How To Start A Social Media Marketing Agency: The Beginner’s Guide

Want to learn how to start a social media marketing agency?  

In this post, I’ll walk you through the whole process, step by step.

We’ll look at how to position your agency to stand out from the competition, establish your services and business processes, hire and recruit talent, build your online presence, find clients, and cover everything else you need to know.

Plus, I’ll also recommend some software tools that can help you manage your agency and deliver social media services at scale.

Step 1: Choose your niche

It’s a good idea to niche down when starting a social media marketing agency. 

This will help you to stand out in a crowded market and give you an edge over the competition. 

You’ll be able to position your agency as the experts in your specific field and tailor your services to your niche, which will help you to land clients.

Your niche might be a specific industry or target market. For example, you could specialize in social media marketing for B2B, local businesses, startups, entertainment brands, tech brands, SaaS companies, etc. 

Alternatively, your niche might be the platform(s) you specialize in. For example TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and so on.

The other option is to ‘go wide’ and offer a broad range of generic social media marketing services to meet the needs of every industry. 

This will give you access to a broader client pool but the tradeoff is that you’ll face more competition and may struggle to establish a strong identity or expertise in any one area. 

Clients often prefer to work with specialists who understand their specific challenges and goals, so a broad approach can make it harder to differentiate your agency and build a reputation as an authority. 

Remember: You can always start by specializing in a specific niche, then branch out to a broader market later if you outgrow it.

However, it would be worth considering the other niches or verticals you could serve in the future when deciding on a name for your agency.

There are some other factors involved in choosing a name and some are specific to your domain name, but the important thing is that your agency name fits regardless of how you expand in the future.

And don’t worry if you get stuck! Generative AI can be a helpful sounding board for coming up with ideas. You could also use an online name generator to help come up with creative ideas you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of.

But let’s not get bogged down with the name for now. Let’s move onto step 2.

Step 2: Establish your USP (unique selling proposition)

Once you’re clear on your niche, work out what your USP (unique selling proposition) is going to be.

Your USP is a concise statement that tells potential clients why they should choose you over the competition. 

It should be clear, specific, and compelling. It should communicate the value you bring to your clients. And most importantly, it should highlight what sets you apart and makes your agency better than the rest.

For example, that might be:

• Your expertise & credentials

‘Award-winning social media marketing agency with 10+ years of experience’

• Your results-driven approach 

‘Guaranteed 3x ROI on every social ad campaign—or your money back’

• Your in-depth industry knowledge 

‘We specialize in helping SaaS companies scale with precision-targeted LinkedIn strategies’

• The innovative strategies you use 

‘Our proprietary growth framework helps brands earn organic followers 10x faster than other agencies’

• Your speed & efficiency

‘Launch a winning social media campaign in 24 hours with our fast-track service’

• Your platform mastery 

‘We help brands dominate Pinterest and turn pins into profits’

• Your creativity

‘Our focus on storytelling builds authentic connections that grow your brand’

Keep in mind that your whole brand messaging, marketing communications, and sales strategy will revolve around your USP, so it’s important to get it right. 

Bonus tip: AI is super important to social media marketing right now. Businesses need SMMAs who can save them money and improve efficiency by deploying AI in innovative ways—so why not incorporate this into your USP?

For example “Our AI-driven approach allows us to deliver 10x the value at a fraction of the cost”, or “Using AI-powered analytics to optimize every post for maximum engagement.”

Step 3: Outline your services

Next, think about what services you want to offer. Services commonly offered by SMMAs include:

• Social media strategy
• Social media content creation
• Social media advertising
• Community management
• Inbox management
• Influencer outreach
• Influencer campaign management
• Social media contests
• Follower growth 
• Data analysis & reporting
• Reputation management

Depending on your business plan and niche, you might choose to focus on only one or two services. Alternatively, you might diversify your services to cast a wide net.

You’ll also need to think about how you’re going to package your services. 

Do you want to let clients purchase services a la carte or will you bundle them together? For example, you could offer an ‘organic social media’ package and a ‘paid social media’ package. 

Do you want to charge your clients separately for each profile/social media account they need you to manage? Or will you offer a package that includes management of the brand’s whole social set across multiple platforms?

Will you offer an ‘all-in-one’ comprehensive management service that includes everything clients need to market their brand across all their socials? If so, what will be included? (e.g. 30 posts per profile/month, weekly reports, etc.)

Bonus tip: Remember to cater your services to your target audience. For example, if you’re targeting B2B businesses, you might offer LinkedIn post creation & outreach services.

Step 4: Think about prices

Start considering your pricing strategy. How much will you charge brands for your social media marketing services?

There’s a lot to think about when setting your prices. You’ll need a solid financial plan in place to make sure your agency is going to turn a profit. 

I’m not going to offer specific advice on that as that would be beyond the scope of this post, but here are some general questions you might want to start thinking about at this stage:

• How much do my competitors charge for similar services?
• What kind of budget does my target clientele have to spend on social media marketing?
• What are my expenses? (e.g. the costs of the tools I’ll use, the staff I’ll pay, my website & hosting fees, etc.)
• How many clients do I expect to be able to attract per month?
• How much sales revenue do I need to earn per month to be profitable?

Keep in mind that your prices are unlikely to be set in stone at this point—they might evolve as your business plan comes together, so stay agile and leave room for maneuvers.

For example, once you’ve begun hiring employees and have a clearer idea of the costs of staffing your agency, you might need to rethink your prices in order to turn a profit. 

Likewise, after launching, you can assess how much you’ve earned in your first few months and how that differs from your projected earnings, then adjust your prices to match that reality.

Bonus tip: Subscription based services and retainers are super important but one-off or trial services can be useful to get new clients on board. 

Step 5: Create a business plan

Before you launch your agency, you’ll need to make sure you have a detailed business plan in place. 

There’s a lot that goes into a business plan. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty details as that would be outside of the scope of this post. But generally, some of the components your business plan might include are:

• A plan for your business structure. Will you set up your SMMA business as a sole proprietorship? LLC? S-corp? C-corp? Etc.
• A financial plan. What are your financial goals? Do you need to make cash flow forecasts and profit and loss projections? What are your set-up costs and funding requirements? What are your running costs? How will you manage taxes and VAT? Do you need business liability insurance? Etc.
• A HR plan. How will you plan, hire, train, retain, compensate, and fire employees/contractors? Are there employment laws and regulatory requirements to consider? How will you communicate with your team? Etc.
• An operational plan. How will you carry out your day-to-day operations? How will you onboard new clients? How will you handle contracts? How will you send/collect invoices? How will you handle intellectual property? How will you create, edit, and approve content? How will you get client feedback and approvals? Etc.
• A marketing & sales plan. How will you prospect for clients and generate leads? What marketing channels will you focus on? How will you close deals and convert leads to customers?

Keep in mind that there may be legal aspects, tax rules, and regulations to consider and I’m not qualified to advise on these. They may vary depending on your location, so do your research beforehand. 

You might even want to consult with qualified professionals such as a business advisor, accountant/bookkeeper, financial advisor, attorney, tax specialist, etc. to get a clear picture of what you need to do to set up your SMMA and ensure you’re fully compliant.

Step 6: Put together your team 

In most cases, running a successful social media marketing agency takes more than one person. 

You may need to put together a team of specialists to help with different aspects of your operations, such as:

• A strategist to devise social media campaigns for your clients
• A writer to craft engaging social media post captions
• A graphic designer to create scroll-stopping visuals for those posts
• An accountant to help manage your agency’s finances

And so on.

If you’re bootstrapping your agency and you only have limited resources, you might only be able to handle a team of two to three people at first.

In that case, you’ll need to consider which roles are non-negotiable and start with those. Some people even start their agencies freelance and handle everything themselves with no additional employees. You can always scale up your team later as your financial resources grow.

Another thing to consider is whether you want to outsource work to contractors or hire employees. Again, there are legal aspects and employment laws to consider here so do your research. 

If you do go down the contractor route, you can find experienced freelancers to outsource work to on sites like Upwork, Freelancer.com, and Fiverr. 

Step 7: Build your online presence

At this point, you’re nearly ready to launch. The last thing to do is formally establish your social media agency and start building your online presence. Here’s how to get started.

Launch your website

First, you’ll need to create your agency website. For this, you’ll need three things:

• A website builder or ecommerce platform

This is the software you’ll use to build and manage your agency website. Options include WordPress, Sellfy, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.

• A hosting solution

Your web hosting provider stores your website files on their servers and makes them accessible on the internet. 

Web hosting is included with some ecommerce platforms (like Sellfy and Shopify). Alternatively, you can purchase hosting separately from a company like Dreamhost.

• A domain name. 

Your domain name is the text that users type into their URL bar to access your website (e.g. https://www.mysocialmediamarketingagency.com). 

You’ll need to register a custom domain through a registrar like Namecheap and connect it to your site. Your domain should be the name of your agency. If the .com version isn’t available, you can use other extensions like .co, .net, .io, etc.

Fill out your website with a services page, ‘about us’ page, contact page, pricing page, lead capture page, and any other pages/sections you think are relevant.

You’ll also need to connect a payment processor so you can take payments, and fill out your product catalog with your services and packages using your ecommerce solution.

Create a portfolio

It’s a good idea to create a portfolio section on your website to showcase the work you’ve done for other clients. 

Prospective clients often look for this to get an idea of what you can do, so it’ll help you to close more sales.

You might create a separate ‘case study’ for each brand you’ve worked with in your portfolio, highlighting what you did for them and what it achieved. 

It helps to quantify your results. For example, ‘We grew [brand]’s followers by 123% in 30 days’ or ‘We achieved a Facebook ROAS uplift of 37%’.

Obviously, if you haven’t worked with any clients yet, you won’t have anything to add to your portfolio at this point, so consider it a work in progress and come back to it regularly.

Alternatively, if you want to get some initial portfolio work before you formally launch and start looking for clients, you could consider volunteering your services for a non-profit. 

Not only does this help you to get some initial experience for your portfolio, but it also helps you to establish your brand values and with word-of-mouth marketing.

Add social proof

Social proof is incredibly important for social media marketing agencies. 

Clients often look for reviews and testimonials before they’ll consider working with you—so make sure to add them to your website.

You could share your best reviews in a carousel image on your homepage or key landing pages, for example. Again, you might not have any reviews to share just yet—-that’s okay. Just make sure to add them once you get them.

Aside from reviews, other forms of social proof include star ratings, awards credentials, etc. These should all feature prominently on your website.

Related: How To Use Social Proof In Your Marketing (Beginner’s Guide)

Secure your brand socials

After you’ve finished putting your website together, create social media accounts for your business on every platform.

Use your agency name as your social handle wherever possible. If it’s not available, use something similar. For example, if your agency is called ‘ViralWave’, but @viralwave isn’t available, you could try something like @wereviralwave, @viralwavehq or @viralwaveofficial.

LinkedIn is arguably the most essential social media platform to have a presence on as a social media marketing agency as it’s a good place to find clients. 

However, I’d also recommend creating accounts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Bluesky, and elsewhere.

Build your social media presence on all of the above by posting at least once a week, but focus the bulk of your efforts on just one or two platforms.

You’ll definitely want to repurpose any content you create across as many platforms as possible though. I’ll talk about tools to help you with this in a moment.

Make sure to also claim your business profile on Google Business (especially if you’re targeting local businesses), as well as other relevant directories.

Then, keep a close eye on your reviews. Try to ensure you get only positive reviews but if you do get negative reviews, respond to them in a way that mitigates the damage to protect your brand reputation.

Step 8: Start looking for clients

Once you’ve launched your agency, it’s time to start looking for clients. This is the hardest—and most important—part of the process.

Fortunately, you don’t necessarily need dozens of clients to make a profit—a handful can be enough. Stats show that 32% of SMM agencies only have 1 to 5 clients and a further 40% have just 5  to 10.

The first step in getting clients is lead prospecting. This is where you identify potential customers (leads) who fit your target market and might be interested in your services, and get them into your sales funnel. 

Here are some different strategies you can use for lead generation.

Social media prospecting

Use social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to find and connect with leads who might be interested in what you have to offer. Then, connect with them by reaching out through a DM.

You can also use social media as a vehicle for inbound lead generation. Consistently put out engaging content that resonates with your target clients to grow your organic audience, and let leads find their way to you. 

Make educational videos about social media marketing on YouTube. Share your expert tips on TikTok. Craft compelling LinkedIn posts to share your hot take on the latest SMM trends. Do anything you can to get attention from your target clientele and attract new customers.

I’d also recommend using a social listening platform like Brand24. You can use the platform to set up keyword searches that pull in mentions that you can use to find opportunities.

The keyword searches you run will be key. The right one will be able to monitor the web for business owners and entrepreneurs discussing their social media challenges (e.g. on Reddit or other forums). That’s the perfect opportunity to promote your agency.

As a side note, I used to work with a passport agency in the UK that used this exact strategy. In a couple of months, it became their main source of new clients. 

Click here to try Brand24 for free.

Paid advertising

Running paid ads is probably the easiest, fastest way to acquire new clients as a social media marketing agency.

However, it can eat into your budget pretty quickly. You’ll need to carefully plan and execute well-targeted ad campaigns to deliver a positive return on your ad spend.

There are lots of places where you can run ads. I’d recommend starting with Google Ads to ensure you’re showing up at the top of the SERPs for high-intent searches from your target market. 

You can also experiment with ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. as well as display ads.

Referral marketing 

Leverage your existing network to generate new leads through referral marketing.

One way to do this is to offer your existing clients incentives to refer new leads to your business. For example, ‘Get 20% off your next purchase when you refer a friend’.

You could also consider setting up an affiliate program, where you recruit and onboard affiliate partners to promote your agency in exchange for a commission. Commissions can be a flat rate (e.g. $50) or a percentage-based amount (20% of the order value).

Exactly how you set this up depends on how you plan to bill clients. There are referral marketing software platforms that you can use to integrate with your store or billing system.

And there are some ecommerce platforms that offer this feature natively. For example, Sellfy is an online store builder that can power your affiliate program out of the box. You can use it for one-off digital products, subscription products, physical products, and even merch. 

Freelance marketplaces

Businesses will often post social media marketing job listings on freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Freelancer.com. 

For example, they may be looking for someone to help them create posts, reply to messages and DMs, etc.

You can browse these marketplaces for projects that match your expertise and ‘bid’ on jobs by sending a proposal.

Keep in mind that a lot of the job listings you’ll see on these sorts of marketplaces are from clients with tighter budgets who are looking for freelancers, so it may be tough to find good leads—but it’s worth a shot.

Cold outreach

Cold outreach is when you proactively reach out to potential clients who haven’t otherwise expressed an interest in your services and ‘make the first move’.

For example, you might send them a direct message on social media, fire off a prospecting email with your pitch, or make a cold call. This can be done at scale using automation software.

Cold outreach is a controversial tactic, but it can work well if done right.

Just keep in mind that there may be laws and regulations that restrict what you can do. These might depend on the medium used and jurisdiction. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t advise on this—do your research and make sure you comply with all relevant laws. 

Networking

Visit conferences, meetups, presentations, and other professional events that your target clients will be at and use them as a networking opportunity.

If you’re targeting local businesses, you can also run on-the-ground marketing campaigns and visit their premises to meet with them, pitch them your ideas, hand out business cards, etc.

In my experience, local networking groups are one of the best ways to get new clients. The agency I used to manage did VERY well with these groups.

Step 9: Nurture leads and close deals

It’s a good idea to have a sales funnel in place to get all those prospects you generate using the methods above interested in your offer and ultimately, close the deal.

For example, your sales funnel might look like this:

• Send a series of welcome emails to ‘warm up’ your lead and give them information about your services
• Invite them to book a meeting with your sales rep.
• At the meeting, ask questions about their goals, audience, etc. to offer them a tailored service package, and answer any questions they have 
• Give them all the information they need to sell the idea of working with your agency to key decision-makers at their company (e.g. sample work, price lists, case studies, etc.)
• Follow up with promising leads via email to seal the deal.

This is just a basic example to give you an idea. You’ll need to get more creative here.

The point is to have your own process in place to move prospects from initial interest to purchase.

Note: I’d also recommend running an email newsletter in tandem with your sales funnel. And you’ll need some sort of onboarding workflow as well. Both require a lot of extra effort but they set a great impression with new clients.

Step 10: Satisfy your clients

Once you’ve landed your first clients, it’s important to make sure you’re meeting—no, exceeding—their expectations. 

Not only will this help with client retention—repeat business is important for social media marketing agencies, and happy clients are more likely to work with you again in the future—-but it also helps you to get positive reviews and earn word-of-mouth referrals, which are super important in your first year after launch.

I like to follow the rule of ‘underpromise, overdeliver’. 

Set reasonable expectations in your initial consultations, then go above and beyond and exceed those expectations. Don’t promise results that you might not be able to achieve as that’ll lead to unhappy clients and bad reviews.

It’s not all about results either. The way you communicate with your clients matters too. Aim to be transparent, friendly, and responsive throughout your time working with them. Provide regular reports to keep them in the loop, and always respond to any questions or queries promptly.

Step 11: Scale up and grow your business

Over time, you’ll continue to grow your client pool until you’re at max capacity and you can’t handle any more work.

At that point, it might be time to scale up. Onboard new employees to help you keep up with demand, increase your ad spend, scale up your marketing efforts, and start growing your business.

Just remember to stay agile. The social media landscape is constantly evolving, so it’s important to be ready to adapt to changes. The needs of clients may change over time and your services and processes need to evolve with them.

5 tools for social media marketing agencies

Running a social media marketing agency requires you to juggle a lot of moving parts. 

You’ll need the right software to be able to deliver your services efficiently and stay on top of everything.

With that in mind, here are some tools every social media marketing agency needs.

SocialBee

SocialBee is an all-in-one social media toolkit that supports teams. It has everything you need to offer all the core social media marketing services in one place.

IMO, they offer one of the best scheduling feature-sets of any tool I’ve tested.

You can connect all your client’s social media accounts to your SocialBee account and manage each brand’s social media set in a separate Workspace.

Here are some of the things you can do with it:

• Social media scheduling. Create, schedule, and auto-publish posts to multiple social media platforms from one place. Map out your entire strategy for each brand you work with months in advance using the shared content calendar.
• Post categories. Bucket posts together into content categories to keep things organized. Then, create an automated weekly category-based posting schedule to have SocialBee to save time.
• Analytics & reports. View detailed social media insights and track metrics like follower growth, post engagements, etc. Compile data into visual reports and share them with your clients to prove the value you’re bringing to the table.
• Community management. Organize your social media feeds into streams and view and reply to messages, comments, etc. from across multiple networks in your SocialBee dashboard. 

SocialBee supports all the main social media networks including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok. 

It also has rich collaboration features, including the ability to add multiple users to your account, draft and approve posts, leave feedback/notes, etc.

Plus, SocialBee has one of the most powerful AI assistants of any all-in-one SMM solution I’ve tried. 

Its unique Copilot AI can plan your entire strategy for each brand from start to finish, including devising an optimal posting schedule, creating content categories, crafting post captions and visuals, etc. This is a huge time-saver and can help you to deliver campaigns more efficiently.

Note: SocialBee also runs a “done for you” social media service that can offer white label services should you need them.

Pallyy

Pallyy is another one of the best all-in-one social media management tools for agencies. It comes with features that are essential for all the core services your agency will want to offer.

It supports most social networks but has some unique features that are useful for Instagram, so it’s a good choice if your agency specializes in offering Instagram marketing services.

Here are some of the things you can do with Pallyy.

• Schedule posts. Upload or create post visuals to your media library. Then, drag and drop them onto the shared content calendar to schedule posts ahead of time.
• Manage messages and comments. Use Pallyy’s unified social media inbox to track and respond to all your client’s messages, comments, and reviews across channels in one place.
• Analyze performance. Drill down into your social media performance metrics and build reports to prove results to your clients.
• Build bio link pages. Create a custom social media landing page with all your promotional links to add to your client’s Instagram and TikTok bios. 

With Pallyy, you pay $20/month per social set, so the cost scales up the more clients you manage, but it’s very affordable overall. However, it’s also an extra $29/month per user, so if you have a large team, it can get a little pricey.

ContentStudio

ContentStudio is another all-in-one tool with a broad range of features to better help you manage your client’s social media accounts. 

Here’s what you can do with ContentStudio:

• Discover content. Find and curate trending articles, posts, and videos from across the web to share on social. 
• Create and publish posts. Plan, schedule, and publish content to every social media platform from one dashboard.
• Analyze performance. Measure and report on all the social media KPIs that matter to your clients.
• Engage with audiences. View, manage, and reply to each brand’s social media audience with a unified inbox. 

It also has some additional features that make it particularly well-suited to agencies. For example, it’s one of the only all-in-one SMM platforms that’s fully white label so you can add your own branding everywhere.

It lets you set up workspaces for each brand you manage to keep their social sets separate (super important), set up approval workflows (useful for teams), and even offers client management tools.

Brand24 

Brand24 is a web monitoring & social listening tool. You’ll need a tool like this if you plan to offer services related to brand reputation management through your agency.

You can use Brand24 to ‘listen in’ for mentions of a particular keyword or brand name across the web. It pulls all mentions into your feed so you can quickly jump into important conversations.

For example, if someone is complaining about the brand you manage on Facebook, you’ll know about it and can jump in to offer the customer assistance and mitigate damage to the brand’s reputation.

Brand24 can also analyze the context of each mention to extract useful insights. For example, automated sentiment analysis works out whether each mention is positive or negative, and it can give you an idea of your overall brand sentiment based on this.

You can track how sentiment or mention volume changes over time and compile that data into reports to prove to your clients that your efforts are having a positive impact on their brand awareness or reputation.

Social Status

Social Status is a dedicated analytics tool that can be used to offer social media analytics and automated reporting services.

Social Status includes other types of analytics that all-in-one social media tools like those discussed above don’t. 

For example, detailed paid and organic performance breakdowns, social competitor benchmarking, influencer campaign tracking, etc.

So, there’s potential for upsells and cross-sells or simply adding more value for clients with a tool like this.

Final thoughts

That concludes my beginner’s guide on how to start a social media marketing agency.

As you can see, it takes a lot of work to get an SMMA off the ground—but it can definitely pay off in the end.

If you choose the right niche, establish a solid USP, and consistently impress your clients, there’s no reason you can’t succeed and end up with a 7-figure business.

Want to learn more about social media? Check out our guide on how to build your social media strategy, and check out these social media post ideas to boost your brand.

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