Getting started with your social media marketing agency is a daunting task for any aspiring entrepreneur. Signing your first client is even harder. So where do you start? You have little to no experience and currently don’t have any reviews or case studies to show potential clients. So here’s how I started 6 years ago and these are the lessons I learnt along the way.

1) Family and friends
Use the people closest to you in your inner circle. This is arguably the best way to get started with any business selling any product or delivering any service. I personally contacted close family friends and told them about my new social media marketing agency I was setting up. I picked up my first client and charged $100 per month to manage their social media. I spent countless hours working incredibly hard for my first client to show them what I could do and slowly build my experience. The family friend had just started a business and so was more than happy to give me a chance to help them out and grow their business through social media. It was the break I needed and something that massively contributed towards me getting off the ground with my own new business.

2) Network
Businesses constantly offer free events, seminars, webinars, meet and greets. Attend them all and get your name out there. Building trust is essential and people are 100 times more likely to work with you if they meet you in person over you cold calling them or sending them an email along with the hundreds of other emails, they receive from people trying to sell them something. Build your business relationships, take opportunities that are presented to you and show up when you are invited. This is an incredibly easy and free way to market your name to business owners and potential collaborative partners. I’m still reaping the reward from relationships I formed years ago.

3) Facebook groups.
The engagement in Facebook groups is electric compared to traditional Facebook business pages. The feeling of exclusivity encourages people to be so much more involved and willing to communicate within the group. This is something I failed to do when starting my social media marketing agency and something I wish I’d of known about at the time. Theirs now hundreds of groups on Facebook all full of potential businesses you could work with. It’s important to keep in mind that you should be going into these groups with the intention of providing value, not to sell. Offer advice to people asking questions, provide your opinions and share your experience, people may ask you for further information which presents your window of opportunity to sell. Groups on Facebook continue to grow and so the number of potential clients you could tap into also continues to grow with it.

So there you have it, 3 tips I wish I’d of been told at the start of my journey in building my social media marketing agency. Had I of been made aware of the 3 key points above, I believe I would have been able to fast track a lot of the progress I have made in a much shorter amount of time.