With the move to remote work, digital marketers are needed more than ever. In fact, data provided by LinkedIn states that the need for paid social media has climbed more than 116% in the past year. With such a demand, it’s easy to see why so many people are considering creating their own digital marketing businesses in 2022. With a bit of planning, you can do the same.
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Hone Your Marketing Skills
Before you can create a digital marketing business, you need to be sure that your skills are up to par. Online marketing requires you to have knowledge about and skills in affiliate marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, website marketing, and much more. You’ll need to know about search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, content creation, and a range of other mediums. Some clients may also want you to help them with TV, SMS, radio, or billboard marketing, so if you can, ensure you add them to your skill sets. Keep in mind, too, that learning these skills is ongoing. Trends in marketing change by the year and sometimes even more often, so you’ll need to stay on top of your game if you want to remain relevant.
Create a Business Plan
Every business, even those operating mostly online, requires startup capital. If you’re hoping to find yours in the form of small business loans (and even if you’re not), you need a solid business plan. The biggest component of any business plan is the numbers. Your potential investors and lenders will want to know how many clients you already have, how many more you hope to attract, and how you are retaining the clients that you already have. Other important numbers include the cost of client retention, how much you pay outside partners, how much it will cost to sell your services and how you plan to sell them, and more. This information must be backed by data analysis in most cases. Always be realistic and honest when creating and presenting your business plan.
Build Your Online Presence
Before you can start building an online presence for other businesses, you need to do it for your own. Start with your business website. Think of it as the “front door” of your business. It should look professional and provide information that includes who you are and what your company can do for people. Make sure there is a way to contact you, including a form, to make things go more smoothly for potential clients. Don’t forget about the rest of your web presence, either. You’ll want to create a digital marketing blog to help drive traffic to your website. Social media is also important. At a minimum, create business accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you’re adept at video content, creating a TikTok account is also a good idea.
Provide a Portfolio
If you haven’t already, now is the time to start creating a portfolio of your work to help you bring in new clients. It’s much easier to bring in new clients to a brand new agency if you do so at a lower price. Once you’ve done marketing work for several clients and gotten positive testimonials from them, then you can start trying to sink your teeth into bigger projects. Big-budget clients are more willing to hire a digital marketing agency once they see that it has positive reviews from other companies.
Build Your Team
You’ll likely need to hire employees eventually. This will occur once you have a number of clients, a process, and a profit that works for you. Start by hiring people to perform easy-to-execute jobs and hire freelancers before you take on full-time employees. This gives you time to hone the process once you have people working for you as well as ensure you have the flexibility needed if you decide employees aren’t quite in the budget yet. It may help to bring someone on for a one-off job first to determine whether you work well together.
Above all else, remember that owning your own business is a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time and make changes where you need to. A trial-and-error process will get you to where you want to be in time.