Digital Marketing Company Start-up

Witnessing the growth of digital platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok has convinced you that digital marketing is thriving and is here to stay. You sense a market need that most businesses lack the expertise of handing their digital marketing campaigns.

So you finally decide to verge into the field of digital marketing and want to create a company around it.

But just like most beginners, you’re stuck with the conundrum of where to get started. The problem is actually part of starting a digital marketing company. You need to figure out the best way to get started.

Here’s a complete guide you help you out in your pursuit. You’ll learn step-by-step how to start and scale your own digital marketing company in Canada as a first-time entrepreneur.

Starting a Digital Marketing Company in Canada in 10 Steps

Starting a digital marketing agency requires as much work as it sounds appealing. While the process will vary from person to person and region to region, you can break it down into 10 general steps. Those are:

1. Decide Whether to Operate as a Company or Freelance Agency

2. Find Your Niche

3. Develop a Business Plan

4. Educate Yourself and Hire the Right People

5. Analyze Your Competitors

6. Get the Right Tools

7. Launch a Website and Market Your Services

8. Be Active on LinkedIn from Day 1

9. Get to Your First 25 Customers

10. Stay Updated on Latest Marketing Trends

In the subsequent sections, we’ll be explaining each step in greater detail. But for now, just keep in mind that you must go through these steps to successfully build a digital marketing company.

Company or Freelance Agency?

In the old days, the only way to start a company and offer a service for a profit was to register as a company. This involved working through various regulators, securing the licenses, paying the registration fees, trademarking and copyrighting your company name, among other things.

But in modern times, you can start a business to generate without even registering yourself. These types of businesses are known as Freelance Agencies.

You can start right from your bedroom, and you do not have to visit a registration office.

A freelance agency works remotely from anywhere in the world. All the employees work remotely and are connected over the internet to deliver client projects.

So the first thing you need to decide is whether you want to start a digital marketing company or a digital marketing freelance agency.

If you want to start a company, then you have to incorporate through federal incorporation or provincial incorporation. Along with that, you have to obtain a federal business number and a Corporation income tax account from Canada Revenue Agency.

The main benefit of starting a registered company over a freelance agency is you'll get bigger clients who would have bigger budgets. They tend to only work with the registered company because of the sensitivity of work and regulatory requirements.

Accordingly, your profit margins will be higher if you’re working with bigger clients.

In the case of freelance agencies, you'll most likely be serving small business owners and medium-sized enterprises. They will be more flexible in handing over their work to a freelance agency.

.As a benefit, you don’t have to run an office, pay the rent, or be constrained to a particular city. You can work from anywhere you wish to. You’d have to sacrifice this flexibility if you want to run a company.

So this is a crucial decision you need to make first.

Find Your Niche

Digital marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses various sub-domains. When you’re just starting out, it’s unlikely that you’d be able or equipped to offer all the services.

Therefore, you need to select a niche. This can be SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Or it can be Social Media Marketing or Affiliate Marketing or AdWords, or any other niche.

Even if you plan to provide all of the services, you need to specialize in one. That’s the rule to starting a business in a competitive environment.

Big companies like WordStream, HubSpot, Neil Patel Digital go by this rule as well. If you look closely, Neil Patel Digital is an all-around digital marketing agency. But they tend to focus more on SEO. That's because the founder Neil Patel specializes in it.

This helps the company stand out from the competitors and own a niche. By looking at the company, other businesses will realize that NPD is a specialist in SEO and knows what they’re talking about.

When selecting a niche, you’d also have to select a particular industry you’ll be targeting. Is it healthcare? Automotive? E-commerce? NGO?

Whatever the niche might be, you should have at least some level of expertise working in that particular niche. This way, you'd know the ins and outs of how to run campaigns in that niche, how long does it take to generate leads, and what's the cost would be like.

So after going through this step, your niche may look something like, "Social Media Marketing for auto dealers in Quebec." This is much better than saying, "Digital Marketing for any business in Canada."

Develop a Business Plan

To succeed in any business, you’d need a comprehensive business plan. This is a given for any industry, not only digital marketing.

But most first-time entrepreneurs ignore the importance of a business plan and move ahead with execution instead. As successful digital marketing founders will reveal to you, this is a mistake.

When developing a plan, you need to be as extensive as possible. The list of things you'd be defining here are:

l How you’re going to acquire clients

l Your business model

l How you’ll make money

These are the main questions a business plan addresses.

Many people confuse a business plan with a business model. But both are quite different from one another.

A business plan contains how you’ll be reaching your goal, which is making a profit in exchange for your services. A business model refers to how you’re going to operate.

In digital marketing, you can operate in four ways:

1.       On an Hourly Rate

2.       On a Flat Retainer Basis

3.       On Percentage of Spend

4.       On based on performance or Commission-based

Each model is unique and has its pros and cons. Most marketers start off with an hourly rate. The client pays by the hours of work done. This is flexible for both the company and the client.

Other clients may prefer to work on a performance-based or commission-based basis. Here, you'll only get paid when you deliver the results. The result can be improving SEO score, generating leads, growing the social media presence, and things along those lines.

Within all of these, you need to figure out how you’ll be making money. You do not want to operate on a negative ROI, not at least for a long time.

Therefore, discuss these things in brief in your business plan document.

Educate Yourself and Hire Staff Members

Tesla founder and CEO defines a company in his own words as, "A group of people working together to create a product or service."

So if you’ll be starting a digital marketing company, you’d need staff members who will help you in delivering client projects.

In the beginning, it might be just you working as a solopreneur. At max, you'll have one or two people. You need to make the most of this resource and educate yourself as much as possible.

Since it'll get overwhelming to educate yourself on every concept of digital marketing, you need to narrow it down to your niche.

If you specialize in PPC marketing and have experience doing it, then you should start your business around PPC marketing.

Not only would you be able to deliver results, but also make a profit. You can use the profit to expand into other areas and deliver other marketing services.

You should also plan for hiring staff members. How are you going to hire them? Through job portals? Through social media? Or through local job advertisements?

When selecting candidates, you should ensure they complement your skillset. So if you're good at Google AdWords, it makes more sense to hire a Facebook Ad marketer than another Google AdWords marketer.

After hiring, you should invest in educating them too. There are many online platforms like Udemy that allow you to educate your entire time at an affordable cost.

As the skill set of your employees grow, your company will be able to offer more services.

Analyze Your Competitors

Analyzing your competition is vital before starting a business. Doing so will give you a sense of who is already providing the digital marketing services in your area and how you'll be competing with them.

Almost all industries, sectors, and demographics have competition. So thinking that you don’t or won’t have any competition is a naive thought.

Another reason for conducting a competitor analysis is to differentiate your business. If an established company is providing the same services that you intend to offer, then there's very little reason for clients to pick you ahead of that company.

People trust companies that are well-established and have a rich portfolio. Since you’re just starting, it’s highly unlikely that you can boast of a similar portfolio,

Therefore, you need to differentiate yourself. You need to pick those services that either are not offered in your demographic or are offered by very few companies.

Ideally, you’d want to avoid segments with high competition. This will make it harder for you to convince and land clients.

Without competitive research, you'll run out of business sooner than you expect.

How to Perform a Competitive Analysis?

Competitor analysis for starting a digital marketing agency doesn't have to be complex at all. All you'd ever need is Google.

Simply head over to the search engine and type, "Digital Marketing Agency in [city]." This will show you all the companies that are offering the services in that region.

If you find too many companies listed, then it means you need to narrow down. You can then search for terms like "Google AdWords agency in [city]," "Social Media Marketing agency in [city]," "Content Marketing agency in [city]."

You should choose the domain that has low competition but high potential for growth.

But before selecting the niche, you should also take into account other factors like your expertise and budget. Not every niche will cost the same price to run campaigns.

Google AdWords is pricier than SEO. Similarly, content marketing takes more time than social media marketing.

So by balancing all of these things, you should be able to select a niche for yourself to get started.

But never neglect competitor analysis and spend a significant amount of time looking at who you'll be competing against.

Get the Right Tools

To run and manage a digital marketing agency, you’d need tools that you’ll use in your everyday business process. Most of the tools require a license for commercial or agency use. So be prepared to spend some capital and purchase the licenses.

The first one you'd need is a Keyword Research Tool. From here, you'd gather all the keywords that people are using for performing a search. There are many software and tools for this purpose like SEMRush, Keywordtools.io, Mangools, among others.

The tools you purchase will also depend on your niche. So if you’ll be offering SEO, you’d need to purchase tools like SEMRush, Yoast Premium, Ahrefs, Moz SEO, etc.

Similarly, for Google AdWords, tools like Spyfu, KW Finder, Answer the Public, and AdWords Wrapper.

The tools are priced somewhere between $50 per month to over $300 per month for agency use.

So if you’re just starting your business, you shouldn’t purchase everything at once. Pick only those that will be helpful in your niche.

Other than the operational tools mentioned above, you’d also need the administrative tools to run and manage your business.

This includes time management software, workflow management software, email suites, cloud storage, reporting software, among others.

You're going to have to purchase license copies for each member of your team.

But in the beginning, it’s important to keep expenses to the minimum.

Launch a Website and Market Your Services

A professional website is a must for a digital marketing agency. Since all digital marketing activities begin with a hosted website, you cannot start marketing to clients without one for yourself.

Launching a website isn’t hard these days. All you need is a domain name and a hosting provider that’ll host the website for you.

But the main concern is designing and marketing. And that should be your main focus.

When you sit down to design your website, it's important to keep it simple yet attractive and to engage at the same time. It should feel welcoming and helpful.

You should ensure that it loads faster across all devices without any lag. If people cannot access your website smoothly, they’ll most likely feel the friction and bounce.

Once your website is designed and up and running, you should start marketing it.

Before you start marketing, it'd be helpful if you can record all of your marketing activities. This would serve as a real-life portfolio, which you can later show to your clients to prove your expertise.

There are multiple channels on offer. But it’s important to focus on one or two channels in the beginning. For example, you can use Google AdWords and Facebook Ads to generate leads.

These are quick to set up and the fastest way to generate leads. SEO takes time, and do does email outreach.

Marketing is something that you'll be doing throughout the lifetime of your business. To expand to other channels as and when you feel you have enough time and money to invest.

Be Active on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not like any other social media platform. It is meant for business professionals who want to share knowledge, expand their network, and grow their business. So this is an ideal platform to be if you’re just starting a digital marketing agency.

In fact, you should spend a significant amount of your time on LinkedIn every day.

The possibilities on the platform are endless. For generating leads, you can reach out to business owners directly who are also on LinkedIn. You can pitch them your services and get your first set of customers.

The social network also allows you to run ads just like Facebook and Google. Your ads will be shown to your chosen target audience. If it’s catchy and valuable enough, they’ll take the required action.

But the real power of LinkedIn lies in sharing valuable content that other users will love to read. These aren't sales or meant to generate leads. But they help you in building a personal brand for yourself.

You can share digital marketing tips and your experience of managing campaigns. This will make you look authoritative and trustworthy, which 100X better than ads when it comes to sales.

So once you sign up for LinkedIn, you'll have to use to for the rest of your time managing the business. So think of it as a long term thing.

Get to Your First 25 Customers For Digital Marketing

People talk about getting to their first 100 customers. But that turns out to be overwhelming for some entrepreneurs who are often understaffed and out of time.

Therefore, you should get the number down to 25.

As you’re just starting your digital marketing agency, you should focus on getting to your first 25 customers.

For this, you’d used a mix of both marketing and customer development. Marketing your business alone will not get you there.

Customer development comprises figuring out your customer's actual needs and addressing them for a profit. So you'll have to test to validate your hypothesis.

Do they need SEO services? Is it AdWords that's best for their case? Will Social Media Marketing help them the most? Or is it cross-platform marketing that would get them the maximum ROI?

Once you’ve figured out the actual need, you can run the campaigns accordingly and get paid for it.

Without figuring out the actual need, you'll experience a high bounce rate. You'll see customers abandoning your agency because they get no real value.

So once you’ve marketed your business and acquired clients, you need to run them through a customer development cycle. That’s how you get to your first 25 customers.

Stay Updated on Latest Marketing Trends

Digital marketing is an ever-changing landscape—new platforms, new rules, new .to the changes swiftly.

The main concern for businesses is the regulatory changes. Especially when it comes to user privacy, things are changing quite rapidly. The implementation of GDPR, CCPA, DPA are fundamentally changing how companies can collect and process user information.

As an agency, you should be aware of all of these regulations to stay on the right side of the law.

Besides that, you also need to keep yourself updated on the evolution of digital platforms. Google isn’t anything like it used to be a decade back. Facebook has become more competitive and smarter. Instagram has changed, and so did Snapchat.

Therefore, to stay competitive as a digital marketing agency, you are supposed to be well-informed on these topics.

To Sum up

As a digital marketing agency, you’re responsible for running marketing campaigns for your clients. They trust you with their marketing and ad dollars.

Therefore, take it as a duty to use their budgets as efficiently as possible.

As you start your agency, you’ll experience a lot of setbacks and rejections. Most people will say no, and chances are nobody will sign up for your offers.

But that's part and parcel of starting a digital marketing agency from scratch. And that's also the phase where most people quit.

If you want to be successful, you have to persist and keep going. After a while, with the right targeting and strategy, you'll land clients who will pay you to run their marketing campaigns.

With that said, it’ll take time to reach that stage where most successful marketers are at right now. So be well prepared for it.