42 Tips on How to Launch a Marketing Agency: A Checklist

Last week we gave you some questions to ponder while considering Should I Start a Marketing Agency?

This week we want to give you a practical, succinct checklist for how to launch a marketing agency. These should give you food for thought and help your brainstorm!

☐   1. Define Your Industry Niche: Determine your target market and the specific industry or niche you want to serve. You may want to be open to everyone but focus on a few verticals with which you are familiar, at least in the beginning. In a recent survey, 32% stated that they’re specialized in one client industry.

☐   2. Determine the Services You Want to Offer: You can always add more later, but you may want to focus on a handful of services to begin. In a recent survey, 38% of respondents agencies said they focus on providing one specific service (such as SEO or social media). Almost 70% of these one-niche agencies offered SEO and over 63% offer content marketing services.

☐  3.  Craft a Unique Selling Proposition (USP): If you want to launch a marketing agency, you need to clearly communicate what sets your agency apart from competitors.

☐  4.  Develop a Business Plan: Outline your agency’s goals, target audience, services offered, pricing strategy and financial projections. A business plan increases the chances of growth by 30%. 71% of fast-growing businesses have plans

☐   5. Build a Strong Brand Identity: Create a memorable brand that reflects your agency’s values and resonates with your target audience. Branding goes beyond your logo and look and feel. Branding is part of every touchpoint you have with a customer. 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.

☐   6. Invest in Professional Branding Design: Hire a designer to create a professional logo, website, and marketing materials that reflect your brand identity. Unless you are a professional designer who specializes in branding, don’t risk looking amateurish by doing it yourself.

☐   7. Network Extensively: Attend industry events, join networking groups and connect with potential clients and partners.

☐   8. Focus on Relationships: Build strong relationships with clients, employees, suppliers and other industry professionals. People want to do business with people they like.

☐   9. Stay Customer-Centric: Keep your clients’ needs and objectives at the forefront of your marketing efforts and decision-making process. Your audience cares about how you can offer solutions to their needs and challenges, not about how great you think you are.

☐   10. Provide Exceptional Customer Service: Deliver high-quality work and always strive to exceed your clients’ expectations.

☐   11. Stay Up-to-Date with Industry Trends: Continuously educate yourself on the latest marketing trends, technologies, and best practices. Digital marketing technology and trends is change at a rapid pace. If you don’t keep up, you will be left behind. You can’t just launch a marketing agency, you must keep up to date.

☐   12. Delegate Responsibilities: If you have employees or contractors, learn to delegate tasks effectively to maximize productivity and focus on growing your business. Or just use white label marketing services for excess work, particularly work that isn’t your agency’s focus.

☐   13. Prioritize Time Management: Manage your time effectively by prioritizing tasks, setting deadlines, and avoiding distractions.

☐   14. Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): Develop clear processes and workflows to ensure consistency and efficiency in your agency’s operations. It avoids bottlenecks and nasty surprises to both workers and clients.

☐   15. Implement Project Management Tools: Use project management software to streamline workflows, track tasks and collaborate with team members.

☐   16. Provide Ongoing Training: Invest in training and professional development programs to keep your team’s skills sharp and up-to-date.

☐   17. Build a Portfolio: Showcase your agency’s work through case studies, client testimonials and examples of successful campaigns.

☐   18. Offer Free Resources: Create valuable content such as blog posts, eBooks, or webinars to establish your agency as a thought leader in your industry. When you are selling, you aren’t building rapport. It’s important to build rapport and trust.

☐   19. Use Social Media: Leverage social media platforms to promote your agency, engage with your audience and showcase your expertise. Social media is cost effective, and enables you to easily engage with your clients.

☐   20. Optimize Your Website for SEO: Ensure your website is optimized for search engines to improve your online visibility and attract organic traffic.

☐   21. Invest in Paid Advertising: Consider using paid advertising channels such as Google Ads and social media ads to reach your target audience and generate leads.

☐   21. Offer Free Initial Consultations: Provide free consultations to potential clients to demonstrate your expertise and build rapport.

☐   22. Ask for Referrals: Encourage satisfied clients to refer new business to your agency through word-of-mouth referrals. Set up a process for getting referrals.

☐   23. Collaborate with Platforms, Other Agencies and Businesses: Partner with complementary agencies or freelancers to offer a broader range of services to your clients. Consider partnering with a platform that can provide you up-to-the-minute marketing technology, leads, visibility and white label marketing services.

☐   24. Stay Flexible and Adaptable: Be willing to adapt to changes in the market, client needs and industry trends. Kodak dominated the photographic industry in most of the 20^th century. But though they developed the world’s first digital camera, the management failed to recognize the major shift to digital photography over film, and failed to shift their focus. They filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

☐   24. Monitor Your Finances Closely: Keep track of your agency’s finances, expenses and revenue to ensure profitability and financial stability.

☐   25. Set Clear Goals and KPIs: Establish measurable goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your agency’s progress and success.

☐   26. Regularly Evaluate and Adjust Your Strategies: Continuously assess your marketing strategies, client acquisition tactics and business processes to identify areas for improvement.

☐   27. Focus on Sales and Lead Generation: If you build it, it doesn’t mean they will come, not if you don’t do something to bring them to you. It’s not enough to just open your doors. You need to be constantly marketing and selling your own services, or hire or partner with someone who will do it for you.

☐   28. Treat Your Current Customers Like Gold: Your initial customers will be getting the word out about your agency, and you want their return business. Don’t focus so much on selling to new customers you forget to take care of your current ones. It’s marketing gospel that it is much, much cheaper to sell additional services to current customers than to get new customers.

☐   29. Stay Organized: Maintain meticulous records of client communications, projects, and financial transactions to stay organized and efficient.

☐   30. Cultivate a Positive Company Culture: Foster a supportive and inclusive work environment that encourages creativity, collaboration, and growth.

☐   31. Be Transparent and Honest: Build trust with clients by being transparent about your agency’s processes, pricing and expectations.

☐   32. Stay Committed to Quality: Never compromise on the quality of your work or the service you provide to clients.

☐   33. Celebrate Milestones and Achievements: Recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of your agency and team members to boost morale and motivation.

☐   34. Seek Feedback: Regularly solicit feedback from clients and employees to identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments.

☐   35. Embrace Creativity: Encourage creativity and innovation within your agency to develop unique and effective marketing strategies. Think outside the box.

☐   36. Monitor Industry Regulations: Stay informed about industry regulations, compliance requirements, and ethical standards to ensure legal and ethical business practices.

☐   37. Stay Resilient: Entrepreneurship can be challenging, so cultivate resilience and perseverance to overcome obstacles and setbacks. If you launch a marketing agency, it’s going to be a lot of work in the beginning.

☐   38. Offer Flexible Pricing Options: Consider offering flexible pricing options such as retainer agreements, project-based fees or performance-based pricing to accommodate different client budgets and needs.

☐   39. Stay Agile: Be prepared to adapt quickly to changes in the market, client preferences and industry dynamics.

☐   40. Build a Strong Online Presence: Maintain an active presence on social media, industry forums and online communities to increase visibility and attract clients.

☐   41. Invest in Marketing Automation: Use marketing automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks, personalize communications, and improve efficiency. An alternative is to seek out a strong marketing platform that will provide you with this technology.

☐   42. Diversify Your Revenue Streams: Explore opportunities to diversify your agency’s revenue streams by offering additional services, products or consulting. You don’t need to offer everything, but rather than send your clients off to another agency for a service you don’t currently offer, consider white label marketing services rather than brining on a large staff to manage and pay year-round. If you want to launch a marketing agency, white label services enable you to offer your clients many services immediately.

Ready to Launch a Marketing Agency?

If you are planning to launch your own marketing agency, Umbrella can provide you a platform for technology, training, lead generation and whitel label digital marketing services. For a free consultation, contact Umbrella by heading to our website or calling (866) 760-2638.