How to Start a Digital Marketing Agency
How to Start a Digital Marketing Agency
How to Start a Digital Marketing Agency
If you’re reading this, you’re most likely a thriving freelancer who’s ready to scale. Or maybe you’re just dipping your toe in the freelance world and want to set yourself up for future success - this guide’s for you, too!
Ideally, your processes are dialed in, your clients are happy, and you have a few freelance partners who pitch in for out-of-wheelhouse asks. Best case scenario? You're filing your taxes without having a complete mental breakdown. If so, congrats, and keep reading. We’ve tapped top freelancers and agency owners for their best advice on everything from hiring your first employee to which software they can’t live without.
Who We Are - Why Listen to Us?
We’re No Revisions, an a-la-carte marketing agency that supplements brands for project-based needs (think one-time social media strategy, content creation, and graphic design) without the typical constraints of a big creative agency. Need a white-label service without the hassle of finding a freelancer? That’s what we’re here for.
Our sister agency, The Creative Exchange (TCE), is a social media agency focused on CPG long-term partnerships. Both were founded by thought-leading social media strategist Anna Sullivan (a freelancer turned agency owner) and operated by a handful of industry experts (freelancers who left large agencies or in-house). From big brand partners like Caraway and Solawave to small startups, we’ve seen it all and want to help you avoid the mistakes we made in the early days.
Below, you’ll find everything we wish we knew when starting our digital marketing agencies as well as advice from long-time freelancers and agency pioneers.
When To Start An Agency & When To Stay Freelance or In-House
As an agency owner, you’re responsible for more than just delivering services to clients. You’re managing and supporting a team with different personalities and needs, taking on additional administrative tasks such as payroll, and balancing cash flow for yourself and others.
If you’re more interested in simply providing a service you love than managing others, sticking to freelance may be for you. If you’re feeling stretched thin or consistently asked if you offer a service you’re not a pro at, white labeling may be your solution.
If you don’t want to work weekends or odd hours, staying in-house or at an agency may be your best bet. Sullivan suggests reading the E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, which helped her identify her entrepreneurial style. She says, “We can’t be everything to everybody, so it’s good to know how you operate and where you want to go with your business.” If you're unsure if you’re ready to manage others or take on more, follow along below for clarity.
Define Your Services
What Makes You Unique?
As freelancers, we often wear many hats. This still holds true for starting an agency, but at some point, you have to decide what you’re most passionate about, what you’re best at, and what you hate doing the most - that’s what you drop, hire, or white label for. Do your best and hire the rest, recommends Sullivan.
Initially, TCE offered social media services, content creation (blog writing), and branding. But every time Sullivan spoke with a new client, they only discussed social media - it was her passion and where she excelled. Eventually, after consistently signing on social media client after social media client, TCE switched gears and tailored its service offerings and marketing toward social.
Always offer the service you’re most passionate about, skilled at, and proficient at managing. If you don’t have that clarity yet and offer a few different services, check your profit margins and identify the one you can consistently repeat.
Angel Vasquez, co-owner of branding studio Unfazed Agency (one of our service partners), recommends tailoring your services to appear as a family, not stand-alone items. “It’s important not to do too many things and to find a family of interconnected and relative services,” he says.
A few good examples are (web design, graphic design, and web development), (social media strategy and copywriting), (video production, content creation, and video editing). When marketing these “buckets”, always include search engine optimizations the client would be searching for, ie. web design agency, website design companies, and best logo design companies are a few good examples for a website design and branding agency.
The perfect time to start an agency is when you offer one or two services that perfectly intertwine with another service you don’t provide but would potentially increase the project scope. Example: You do branding and graphic design and want to do web design, but learning web development takes too long. Now’s the time to white label for web development and title your company as an agency vs. freelancer graphic designer.
Another perspective to help narrow your offerings while remaining unique in the marketplace is to identify a specific skill few are offering—think brand naming (our naming partner is Jingleheimer) or target a niche audience like CPG founders who need help sourcing or finding partners (Generation CPG is popular).
Define Your Niche and Target Audience
Only put the work you want to get hired for out into the world. As freelancers, we often work on client projects that don’t necessarily light our fires, but they keep the lights on. Finding that balance takes time, but knowing where you want your business to go and having a broader perspective is critical.
Laura Schwerb, photographer and founder of Page and Plate Studio (one of our product photography partner), recommends carefully choosing your portfolio pieces. “All the work you put on your portfolio should be work you’d like to get hired to do more of. And if you put the work out there, that’s what people will think of you for or ask you for,” she says. Although every project won’t be a passion project, targeting clients within your ideal realm or vein will eventually bring more clients of a similar niche.
So, how do you transition from random clients to clients in a specific niche? Go where they are. “I wish I better understood who my dream client was in the beginning vs. what was local to me. If there’s business at your door that you don’t necessarily want, take yourself someplace where the business at your door is what you’re dreaming of. Put yourself where your client is.” says Sullivan.
We’re not saying you need to move anywhere (hello, we’re remote for a reason), but putting yourself face-to-face or virtually through tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, hashtags on IG, and expos or marketing events makes all the difference. Be a sponge in your dream water.
Get your books in order
As freelancers, we often wear many hats. This still holds true for starting an agency, but at As a thriving freelancer, you should have your pricing and accounting dialed in. But it might be time to seek guidance if you want to scale, add additional services, or hire your first full-time employee. Feeling unsure? Reach out to a mentor! Sullivan recommends MentorPass.
If you’re just scraping by without contracting out, increase your pricing. From our experience, freelancers often undervalue their services and charge less than they’re worth. If you’re doing good work, your client doesn’t want to lose you, and that’s worth something. Know your value and charge it. We wish we didn’t have to say it, but don’t add an employee if you can barely pay yourself.
A pricing tip we wish we learned earlier: Your payroll should always be at most 40% of the service cost. Taxes will be up to 30%, tools another 20%, leaving you with almost zero profit and hardly any for marketing. Always price out your business needs before deciding your pricing.
If you add a contractor for a service, add 20% on top of their fee to the service's base price, ensuring you can cover taxes and other fees. If all of this seems too much or you haven’t done it already, GET AN ACCOUNTANT.
We can’t reiterate the importance of getting your finances in order enough. “So many times, creatives play the I’m a creative, I don’t worry about that stuff,” says Schwerb. “But just because you’re a creative doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the financial benefits of someone with a burnout 9-5”.
Schwerb recommends reading the book Profit First, which helped her shift her mindset and business into a place of expansion instead of scarcity. “I can now take a month off and know my business will still pay me. I have retirement, am set for taxes, all of it,” she says.
We recommend an initial conversation with a Quickbooks accountant for bookkeeping. It’s relatively inexpensive and can save you a lot of money in the long run. Build a solid foundation now so you can contract, hire, and scale without financial hiccups.
Define Your Pricing & Agency Model
If you’re interested in changing up your business model, here are our recommendations. We’ve also added a few base-rate numbers from Indeed and agency research for perspective.
Monthly Retainer: Perfect for knowing your upfront cash flow and delivering a set amount of hours per client monthly. An average monthly retainer for email marketing (including design for templates and individual email campaigns, copywriting, and implementation) in the US in 2024 is around $2500-$7K for 10 emails per month. At No Revisions, we’re charging $3000 for weekly emails + analytics.
Tiered Packages: An excellent option for enticing different levels of business. This model can sometimes confuse clients - ensure you have the “math” figured out before listing how much each tier costs + prices for additional services.
Flat Fee or Package: Selling a one-off service such as website design or branding? A flat fee or package rate is a clear and straightforward option. Ensure you know how long these services take so you’re not leaving money on the table. For example, are you charging $3.5K for a website build that takes 80 hours? That’s $50 an hour. An average monthly package fee could range between $250 - $750 an email.
A-La-Carte: This option works best if you offer several services. At No Revisions, we partner with other boutique agencies to white-label services we don’t have in-house. This provides the best of both worlds, as many of our clients need our expertise (social services) and hand-in-hand services like branding or photography.
Hourly: Although this model is straightforward, it’s hard to scale. We suggest this model when we’re sure of the hourly breakdown of a project, as troubleshooting tasks can quickly add up for the client. An average email marketing manager hourly rate is between $40-$60.
For No Revisions, the package price and a-la-carte models work best. For TCE, we prefer monthly retainers. We suggest running a profit analysis based on your current working hours, as you could increase profit when scaling.
When to Hire & Become an Agency
When making your first hire, look for the unicorn - someone who can do the task you need the most, but is also multifaceted and could potentially cover other areas of your business.
“Before starting the agency, I was doing everything involved in social media management for all my clients,” says Sullivan. You can fake some things until you make it, but not photography. That was my first hire because it was a service I needed for my business, and I wasn’t an expert. After photography, I hired a graphic designer, but I did it slowly.”
No one goes from a solo freelancer to a twenty-employee agency overnight (unless you’re VC-backed), but scaling to even one additional hire can drastically decrease your profit margin. Ensure their additional value can increase your pricing.
Vasquez saw a similar growth track when his agency Unfazed hired a web developer to support their branding and graphic design offerings. “Our creative director kind of hit a cap with offerings and knew that offering web design on top of the current package would increase margins. That’s when we hired and started looking for partners that could increase our bottom line on the invoice,” says Vasquez.
Although your initial first hire may be at a lower salary than traditional 9-5 options, remember you’re also potentially offering flexible hours, remote work, continued learning opportunities, and more to a new team member. By providing an opportunity for your new hire to develop their skillset and career, you can leverage a slightly lower hourly/retainer/salary in the beginning. Obviously, always pay your team appropriately, but do your research before proposing that initial number.
The Name Game
Now that you’re transitioning from freelance to agency, you’ll need to rename and rebrand potentially - here’s why. Clients feel safer knowing they have access to an agency or a team. “It’s all about optics,” says Vasquez. “Instead of saying, I know a guy. Now, he’s a part of my team, and we work on many projects similar to this together.” This reassures the client that you’re not just a single provider but also have support.
When it comes to naming, think long-term and scalability. We love cheeky names that say what they are. No Revisions is named No Revisions because that’s part of our business model. We provide a service without any revisions. A few other fun agency names we’re loving are:
Good Work
The Peeps
Take a Gander
Mutual Friends
Need help coming up with a memorable name? Connect with our wordsmith and naming service provider, Jingleheimer Agency.
Taxes & Trademarks
If you’re currently operating as a sole proprietor and doing your taxes, you can potentially stay where you are—this keeps you in the freelancer lane. But if you want to start hiring contractors or add an employee, we recommend transitioning to an LLC or C or S Corp for legal and tax reasons. Every business differs based on cash flow and expenditures, so always talk to an expert before filing. For guidance, book a call with a consultant such as Collective.
Here’s our must-do list if you haven’t already:
File your business name in your state or where you’d like to file taxes. There are tax advantages to filing in states without state taxes, but sometimes, it’s easier to file where you live. Keep it simple. Start your search here.
Trademark your business name. We use Indie Law.
File for an LLC or S/C-Corp through Bizzee.
Get an accountant through Quickbooks.
Invoices, Payroll & Online Banking
After years of switching between different service providers, we’ve settled on Relay and Gusto, which work for us. Both are efficient, offer easy-to-use interfaces, and have a moderately low price point with monthly / no-contract requirements.
Relay is an online bank that allows you to have several different checking and savings accounts, send invoices, and receive payments. It also integrates with QuickBooks, captures and saves receipts, and more. We’re big fans.
Gusto is a payroll, HR, and employee benefits tool. It allows you to pay W-2 and 1099 employees, provide access to retirement accounts, and offer healthcare. It’s a streamlined solution for several scaling needs.
Tola is an accounts payable/receivable online app that creates invoices and tracks expenses. Its free starter program is great for anyone sending less than 5 invoices a month.
Dialed in Details and Processes (SOPs)
As you begin to scale and take on more clients, it’s imperative that you consistently show up and provide the same service for all. We recommend creating detailed guides (standard operating procedures) for every internal and client-facing action you and your team take. From payroll to adding Instagram captions, a step-by-step guide ensures no matter who is providing the service, they’re doing it correctly. We also recommend saving a master file (decks and templates) that can be repurposed for recurring client tasks.
Dialing in your processes also allows you to delegate, freeing up valuable hours. “Write everything down. Everything needs a process. If I was to be gone for ten months, this agency could still run because I’ve left instructions on how to do payroll and everything else,” says Sullivan. Think long term, invest the time now, and save the time later. Sullivan also suggests buffering 3 months of revenue for slow seasons and emergencies. If projects slow down, you still need to pay your retainers.
Our favorite tools for processes are:
Google Drive: If you’re not already using Google Drive, you’re missing out on a vast toolbox of resources. We keep Google Docs for every single process. Reminder: always export these and save them somewhere offline. If Google Drive were gone tomorrow, would you lose everything?
Loom: Loom is an excellent tool for screen and audio recording. We use it for any digital task and save the recording in the matching Google Doc. People learn differently, so we provide both a visual and audio reference.
Zapier: Our go-to for automating repeating tasks. Not sure what to automate? We take our client leads from a landing page, to our Hubspot CRM, to a FloDesk welcome email series all via Zapier.
Managing Projects & People
Every team is different, and sometimes, you must adhere to your client’s preferred method of communication. Still, our favorite tools for both internal and external communication, as well as project management, are:
Basecamp: A project management tool and direct messaging service, Basecamp is an excellent option for remote freelance teams that don’t want to log in to several applications. You can create tasks, have a team and private direct messages, and give clients access.
Notion: A project management, meets planning, meets journal software. Perfect for all things processes. For tailored templates, check out Knotably.
Toggl: A simple tool for time tracking both billable and non-billable hours.
Typeform: For both internal and client facing forms. It is easy to gather insight from several individuals while still looking lux.
Marketing Your Agency
Unfortunately, the transition from freelancer to agency doesn’t decrease the hustle nature of client acquisition. Whether your primary source of traffic comes from client referrals, organic traffic from SEO, or Meta ads - the key is to track your leads, understand the funnel they’re coming through, and convert. Unfamiliar with funnels? Watch this video on the basics of funnel marketing.
Take time to properly SEO your website or portfolio. Not sure what that means? Start here with this SEO Basics Guide.
Set up Google Analytics for traffic data, and use Google Search Console to reveal search queries and optimize keywords. Basically, Google Analytics tracks every person who lands on your site, what site referred them to you, and if they converted or bounced. It’s super helpful for identifying what’s working from an acquisition perspective. Google Search Console pairs perfectly with Google Analytics as it gives more insight into what your traffic was looking for when they found you. This helps you tailor your future content.
We use Squarespace to host our website and find it super easy to implement data tracking through their Google Analytics integration. If you haven’t set up a Customer Relationship Management tool to track potential leads, we suggest Hubspot.
One last step before launch? Share your test site or marketing campaign with an “outside” sounding board. This could be other freelancers, your not-so-tech-savvy family (great for navigational purposes—if they can’t navigate your site, your client won’t be able to either), and current or previous clients. Don’t get too attached. Remember your marketing isn’t about you - it’s about landing the right client.
What's Next?
ENGAGE
What's Next? ENGAGE
Engage
Position yourself as a thought leader in your target space and think of yourself as a client. It’s your job to sell the agency. We recommend creating a content marketing strategy for your business and posting consistently. We also recommend delegating as much as you can to an internal team member (if possible), but hold on to your favorite content style or topic.
Sullivan says, “As a founder, I know the topics and am passionate about the things we’ll be posting on LinkedIn or our blog. Then, we share those with our clients. It keeps me engaged in the work and what’s happening. A lot of an agency owner's job isn’t always the fun stuff—it’s payroll, logistics, and admin. And writing the content keeps me engaged in the industry.”
As we mentioned earlier, be a sponge in your dream water. Join communities of other freelancers and marketers, get listed on agency sites, and network in person and online. A few of our go-to but often-overlooked marketing opportunities are:
Get a free listing on the following sites:
Join Communities and Newsletters:
Market Places We Love (Templates and Courses):
Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator:
If you’re unfamiliar with this premium add-on, get familiar fast! With access to key decision makers at target companies, an internal CRM that cross-references your external CRM (great for lead generation), and increased research capabilities, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an excellent addition to all levels of your marketing funnel. If you’re not familiar or don’t have the bandwidth, hire this out. No Revisions partnered with an expert on Upwork to build out our initial strategy.
Offline, remember that in-person events and simple human interactions can lead to new clients or opportunities. “If I’m out and about, and I overhear someone talking about photography or editing, I’ll go up to them and talk about what they’re referencing. I did that a couple weeks ago, and we really hit it off. She took my headshots, and we’re friends now,” says Schwerb. Remember, networking doesn’t have to feel forced - consider it simply sharing valuable information between two like-minded people.
Be Yourself + Market Your Business
Your clients will hire you for who you are and your services, so show up authentically. Whether that’s through on-site branding or email signatures, delivering a service that’s unique to you will set you apart. Identify your selling proposition by doing a competitor analysis of your field. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What sets you apart? What makes you different? Shine a light on that!
Clients won’t automatically drop in your lap, so take the time to market yourself as a business and not just a person. Although challenging, think of your business as a separate entity from yourself. You are not your work, clients, or output - that’s your business. Set your business up for success by properly branding (hire that one-time graphic designer and photographer to execute your brand vision), marketing (create a marketing schedule as though your business were your client), and lead generation (create lead magnets and funnel flows) so you’re never in a dry spell. We cannot recommend this step enough!
If you’re still feeling sticky about moving from freelance to agency, scared to make your first hire, or simply need some advice, we’ve been there and done that. Let us help you!