Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a
very special video by the end of it, you are going to know everything you
need to know about SMMA and how to get started straight away. And not only
that, if you stick around until the end, I'm going to be doing the best giveaway
I've ever done on this channel. So trust me, you're going to want to stay
for that. Now, before we get started, I want to go over a couple
ground rules for this video. The first is that if you
look in the description, you're actually going to find
the GrowYourAgency glossary. So if I say any terms in this
video, just go ahead, open that tab, have it opened by this video. So as I
said, if I say terms that confuse you, or you don't understand, you can actually cross reference
it with the GYA glossary. Next you'll actually find chapters in
this video and actually go over a table of contents for this video coming up shortly.
But I strongly recommend you actually
press the button to add this to your watch. Later, that way a week down
the line a month down the line, whatever it may be, you can
actually come back to this video. Anytime you have any questions
or queries. And finally, this video took me a long,
long time to put together. So honestly it would mean the world. If you go ahead and just aggressively
smash that like button down below ladies and gentlemen would mean the world to me, and would really encourage me to make
more of these videos where I have to do a solid one to two days of prep between
the slides presentation and actually recording it. And before I
even get into this video, I want to tell you a bit about myself. For those of you guys who don't
know my name is Iman Gadzhi. I started my digital marketing
agency, IAG media at the age of 16.
Of course it's evolved
a little since then, but the fundamentals
really stayed the same. I want a hundred percent of the
business. I don't have an office. I have minimal overheads. And at the moment I only
have two full-time team
members on top of IAG media. I'm also a founder of GrowYourAgency I
started this in 2018 and it's evolved to become the largest education company
in the world for agency owners, with thousands of students
from across the world, many of whom pull in six figure
profit from their agency yearly.
And when I say we've got the
greatest community in the world, I'm really not lying. Let's take a
look at some examples on the left. You can see who our inaugural community
party that we hosted back in 2019 before the whole world went crazy. This is open to every
member of the GrowYourAgency
community and was one of the weirdest wildest parties of all time.
And whilst obviously we
can't host one right now. I thought I'd share this photo on
the right, because that's neat. Literally a few days ago with Paolo one
of our students inside of our community. And I make it my mission to get to know
my students as well as possible and any chance I get, I love
meeting people in person, but now let's get into the
nitty gritty of this video. Here's what we're going to cover. So we're going to go over what an SMMA
slash agency is. Starting your agency, picking your service, picking
your niche, pricing, your service, finding your clients, selling
to your clients, getting paid, servicing your clients and
the next steps from there. So let's get started with one
of the most important questions. What does an SMMA and what is an agency? So first let's define agency
and I'm sure in your head, you've got an idea of Wolf.
One is, but actually let's delve
into a little bit more. You see if we think that an agency
is anyone who offers a service, you could say that anyone who
offers a service owns an agency, but if someone came round to your house
and offered to mow your lawn and said, they were an agency owner, you laugh at them because you would
know that they were just a gardener. So let's think a little bit more
critically about what this means. I've made this diagram so you can see a
bit more clearly what I'm talking about. This is the big difference between
a service provider and agency owner. On the left. You can see someone who
offers a service, that's it on the right. You can see someone who manages the
delivery of a service in short service providers create work, agency
owners curated. So now we
know where an agency is. Let's define an SMMA in the very
infancy of the SMMA revolution. It was super easy to find.
As you can see the letters simply stood
for social media marketing agency. Now I'll explain shortly why this
technically doesn't make sense anymore. But before I do this, let's look at some of the key differences
between a traditional agency and an SMMA. This is the agency that
looks most familiar to most people, a big office with a
massive team of people, which offers everything from
public relations to web design. There may be a few hundred
truly successful traditional
agencies in the entire world. Some have been running for almost
a century and are even publicly traded. Now in order to make any money, they have to hire employees for virtually
no money in charge of their clients.
Fortunate. Now this right here is the
typical breakdown of an
agency's revenue around 80% of it will go to their office, their expenses and their staff leaving
only 20% for the agency owner. If that, by the way, that's a very generous number. I know a lot of traditional agency owners
out there that literally only make a three to 5% margin, but these are,
as I said, being quite generous. These are common margins in the types of
agencies you see on mad men or in real life in contrast this an SMMA
that's me, Saturday, kitchen table. You can't see, but actually to my right, I have one of my team members sitting
with me, but majority of the time, I never see them in person.
We don't have
an office. We have minimum overheads, and this is a really big one.
Unlike traditional agencies, we offer one or two services
and we do them extremely well. Now I don't want to be
particularly crude right now, but this is arguably the best thing
about being an agency owner by minimizing costs and complexity. You have a massively higher piece
of the pie when it comes to profits.
And if you start an agency by yourself, guess who gets to keep a hundred
percent of it. Yup. That's right. You so we know SMMAs are great,
but what do they actually do? Remember when we spoke about
what SMMA stands for? Well, it's true that they originally only
offered social media marketing services, but there's a big point that I
want to make here. And that's, if you're watching this video right now
and you have an expertise in graphic designer, SEO, don't turn this
video off whilst I agree and see, we really specialize in teaching people.
What we have experienced doing at
IAG media has said four years ago, I was a creative agency in
the past two and a half years. We've been a exclusively
Facebook and Google ads agency. So really that's what we teach our
students inside of our programs. But as you're going to see very shortly
service delivery is just one part of your business. Here are just a few
examples of some of the services. Some of our students offer.
And these are only growing. The important thing is to take the same
principles of running an estimate and apply them to your new agency. And really that's why my company is
called GrowYourAgency and not grow your Facebook ads agency or grow
your smma.com.
Now, as I said, it's quite obvious that I'm a big
fan of social media marketing, and it's what my agency
offers at its core. So let's look at the
two types you can offer. The first is social media
management, and I'll be honest. It's pretty easy to do if your client
has nice pictures and you have a decent command of your language, you know, it's really not rocket science to
grow an account and post irregularly. The second is paid traffic, and
it's a little bit more complicated. It involves paying the likes of Facebook
or Google to put your content and your adverts in front of more people and
sending them to your client's websites. It might sound super complicated, but the reality is anyone with a
credit card and a Facebook account, you can do it. And the best part of this service is
that because you can track what people do on your website.
You can,
at the end of every month, exactly how much money
you've made for your client, the result you can charge
higher retainers. Now that
you've picked your service, it's time to decide something else.
And that's actually your niche. Now this isn't a word you come across
every single day in day to day life, but it is so critical that you
decide on one with your agency and explain why let's imagine you bought
some incredible steak quality, a one Kobe, and obviously you want
an amazing chef to cook it. Well, you're not exactly going to go for a
vegan chef are you and the vice-versa applies. If you want to
incredible plant-based dinner, you're not going to get a chef that
specializes in cooking steaks. Likewise, F crazy weird alternate universe.
You've been arrested for murder. You're not exactly gonna call it. Who
specializes in parking tickets are you. You're going to call a lawyer who
specializes in criminal defense.
These are known as niches and for
agencies, they are incredibly important. You really need to have a
good understanding of the
industry and you really need to know how it works inside and out. So you can not only service these
clients properly, but that way, so you can become a specialist
in your area. For example, if you work in the medical industry, you'll know that there are certain
trigger words that for example, if you're advertising, you're
just not allowed to say.
And that's why it's so important
to specialize with one niche, because you're going to be able
to serve your clients better. Now here's some examples
of popular niches in SMMA. Now my own agency actually specializes
in education companies and e-commerce businesses. And it's important to note that these are
only a few examples and then agree and see, we have students who specialize
in everything from yoga retreats to, I'm not getting private jets to
pet hotels I don't know what the technical term is, but a
pet hotels. It's ridiculous. Just the wide plethora of
different niches, sub niches, different industries that our
students are targeting. Now, in order to find your niche, you
have to ask yourself a few questions. The first is where do you work now? Now, if you're thinking of leaving your job
to start an agency and you already work for, let's say a hundred or a restaurant, it might make sense to continue
to work with restaurants, obviously with everything that's
going on in the world, you know, use a bit of common sense.
You know, you might be watching this the day
after it's uploaded or six months later. So obviously just take into consideration
the situation going on in the world. In some countries, the restaurants are
open. Some countries they're fully open, absolutely no issues. So, you know, just use a bit of common sense at the
time of, but just as a general rule, that is a good example. And the reason
that's a good example is for example, if you've already worked at a restaurant,
you'll know their busiest periods, you know, their most popular deals and promotions
and the ones in your town that need more customers and next ask yourself
which industry, you know, well, because if you're obsessed
with cars or fitness, look at dealership or fitness products, and finally ask yourself where you can
get the best results for your clients, because you know, you might love fashion, but if you've already previously
designed websites for accountants, guess who you should be
offering your services to.
Now that you know what services you're
going to be offering your clients, who your potential clients could be.
It is time to get onto pricing. Now, the first question to ask yourself is
this is the service I'm about to offer my client one, which will save
them time or make them money. You see services that save you time
are known as convenience space offers. They don't directly contribute to your
client's bottom line. In contrast, results-based offers actually make your
clients money and you can track the result of every dollar they spend and
how many abroad back to them. Now, this isn't an absolute
rule and ladies and gents, it totally depends on whether
you're running ads for
local businesses or whether you're running ads for e-commerce
SAS businesses, online businesses. But here is just a bit
of general guidance.
Agency owners can charge more for results
based offers and less for convenience based offers for individual clients. There are few questions you have
to ask yourself, for example, how much does the client make? It's great if you're the best Facebook
advertiser in the world, but in reality, if you're working for a
local cafe, realistically, you're not going to be able to, to charge
them $5,000 a month. Likewise, I mean, you could work for Nike, but if you can only increase
their sales by $500 a month, you can't charge them
higher rates.
And finally, you need to set your own
base price. You know, what's a hygiene standard
for you. What's the minimum. You're happy to work for finally, it's
time to find clients for your agency. And I know this is the most daunting
aspect of this entire process for people, but it is by far the most important.
Why? Because I've said this before, and I'll say it till I'm blue in the face, an agency without clients is
like a plane without a propeller. So here I've listed some of the most
common ways of finding clients. Now, if you're working with local businesses, a great place to start
is actually Google maps. So type in restaurants in your
local area, as an example, and start collecting
names and phone numbers, or if you're looking to
service e-commerce businesses, look on Amazon or Google shopping and
find a list of brands you can reach out to. So I'll give you a couple of
examples of finding clients right now.
Step one is to use a Google maps. So if you're offering Facebook
adverts to Botox clinics, start in your local area and make
a list of at least 10 clinics. Another method is to look at an online
directory like Amazon and search the product you want to sell. Let's look
at this example with smartwatches, interestingly, there's
a brand called lets fit, who are promoting their products
on Amazon to get more sales. Let's go with them. The next step is to find someone who owns
the business or anyone responsible for their sales or marketing. So LinkedIn
is actually a great tool for this. Find the name of the person you want to
speak to and start researching to find their email.
And if you
can't find their email, then you can just kind of take a wild
swing in the dark at their email format for the company, for
example, their first name, full-stop their last name at whatever
their business name is. Or for example, their first name at their business. Now a great tool to use is called snov.io, where you can actually verify whether
the email you're going to is deliverable. Now it's time to speak to the business. Now there are multiple
ways you can do this, but we're going to focus on to
sending emails and sending DMS. Now here's our first example.
It's actually to the sales
manager at let's fit. I followed a very simple
structure for an outreach email, which incorporates four elements,
personalization problem solution, and making the meeting a no-brainer and
email like this is a hundred percent more likely to get a response than
an email which tries to make a sale.
One email in here's another example, this time it's a direct message to
the owner of a jewelry business, where you're trying to pitch
web design as a service. I followed a similar format here and
what happens once you've set a meeting, this is the biggest challenge as an
agency owner and it's selling to your clients. The good news is just like
everything else. There's a system for it. So let's pretend you've got the sales
manager for let's fit on a zoom call.
What would that look like? So first it's called the rapport stage
and it's basically where you make friends. You get to know the
person you're speaking to. Now, this might seem silly, but in 20,
30, 40, 50, maybe an even an hour, if you're going be asking this person
for a decent amount of money, see me, them to like you and to trust you
next up, it's time to go digging.
And this is where you ask more information
about the company and you try to work out what they're trying to achieve. So
if you're speaking to the business owner, the financial success of the company is
directly related to how much money is in their pocket. But even if you're
speaking to someone else in the business, they still want to look good and good
performance could result in their promotion or a raise or bonus. So just kind of know who you're speaking
to and adjust your pitch accordingly. Now you've got to present your solution
as the logical one to grow in their business. In this example is the
Facebook ads can be profitable. And that they're much cheaper than
Amazon. Finally, it's time for the close. This is one of the most nerve
wracking parts of the entire call, but it's where you need to stay calm,
do your best, not to be desperate. And just to blurt out the price.
Silence is incredibly underrated. When it comes to sales calls, my advice learn to get comfortable
sitting without saying anything. If you've done all the steps correctly,
they'll come to you.
Congratulations. You've signed your first client. We've actually made one mistake
you haven't gotten paid yet. So let's actually go back
a step. Unfortunately, all of your hard work of saying a client
can be wasted by failing to do this. And that's because often after
you've gone off the phone, people will have second thoughts or
actually get a cheaper price elsewhere and fail to pay you. So before
you hang up on the client, send them an invoice. Now I use Stripe to take my payments
from the majority of countries, and this means that clients can actually
take out their credit card and pay on the call.
And until they do,
I sit there, I wait. In fact, I've waited for up to an hour before, whilst the client had to speak to
their bank, just to verify the payment, you know, these days with fraud
prevention and this and that. And I'm sure you guys know how much of
a nightmare the banks can be sometimes, but I didn't leave the call. You know,
I didn't go, okay, it's fine. You know, you can pay the invoice and will
email me after and this and that. I literally muted myself on zoom, turn my video off and just sat
there and waited.
And you know, routinely turned my video back on, turn my audio back on and let
the client know that I was there. It was an entire hour, but
I got it over the line. And they actually went on to be one
of our longest standing clients. Okay, now I can congratulate you properly.
You've signed a client and they've paid. Now it's time to actually deliver
that service to your client. The first option is to do it
yourself. And a lot of time, this is an easy option, especially if
you already know how to deliver it. And the bonus of this is that you actually
get to keep a hundred percent of the retainer. Remember what we said
earlier about agencies? Now, this is where contractors
and freelancers come in.
Now, before I say anything else, I want to say that being an agency
owner doesn't make you any better than a service provider. It's just
a different way of operating. So if you choose this route, make sure you pay your contractor fairly
and treat them with the utmost respect, just like you would expect your client
to do with you. Now with this option, you have to find someone
who can do the work for you. And one of the easiest places
to look is either Fiverr, Upwork or Facebook groups make a post
looking for someone who can run Facebook ads or build a website and get a
couple of different quotes from people. The major benefit of this is the person
you hire is likely to be able to provide a great standard of work because it's
what they specialize in.
Now at my agency, I don't actually provide any of
the services myself. Granted. It was different when I first
started four and a half years ago. So August of 2016, when
I started my agency, I actually for the first 18 months was
delivering all the services myself. So back then my agency
was a creative agency. So I would shoot all the content
for clients, edit it, distributed, grow their social platforms. And that's kind of the role that I
played in the first 18 months now for the past two and a half, three years, I have not delivered the services myself
initially. And this is two and a half. Yeah. Based around two and a half, three
years ago for the space of six months, I had a contractor on board. I was
paying him per month per client. Now he's actually ended up being
with me for the past three years.
He's actually the COO
and my agency, Danny. And that's one of the beautiful
things as you start to GrowYourAgency, and you get past 10,000,
15,000, 20,000 a month, which I know for some of the beginners
here just seems like absolutely crazy number. So let's just take
things one step at a time. But, but just to let you know what you have
to look forward to later down the line in the same way that initially I started
off with a contractor to deliver the Facebook ads for me, this person's now
been working with me for three years, two and a half of those
have been full-time. The agency has grown to the point where
now we're hitting a hundred thousand dollars a month profit. And that
means that not only is he full-time, but he's very well paid. So that might be a journey that
some of you guys may follow, or you might just decide to keep
things lean, keep things small, very profitable, and just continue
to work with contractors.
So, as I said in my agency actually don't
deliver any of the services myself. I just do the sales. Obviously I'm there for the
onboarding call with my clients. I pop into the occasional check-in
call. But for the most part, my two, technically three, depending on how you
look at it, guys who work at the agency, Danny, Luis, and as I said, Ciaran is actually the product manager
at the education company GrowYourAgency, but he kind of fills two roles. He does
all of the copywriting for our clients. Anyways, I'm boring you with details. My point is they kind of
manage and run the vessel. All I have to do is the sales. And as
we talked about earlier in this video, really just be the agency
owner. So what's next. Well, this is where you rinse and repeat. And here's an example of an email you
might send to a client after you've gotten them great results. It's simple. And
it asks for referrals because look, and then day as an agency owner,
these are your bread and butter. It's an easy way to get more clients
without having to do much outreach.
So once more, congratulations,
you're officially an agency owner. Now earlier I promised that I would do
the biggest giveaway I've done on my channel thus far. So here
it is ladies and gentlemen, for every hundred unique
comments down below, I'm actually going to give away
a 30 minute free coaching call. Now I never do one-off coaching anymore. But for the companies that work with
my advertising agency, IgE media, my fee is $2,000 per hour. And you
have to do multiple, multiple hours.
You can't just do one. It's not
really worth my time at this point. And you know, that's not any
hypothetic value or this or that. You guys can look back
on my YouTube channel. I've done sales breakdowns before I've
done kind of day in the life of an agency, owner of logs. And
you've seen me close 20, 25,000 pound two day trainings where
most of the time I only need to do a half day. And my team kind of takes over
the rest of the day and a half. So as I said, that is my
current going rate hourly. So I'm going to give every
hundred unique comments. I'm actually going to get Tristan.
The creative director at my company. You can say, hi, every a hundred unique comments. He's actually going to go ahead and
randomly select a giveaway winner and I'll leave the details down below.
You can actually reach out to Ciaran
and he'll arrange the free complimentary coaching call between us. So let's get
into last final piece of the training. Now, how many times have you watched a
YouTube video and never actually taken action on it? Or you watch it passively, but there's no real action step. So
here's the action step for today. Number one, I want you to comment below because I
want you to get in on this free giveaway. The next thing is go to the
link in the description. Obviously there'll be a few, but one of
them will take you to agency incubator.
Guys. I'm not trying to sell you
anything. I don't want you to. In fact, I don't, I'm asking you not
to buy anything right now. All I want you to do is I want
you to watch the free demo. Now what this demo is, it's a 15 minute video where you
can see literally behind the scenes, like literally as if you've already
purchased the program behind the scenes, what agency incubator looks like.
So you get to see module by module. I do the breakdown. I show you all
the plug and plays all the templates, the trackers, the community, the live Q and a calls like as
if you're literally a customer. And the reason I want you to watch this
is just so you can get an idea of the immense value in this program. And as I
said, I don't want you to buy anything. So after you watched that,
don't buy the program.
What I want you to do next
is right below that demo, you actually got to find a link to
booking a call with my student success manager. Because for most of you, you are about to embark on one of the
most important journeys of your life, starting an online business. And that can
be quite a scary thing to do at times. And that's actually why we have
my student success manager, whose entire role in my company is
to speak to potential new students. Give them a little bit of advice and
see if they're a good fit for agency incubator.
But the main priority
is the first thing I said, give you guys a little
advice, speak to you. One-on-one here are your problems
here where you're kind of stuck. And as I said, only an F only you're
a good fit for Agency Incubator, He'll go ahead and present you
with a very special offer to join. So ladies and gents, I want you to go ahead and take those
two action steps because honestly there has never been more opportunity
than in 2021 with social media marketing and the success
that my students saw in 2020, even with everything that's
going on in the world was crazy. Our students had better success and
my agency actually grew in 2020, even with everything that's going
on. And while I'm saying all this, I'm actually going to
get interest into pop up. Some of the student wins just
this week alone. So as I said, I'm looking forward to jumping on zoom
with some of these coaching calls, giveaway winners.
I'm very excited for you to check
out the demo and then booking your complimentary call with my
student success manager. Thank you guys so much for sticking
around until this point and for smashing that like button. I really appreciate
it. I'll see you guys in the next one..