Starting an agency is easier than you think.
Pick a name
Buy a domain
Begin Outreach
Boom. You’re good to go. While it is in fact that simple, there are some softwares and programs out there that might be worth an extra penny to get you off the ground. Check out our list of the best three softwares you can buy when starting your SMMA.
1. Hunter.io
If you’re going to pay for one software on this list, this would be the one. While it starts at $50/month, you can opt in for a 30-day free trial that can get you jump started without paying a dime. For anyone who hasn’t heard of Hunter.io, it’s main objective is to scrape emails embedded into a website. Essentially, companies and stores will have personal emails with the same domain that can be found using Hunter.io that otherwise couldn’t be found. This is obviously super useful when beginning the outreach stage of your agency!
For instance - You come across www.coolstore.com and see on the “about us” page that the company is owned by Danny Smith. Well, 99/100 times, Danny won’t have his personal email on the site. Go to the “Email Finder” page on Hunter.io, type in his name and company name, and you’ll likely get an email that looks something like “danny@coolstore.com”. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it works most times, and that’s very valuable when it comes to beginning your agency.
Why is it valuable? I’m glad you asked. For starters - company owners don’t often get personal emails unless someone has gone out of their way to find it. So off the bat, you’re showing initiative. You are also not contacting the “support” or “info” email, which is a good thing. So many people reach out to the info email with expectations that they’re going to get an email back. Oftentimes, this goes to customer support or someone that’s not a key decision maker, so they’re emailing someone that doesn’t care what you can provide to their company.
Anyone who has begun using Hunter.io for their email outreach can attest that the open rate and response rate have skyrocketed since beginning using it, I know I can. In short - if you have some money you’d like to spend to put you ahead of the game, this one is the one to go with. Sign up today and use your free trial wisely! 30 days of personal emails is sure to bring in some solid meetings and maybe even closed-clients to your agency.
2. Apollo.io
Once you have your leads list you can either email one-by-one personally, (which would take forever), or you could put them all into one big “leads list” on an email automation software like Apollo.io. There are so many email automation softwares out there, but this one takes the cake for us!
Why? Well, for starters, it’s free. Who doesn’t like that? For $0 you can get a fully-automated email campaign to your leads. With the free plan, you get analytics, a friendly user interface and a/b testing, so you can see what is working and what isn’t. Not to mention, you can create and edit templates within the software that are fully customizable. For example, you could create a template like this one with everything in “{ }” that would come straight from your leads list:
Hi {First Name},
I just came across your website and really liked {Company Name}’s mission! I appreciate your dedication to {Mission Statement}......
As long as everything in “{ }” is a field within your Excel/Google Sheets file, it will upload directly to your template, so you don’t have to worry about manually typing everything in! You’re still getting a personalized feel without sacrificing volume. With the free plan, you’re able to send up to 250 emails/day. Which, if you ask us, is more than enough to get your agency up and going.
We think this one is a no-brainer if emails are your preferred method of outreach. As mentioned before, you can personalize every email as you send them using Hunter.io, but we know that’s not realistic for most people. Work for one week and see how many emails you can accumulate. Upload your leads list into Apollo.io, and watch the emails come flooding back to your inbox with meetings set!
3. AgenciFlow
This one is third on the list because it may be a bit overkill, but if you have the money to spend upfront, it’s definitely worth the investment. AgenciFlow’s goal is to keep you, the agency owner, organized by centralizing your daily workflows in one place. You’ll come to find that with the different clients you service, the different services you offer and the different payment methods you provide, it can get a little overwhelming with just how much is not in one place. AgenciFlow eliminates all of that.
Before I get into just how it does that, I want to provide a little background on the app. For those of us in the SMMA space, I’m sure we all know who Iman Ghadzi is. If not, GO WATCH HIS VIDEOS! They’re extremely helpful especially to the beginner agency owner. This app was created by him and his team that have experience in generating tens of millions of dollars per year within the marketing agency space - so they know their stuff. It’s this first-hand experience that makes the app so user friendly to the agency owner.
It centralizes your workflow by keeping communication, productivity and payments all in one place. Communication is centralized by the chat feature, which allows you to chat with people in your team directly, or to people in your team and your clients in one group. Basically, it puts the same functions as Slack into one place so you don’t have to migrate every time you want to send a chat.
Productivity is optimized by adding a “flows” section. Within these flows, you can add tasks that are business specific, client specific, or even personal life specific. Tasks can be added by team members within your agency, which is why this productivity tab is so useful. On top of tasks, you can also set an overarching goal on the front of the “Flows” page, that lets you see your long-term goal every time you login. For us, this was crucial to see on a daily basis because we began our days motivated and ready to take on whatever came our way!
Lastly, payment is taken care of with the invoices tab. Instead of having to switch over to Stripe every time you want to send an invoice, link your Stripe account to AgenciFlow and let it do the work for you! All you have to do is put in your client’s details, the services you're offering, how much you’re charging and whether the payment is recurring. Once those are filled in, it’s as simple as a click of a button.
Conclusion:
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