the financial success of the company is directly related to how much money is in their pocket. But even if you're speaking to someone else in the business, they still want to look good and good performance could result in their promotion or a raise or bonus. So just kind of know who you're speaking to and adjust your pitch accordingly.

Now you've got to present your solution as the logical one to grow in their business. In this example is the Facebook ads can be profitable. And that they're much cheaper than Amazon.

Finally, it's time for the close. This is one of the most nerve wracking parts of the entire call, but it's where you need to stay calm, do your best, not to be desperate. And just to blurt out the price.

Silence is incredibly underrated. When it comes to sales calls, my advice learn to get comfortable sitting without saying anything. If you've done all the steps correctly, they'll come to you.

Congratulations. You've signed your first client. We've actually made one mistake you haven't gotten paid yet.

So let's actually go back a step. Unfortunately, all of your hard work of saying a client can be wasted by failing to do this. And that's because often after you've gone off the phone, people will have second thoughts or actually get a cheaper price elsewhere and fail to pay you.

So before you hang up on the client, send them an invoice. Now I use Stripe to take my payments from the majority of countries, and this means that clients can actually take out their credit card and pay on the call. And until they do, I sit there, I wait.

In fact, I've waited for up to an hour before, whilst the client had to speak to their bank, just to verify the payment, you know, these days with fraud prevention and this and that. And I'm sure you guys know how much of a nightmare the banks can be sometimes, but I didn't leave the call. You know, I didn't go, okay, it's fine.

You know, you can pay the invoice and will email me after and this and that. I literally muted myself on zoom, turn my video off and just sat there and waited. And you know, routinely turned my video back on, turn my audio back on and let the client know that I was there.

It was an entire hour, but I got it over the line. And they actually went on to be one of our longest standing clients. Okay, now I can congratulate you properly.

You've signed a client and they've paid. Now it's time to actually deliver that service to your client. The first option is to do it yourself.

And a lot of time, this is an easy option, especially if you already know how to deliver it. And the bonus of this is that you actually get to keep a hundred percent of the retainer. Remember what we said earlier about agencies?

Now, this is where contractors and freelancers come in. Now, before I say anything else, I want to say that being an agency owner doesn't make you any better than a service provider. It's just a different way of operating.

So if you choose this route, make sure you pay your contractor fairly and treat them with the utmost respect, just like you would expect your client to do with you. Now with this option, you have to find someone who can do the work for you. And one of the easiest places to look is either Fiverr, Upwork or Facebook groups make a post looking for someone who can run Facebook ads or build a website and get a couple of different quotes from people.

The major benefit of this is the person you hire is likely to be able to provide a great standard of work because it's what they specialize in. Now at my agency, I don't actually provide any of the services myself. Granted.

It was different when I first started four and a half years ago. So August of 2016, when I started my agency, I actually for the first 18 months was delivering all the services myself. So back then my agency was a creative agency.

So I would shoot all the content for clients, edit it, distributed, grow their social platforms. And that's kind of the role that I played in the first 18 months now for the past two and a half, three years, I have not delivered the services myself initially. And this is two and a half.

Yeah. Based around two and a half, three years ago for the space of six months, I had a contractor on board. I was paying him per month per client.

Now he's actually ended up being with me for the past three years. He's actually the COO and my agency, Danny. And that's one of the beautiful things as you start to GrowYourAgency, and you get past 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 a month, which I know for some of the beginners here just seems like absolutely crazy number.

So let's just take things one step at a time. But, but just to let you know what you have to look forward to later down the line in the same way that initially I started off with a contractor to deliver the Facebook ads for me, this person's now been working with me for three years, two and a half of those have been full-time. The agency has grown to the point where now we're hitting a hundred thousand dollars a month profit.

And that means that not only is he full-time, but he's very well paid. So that might be a journey that some of you guys may follow, or you might just decide to keep things lean, keep things small, very profitable, and just continue to work with contractors. So, as I said in my agency actually don't deliver any of the services myself.

I just do the sales. Obviously I'm there for the onboarding call with my clients. I pop into the occasional check-in call.

But for the most part, my two, technically three, depending on how you look at it, guys who work at the agency, Danny, Luis, and as I said, Ciaran is actually the product manager at the education company GrowYourAgency, but he kind of fills two roles. He does all of the copywriting for our clients. Anyways, I'm boring you with details.

My point is they kind of manage and run the vessel. All I have to do is the sales. And as we talked about earlier in this video, really just be the agency owner.

So what's next. Well, this is where you rinse and repeat. And here's an example of an email you might send to a client after you've gotten them great results.

It's simple. And it asks for referrals because look, and then day as an agency owner, these are your bread and butter. It's an easy way to get more clients without having to do much outreach.

So once more, congratulations, you're officially an agency owner. Now earlier I promised that I would do the biggest giveaway I've done on my channel thus far. So here it is ladies and gentlemen, for every hundred unique comments down below, I'm actually going to give away a 30 minute free coaching call.

Now I never do one-off coaching anymore. But for the companies that work with my advertising agency, IgE media, my fee is $2,000 per hour. And you have to do multiple, multiple hours.

You can't just do one. It's not really worth my time at this point. And you know, that's not any hypothetic value or this or that.

You guys can look back on my YouTube channel. I've done sales breakdowns before I've done kind of day in the life of an agency, owner of logs. And you've seen me close 20, 25,000 pound two day trainings where most of the time I only need to do a half day.

And my team kind of takes over the rest of the day and a half. So as I said, that is my current going rate hourly. So I'm going to give every hundred unique comments.

I'm actually going to get Tristan. The creative director at my company. You can say, hi, every a hundred unique comments.

He's actually going to go ahead and randomly select a giveaway winner and I'll leave the details down below. You can actually reach out to Ciaran and he'll arrange the free complimentary coaching call between us. So let's get into last final piece of the training.

Now, how many times have you watched a YouTube video and never actually taken action on it? Or you watch it passively, but there's no real action step. So here's the action step for today.

Number one, I want you to comment below because I want you to get in on this free giveaway. The next thing is go to the link in the description. Obviously there'll be a few, but one of them will take you to agency incubator.

Guys. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I don't want you to.

In fact, I don't, I'm asking you not to buy anything right now. All I want you to do is I want you to watch the free demo. Now what this demo is, it's a 15 minute video where you can see literally behind the scenes, like literally as if you've already purchased the program behind the scenes, what agency incubator looks like.

So you get to see module by module. I do the breakdown. I show you all the plug and plays all the templates, the trackers, the community, the live Q and a calls like as if you're literally a customer.

And the reason I want you to watch this is just so you can get an idea of the immense value in this program. And as I said, I don't want you to buy anything. So after you watched that, don't buy the program.

What I want you to do next is right below that demo, you actually got to find a link to booking a call with my student success manager. Because for most of you, you are about to embark on one of the most important journeys of your life, starting an online business. And that can be quite a scary thing to do at times.

And that's actually why we have my student success manager, whose entire role in my company is to speak to potential new students. Give them a little bit of advice and see if they're a good fit for agency incubator. But the main priority is the first thing I said, give you guys a little advice, speak to you.

One-on-one here are your problems here where you're kind of stuck. And as I said, only an F only you're a good fit for Agency Incubator, He'll go ahead and present you with a very special offer to join. So ladies and gents, I want you to go ahead and take those two action steps because honestly there has never been more opportunity than in 2021 with social media marketing and the success that my students saw in 2020, even with everything that's going on in the world was crazy.

Our students had better success and my agency actually grew in 2020, even with everything that's going on. And while I'm saying all this, I'm actually going to get interest into pop up. Some of the student wins just this week alone.

So as I said, I'm looking forward to jumping on zoom with some of these coaching calls, giveaway winners. I'm very excited for you to check out the demo and then booking your complimentary call with my student success manager. Thank you guys so much for sticking around until this point and for smashing that like button.

I really appreciate it. I'll see you guys in the next one.