Find your niche
When it comes to digital marketing, it pays to specialise.
“I recommend digital marketers who want to be CMO one day to specialise first and then broaden their skills,” writes Kevin Indig, VP of SEO and Content at G2. “Increasing your value is easier as a specialist than a generalist. You can connect better and faster with people because the field is smaller. You can build out hard skills quicker from deep knowledge in one thing, compared to shallow knowledge in many things.”
There are a few niche routes you can follow when it’s time to strike out on your own. Do you want to be a social media marketing agency? A paid advertising marketing agency? An SEO agency? Here’s some information about each option.
Social media marketing
Create an agency that manages businesses’ Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages to increase followers and design engaging posts that help the brand reach a wider audience. You’ll be posting text and image updates, creating videos, managing paid social media advertising, and designing content that drives audience engagement.
If you already enjoy social media, or have a big following yourself, this might be the right avenue for you. There’s a growing demand for more authentic social media strategies—for example, by featuring real people instead of models in Instagram ads—so if you have a strong creative vision and work ethic, there’s a great opportunity in helping brands create a more approachable, “Gen Z” oriented voice right now.
Paid advertising
If you go into paid advertising, such as Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, you’ll be creating ad campaigns for companies using tools like Google Adwords and working to generate the most leads possible while keeping the cost per click as low as possible. You might specialise in search engine advertising, which lets advertisers bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches for a keyword related to their biz offering.
“When done properly, PPC has the power to deliver relatively quick and quantifiable results,” writes Brad Smith, founder of Codeless, “results that clients and stakeholders can’t argue with, regardless of their industry knowledge, as they watch revenue leap forward and cash swell in their accounts.”
Lead Generation
This involves building a lead generation website for a business with a tracking number and area code, creating a Google Maps listing, ranking the website, and directing leads toward the business you’re working with. Every call or lead that’s directed through you to the business you’re working with generates income for you.
Lead generation is a great model because it’s scalable. Once you get going, you can be selling hundreds of leads per day, working with companies in various industries. You can also automate it by using lead distribution software.
Affiliate marketing
Considered one of the best types of agencies to start right now, an affiliate marketing agency involves earning a commission by promoting other companies’ products and services. It’s easy to get started: choose a product you like, promote it, and make money from each sale that comes from your efforts. If you have a decent social media following or a highly trafficked website going for you already, it’s even easier to create a business around it.