10 SIMPLE Steps To Launch An INFLUENCER MARKETING AGENCY

hi guys it's suit and welcome back to the channel after watching this video you will not only know how to start an influencer marketing agency in 2024 you'll also have 10 actionable steps on how to do so step one the first most exciting step I think of beginning a business or beginning an agency naming your agency and ultimately a lot of people spend a lot of time on this step but it really doesn't matter too much you can name your agency whatever you want it doesn't matter too much but there are some considerations are other agencies called the same thing you don't want to be starting an influence Mar agency that's called serson because I'm already called serson it's just going to confuse the buyer and also it's probably not going to do so well for you because we're very established right you want to be calling something that isn't already existing in the market or that's far away from something already existing in the market also are you going to be able to get the do domain name because that is super important to get a good domain name for your agency and finally is the name trademark because if the name is trademark just legally can't use that name so you need to obviously have some of these considerations in your mind a lot of people also tend to name their agency similar to their names to make it quite personal and build that personal brand around it which is great but there are long-term implications if your agency is too Associated to your name and to your brand then it makes it harder for a buyer to Value it well because if they were then to buy your company it would then cease to exist or not necessarily cease to exist but not do as well without your involvement so you also do need to think about the longevity are you wanting to start an agency to sell if you wanted to start an agency to sell in the future you might not want to name it too close to your own name because then it doesn't separate it as easily for a buyer I Nam my agency solders the way I actually name my agency is quite funny because I did just name it after my first name like I mentioned to you not to do a second ago not the first name you know obviously it's I'm Sue mean but when I was 13 I used to go under the Alias Saul Anderson when I was a kid because I have a very uncommon name and obviously I'm also Scottish so if you were to type in suin Scotland on the internet my name my school would post a bunch of blogs and stuff up and my parents were quite worried about internet security at the time because I was ultimately like a 13-year-old kid playing games and The Gaming Community if you know is pretty toxic it can be that sometimes they were worried about my Internet Security and Internet safety so I name my name Saul Anderson and I just got known in the space as that so then I just ultimately merged Saul Anderson into serson and created the brand name but obviously that's very separate to Su but that's just a kind of explanation of like how I did it related to my name but I definitely would say if you are trying to go longterm and not just make it a cash cow business then name it something separate ultimately as much as I'm talking about names and everything here doesn't really matter when I was just starting serson I was running as a contractor and you probably will be just be doing that for a period of time you don't really need to worry about your brand name and put too much effort into it come up with something make sure you it match the criteria I mentioned before and just get started onto step two step two is now ultimately choosing your service and you might be thinking so why is this even a step why don't you even need to choose a service surely I'm just going to be offering influencer marketing Services well yes but there are various types of influencer marketing agencies and services you actually can offer and within this business model there are sort of three main types and that is talent management which is essentially managing a roster of talent exclusively to you the influencers are your clients they're the ones that you send to your company and then you are working for them and helping them commercialize and grow and there's a second type of business model which is influencer Partnerships where essentially you are going to be working with Brands who are already running influencer Marketing in house they're already doing the services and the strategy managing of the creative inhouse and all they need from agencies is to just sort of do media buying in a sense and when I say media buying I mean influencer media buying so you simply going to go partner with influencers and pay their money to deliver content for that brand and that's how you're going to kind of run your agency and get paid and the final one which is the sort of big dog I think of the influence of marketing agency Services is the Creative Solutions and manage service where you are essentially signing Brands and doing the full service from strategy creative all the way through to conception of the campaign and completion and Reporting and you basically getting budgets from brands on a project basis or retainer basis and helping them manage their whole influence marketing spend so you need to understand which service level you want to choose then when picking the service before you decide from here you want to ask yourself three things what do you already know what can you or what would you like to learn and do you have someone in mind who could do the service delivery aspect of that service so that you can simply focus on sales and growing the business now for my advice I would always recommend people start with influencer Partnerships it's ultimately the easiest to get into however you must quickly use that as the entry point and you have to be basically not in a partnership solely for very long because it's not going to be a very sustainable business model you have to use it quickly as to entry point to focus to get into talent management or Creative Solutions as I say it's not a long-term service that runs by itself and it's also not predictable Revenue every single month and I'll talk a little bit about that later in this video now we move to step three which is choosing your Niche and before we jump into this I just want to quickly explain to you what a niche actually is and very simply a niche is simply just the industry that you operate in and the worst mistake that you can make as an agency owner is offering your services to everyone the best agencies start by offering one service in one market and it makes finding clients and delivering Services far easier I actually break this rule a little bit with my agency as we offer services to gaming and orts Brands Tech Brands and entertainment Brands but to me these have like a close enough Affinity to each other where it makes sense we work with tech Brands mostly around their gaming products and also gaming is a form of entertainment right we work with Brands like Netflix who tap over into gaming and we also work with sort of Brands like Asus and Acer and we promoted a lot of their gaming laptops gaming preferral so it's a very close affinity and also when I first did just start we also just solely offered gaming and orts services so we were very much niched down at that point when choosing a niche you want to ask yourself two questions firstly what are your interests you don't have to love or be interested in the niche that you're selling in right because I know for example guys that have companies where they sell oil probably don't love oil they're just doing it because it's a good business model it definitely helps and and as an example for me I started my business within the gaming space because I was a gaming YouTuber before I started doing gaming content playing FIFA Minecraft fantas fredes whatever it was so I understand how like Brands speak to gaming consumers I had a previous interest in it so I loved what I was doing even when I wasn't making money and ultimately as well when I was trying to approach Brands I understood their jargon and their way of work and the second thing you want to also have to consider when you're choosing your Niche is where is your experience if you've never done marketing or worked with influencers before it's very useful if you have worked in another industry let's say you've worked previously for a fitness brand you'll already know the pain points of a fitness brand and also the cycles of marketing that they run step four creating your web presence and this section is a little bit like your agency name it's really fun to make but not the be all and end all it's not important to have the most responsive SE optimized backlink website with tons of pages as soon as you start out it just doesn't matter when you're first starting your agency and I do see a lot of agency owners who start up and put so much Focus they get super hung up and getting the perfect Qui LLY designed website as think it's going to make them all the money it won't and at first it just really doesn't matter most of your business will not come organically through your website and you're going to have to basically do a lot of Outreach and cold Outreach to begin with so I wouldn't worry too much about that my advice is use a very simple web Builder like Squarespace or Wix which I can link in the description for you guys and get a very simple but clean looking onepage website up which explains the key parts of the agency you obviously also need to buy a domain though so make sure you can purchase a professional domain which has your agency name . c or your sort of country dot for example RS is sol. com and you can buy these off of things like Google domains name cheek GoDaddy just search up by domain name you'll find them everywhere super cheap but you will need this to get your website up and running when you're first starting out the website has a main importance simply to add credibility that you are a real agency and a real person when reaching out to Brands and influencers if they click the link to your website or they search your website up and see nothing it doesn't really look legit to them and there's a lot of scams that do go on in this space so having a legit website up is important but not having something too artsy it doesn't matter but as I say when you start out you don't have to worry about creating something super comprehensive when I started I simply just built a terrible one pager in WordPress and it lasted me years and did well and if I can find it cuz I'm not sure if I'll still be able to find it it will be up on the screen somewhere here just to show you like exactly what I had when I first started and how you don't need something that great moving on to step five and something that actually is super important and a huge requirement it is a must to get yourself good email address and a good domain name as I mentioned influencers and Brands will simply just not respond to any personal email addresses like @gmail Outlook there are tons of scams around the space and it just has zero credibility so once you bought your domain to set up a website should hop on G Suite which cost like I think £10 a month for the basic plan and register your domain there for emails then make sure you set your email up with your first name or first and second name at your domain name you should then also make sure to set up a professional looking email signature like you can see mine on the screen right now as that just adds a little bit more flare to emails and a little bit more legitimacy to reaching out to Brands and influencers and ultimately also the good thing about gep is that you also get access to all the other Google apps like Drve docs sheets Etc which to begin with you can run majority of your Agency on for about £10 per month which makes it really affordable to get into the space now that you've done all the setup part we get into the fun stuff which is Step six and this is where the real work begins and this is lead sourcing what is lead sourcing this is basically just a fancy way of saying finding detailed information about potential customers and that is usually in the form of name email address and phone numbers the best way to do this within the influencer marketing space is by using social media and specifically influencers content let's say you're an agency starting in the fitness Niche go to fitness influencers profiles and see who is already sponsoring them you can see this easily from content attaining hash ad and also potentially the paid partnership logo on various platforms that now offer this functionality take a list of these companies and you want to head to LinkedIn to find out who the decision maker is going to be at these Brands if it's a massive company for example my protein it's never going to be the owner right they have people working for them it's generally going to be someone dealing with influencer marketing or someone on the marketing team so maybe like an influencer marketing manager head to LinkedIn and type in the name of the brand and then also influence a marketing manager and as you can see here in the screen we found Georgina Cooper and now you can go and use Google to find her email and then reach out to her if you're struggling to find emails for your prospects and your leads I recommend using tools like apollo.

io or snov. io both of these tools are free and they allow you to scrape emails from LinkedIn profiles or or from other sort of Google Search apollo. iio is also really handy because it allows you to find targeted Brands and leads through their own Search tool so you may not even have to go to the influencer's content you could simply just create like an ideal customer profile you know say it's like Fitness brands that have 5 million in Revenue every year get that onto apollo.