what the gurus won’t tell you about launching an smma agency…
Starting in 2022, I have worked with different businesses,
1 was a window installer business and the other was a pharmaceutical products distributor.
I didn’t have any experience in those 2 niches, but I was willing to help and get them results, even if they have nothing set to do advertising for their businesses.
So I’m going to share everything I learn working with those 2 completely different businesses and what to avoid if you’re trying to launch your own ads agency. I’ll also share my mistakes working with these businesses so you can learn from them.
1-Know your niche before jumping in…
During the summer 2021, I’ve started to work with a friend who was a window installer, he needed help and I was willing to have an opportunity to have a client that I can get a case study to then showcase the results and get more clients.
It was based on performance, the client would pay for ad and I would get commission when he get sales.
First mistake
My first mistake, was to not writing a contract straight at the beginning, it might sounds stupid, but when it’s a friend you always think it’s ok, you’ll have time to do it and if I’m not happy I can just stop anyway, but it’s a mistake, firstable a contract is really important because in it you define exactly what you’ll have to do, and if they ask you to do more you can always remind them that it wasn’t what we had decided in the contract, my second mistake was to trust a friend, on this one it’s kind of obvious but I had to learn it the wrong way, never trust anyone in business, there is no friend in business.
Also you want to define at the beginning the time, you don’t want to waste your time in a project that don’t get you any results in less than 3 months, and ideally in 1 month max, I did this mistake more on that later.
We argreed to work based on performance, so I’d be paid per sales,
I started to work on email marketing, and got one sale, the client didn’t transfer me the money straight away, again that’s why you should not forget to mention that the client has to pay you as quick as possible in the contract.
Then I started to work on advertising, and the client asked me to help him on different tasks that weren’t related to what I was supposed to do, as you want to client to be happy, you tried to help as much as you can, again it’s a big mistake, because you’re not supposed to do everything, and if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you’re loosing time and you don’t do things well, so avoid at all costs to do things that you’re not supposed to do and always mention the contract if anything happen.
The ads finally had some traction but no sales, we did an offer where we offered to install windows for 1€, we had a couple of prospects but not a crazy number.
Finally the website went down, and the client asked me to fixed it, for this I simply took a freelancer on fiverr and charged the client.
After that, the client didn’t have enough sales people in his company and he didn’t want my service anymore, so the project got to its end.
Overall on this project, if I had to do it again I wouldn’t take it because it was too much time, not enough money invested into ads and too many things asked that weren’t related to my service,
what I learn, is to take the time to study a project before jumping in it, see if you’re really interested and how people are getting results, never offer a performance based project when you don’t know your numbers, to offer a performance based project, you need to be able to identify quickly if the business has already something going on that it just need to scale, if not it’ll be too much risk for you.
The second business I helped at the same time was a distributor of products for pharmacies in France, again because I took almost both project at the same time, I did the same mistakes without really knowing, the offer was really interested it was 50/50 of the benefits, but the issue here was I had to take care of everything and for 1 person it’s too much work especially when you’re not getting paid for the service and only on commission based.
I don’t recommend starting a commission based service as a beginner in an industry when you’re not certain of the results. If you do sales, you have to identify first if this an in demand market.
In this project, it was different because the client agreed to have his team worked to help execute the strategy, but unfortunately it wasn’t that simple…
When submitted a proven strategy the client wasn’t ok to execute it, so we would have to change again and again the different strategies and wasted a lot of time on the way, not to mention that I wasn’t generating a single penny during this time.
The good side of this project is that I learned a lot about reaching out different types of influencers and what would generate faster content, reach out to influencer take a little time, then you have to negotiate pricing with them, so it’s really time-consuming, at the opposite you can find micro influencers and ask them to make the content, but a lot won’t do that in the right time because there’s no real intensive other than the products for them.
I found that the most effective was actually to reach out to freelancers and they would get paid cheaper price than influencers.
You don’t want to be alone to do things, you can start an agency as a freelancer but it’s not really the purpose of an agency, an agency is supposed to be a team of talents that have their respectively their own skills. Do not try to do everything by yourself, you’ll get burn out, you won’t do a good job and the clients will complain after you.
If you’re launching an agency make sure you have a team, for ad agency get a media buyer and a creative director at the beginning, you’ll be in charge of sales and client reports.
I also learn that you have to be clear with your client straight away, in e-commerce if you want results you’ll have to be able to provide enough budget for content creation and advertising and it won’t be cheap, don’t take any client that is not able to spend at least $10K/month for marketing overwise you’ll waste your time…
Even if I didn’t find any real success during these experiences, I learned a lot about business relationships and how to operate as an agency owner and won’t do those mistakes again…
At the moment I’m at the launching phase of my new agency, and I’m gonna record everything, how I leadsource clients, how to make a great offer and how to get your first client, if you interested keep following my journey,
See you in the next episode…
Chears,
_____
(accroche, intéret, désir, action)
Nowadays, everyone wants to be financially free. You don’t want to work for a boss anymore, you want to travel and get up whenever you want and you want to work from home while earning the amount you want. One of the businesses you can start on the internet with zero capital is called social media marketing, which is offering online advertising for businesses. Most businesses will have to differentiate themselves from the competition by communicating on social platforms, where the majority of their customers are active.
I already had a good experience in ecommerce where I was able to set up a 100 000 euros shop by referencing it on search engines, but after some time I wished to turn to this new activity which seemed to me to be more interesting to develop my skills in the marketing universe.
you just have to look at the smma gurus, some of them make several millions per month, this activity seemed to me extremely juicy and anyway companies need advertisement, right? it’s simple, you just have to offer your help to a company and pocket your cheque at the end of the month then start again and again until you make a million per month, too easy!right?
except that I was far from suspecting the reality and what I was going to get myself into.
And that’s why I’m going to tell you exactly what the pitfalls are that you’re going to encounter when you start your own smma agency, believe me the gurus will never tell you what I’m going to explain to you in this video because if they did, no one would buy their course, not even their own mom.