Digital marketing has seen quite a boom recently. Many individuals want to put up their own digital marketing agencies. After all, the process is simple: get a client and market his business.
Easy, right?
Wrong.
While it is possible that you become the next Neil Patel of the digital marketing world, the road to that level of success requires skills—skills that we will talk about today.
Here are the skills that you need to start a digital marketing agency:
- Web-Building Skills
- Ad Design Skills
- Tracking and Analysis Skills
- Social Media Skills
- Lead Generation Skills
Having the right skillset is the foundation of your success. You cannot get a client and learn these skills along the way. While you can get better at them, there certainly is no way you can start a digital marketing agency if you do not even possess a basic level of expertise in these things.
Let us get started!
Web-Building Skills
A lot of people who want to start a digital marketing agency focus on one thing: social media. This is terrible. Digital marketing is not just about social media, but about the entire gamut of anything that is digital. In short, you are responsible for building your clients’ websites, too.
This includes landing pages and checkout pages.
As a digital marketer, your client does not charge money from Facebook or Twitter if customers want to buy his products. Your client charges money from his website.
What does this mean? It means that even if you create the best ad, customers are not going to buy if the website is clunky and if it looks unprofessional.
Part of your duties as a digital marketing agency is to help your client build a website that works—a website that has a complete sales funnel. And more importantly, the website has to look credible.
As such, your web-building skills are all crucial to the success of your digital marketing agency. You need to be able to design a website that works well in your client’s niche. The website that you build must be coherent from the beginning to the end of the sales process.
Ad Design Skills
As a digital marketer, you need to get really good at creating ads. This skill in itself does not include your expertise on how to run these ads.
As a digital marketing agency, your client relies on your expertise to create advertising materials that resonate with this audience. If you do not know how to create a customer avatar, how will you create an ad?
Here are some of the other skills you need to develop before you can create advertisements:
- Graphic design – you need to learn how to use tools like Photoshop or other graphic design software
- Videography – you need to know how to create videos, animation, or basic video editing techniques
- Copywriting – you need to learn how to write materials that convert a reader into a paying customer
“But I can hire these people,” you say. That is true. The presumption here, however, is that you are a one-person company. If not, and you have the capital to pay experts, then you still need to understand the basic concepts of advertising—what makes an ad deliver? What makes an ad convert?
If you have no skills in creating ads, you may be paying money to ad creators who cannot create the message that you want.
Tracking and Analysis Skills
In digital advertising, there is this thing called pixel. It is a snippet of code that you add on your website. This pixel tracks people, and what they do with your ad. Some pixels are made to trigger the advertisement itself.
For example, let us say that you embedded a Facebook pixel on your website. On your Facebook ad, you can tell the Facebook system to show your FB ad to any person who went to your website.
In a nutshell, here is how it goes:
- You embed Facebook Pixel on your client’s website
- A site visitor reads your client’s blog post
- Your Facebook Ad is going to follow this site visitor
- If the site visitor opens his Facebook account, the ads that Facebook will show are your client’s ads
In short, Facebook is going to follow this person. You can do the same in Youtube, Google, Quora, and other advertising platforms.
Why is this important? Studies show that it takes several impressions before a person makes a decision to buy. If you do not have tracking and analysis skills, your marketing efforts will result in random sales, not targeted ones.
Social Media Skills
Now, just because you use social media does not mean you can place ads in there with such effectiveness that you can improve your client’s social media influence. It takes more than just posting to make your client’s social media pages get a massive following.
In social media, you need to know what platform works best for what niche. You cannot post the same things between Twitter and Instagram, as these platforms vary in audience types.
Here are a few tips to help you get started:
- Instagram – great for image-based products like health and beauty; use this for physical products that produce visible results
- Facebook – a general social media platform that you can use for almost everything
- Quora – great for software products and online courses
- Twitter – great for entertainment and politics
Your ultimate goal is to find people who will buy your client’s product. That goal should be your guide in choosing the right social media platform. Once you have selected the appropriate platform, you need to know how to use it—far beyond just merely posting images and quotes.
You need to know when to use hashtags, how to identify the best time to post in the day, how you can automate the posts, and how to analyze the behavior of those who are engaging.
Lead Generation Skills
Lead generation is the process by which you gather leads. Later on, what you want is for these leads to convert into a customer.
This process can be gathering emails, getting phone numbers, scheduling a consultation, and so much more.
Here are some things you need to consider:
- Search engine optimization
- Advertising
- Email subscription
- Live or recorded webinars
Before you can use the appropriate lead generation technique, the first thing you have to understand is where to find your client’s customer base. Also, you need to know what they want.
Ask yourself these questions:
What makes them tick—what kind of offers will make them interested, and how do you funnel these leads into paying customers?
What price points are they happy with? What can you do to convince the leads to buy?
Summary
Digital marketing is a challenging business. While you may have the skills to create great ads and landing pages, your clients will look for one thing: results. If you fail to deliver, you cannot expect to have clients who will come back and do repeat business with you.
Always measure your success—track your ads and your marketing efforts—and then tie this data with the results that you get. If you do not measure the results of your efforts, there is no way you will know which of your action plans are effective.
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