Digital advertising businesses are highly competitive. You need years of experience under your belt before you consider starting your own agency.
Step 1. Get a minimum of 2 years, or more, of full-time campaign management experience.
Step 2. Raise a minimum of $50,000 in working capital to prepare for your launch.
Step 3. Use your previous experience and knowledge to launch your own marketing campaign and start signing up customers.
Along the way you need to develop a process for setting up new campaigns, a process for managing campaigns, a process for generating leads for your business, a process for building and managing a sales pipeline, a process for on-boarding new clients, a process for reporting campaign performance, a process for managing customer service, and an accounting process for billing, payables, and payroll.
You will need to acquire skills and knowledge in:
- Marketing Science
- Advertising Platforms & Tools
- Analytic Marketing Systems, Tools, & Implementation Procedures
- Professional Sales & Marketing
- Web Design
- Graphic Design
- Conversion Optimization
- Reporting Systems
And this is just the tip of the Iceberg.
Marketing is the most competitive aspect of managing a business, and Advertising is the most competitive of all marketing skills. You have to win customers, not only for your agency, but you also have to win customers for clients. There is no reward for coming in second in a competition to win a client. The agency that almost got hired gets nothing for all of their efforts, and the same goes for your clients’ business. You need to be able to compete against the best of the best and win, else you are wasting everybody’s time and money, including your own.
I suggest that you find the best agency that will hire you, work for them for at least 2 years, learning everything you can. Then when you have the skills, knowledge, and resources go for it. It might seem like something that you can just jump into and learn as you go, which you could have done if you were starting out 10-20 years ago, but now there are more than 50,000 agencies based in the U.S. alone, many more worldwide. You are going to get your butt handed to you in a sling if you try to wing it this day in age.
Get the knowledge and skills first, else you won’t last 6 months.
