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I'm Scaling a Digital Marketing Agency from $0 to $30K/month and...

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Zlatin Manahov

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...in this thread I'll be detailing my progress.

Quick Backstory: I am a 19yo uni student majoring in Business Administration and Economics. I only needed one semester to verify that I am indeed wasting my time and money on university. I kept witnessing people my age already seeing some success while I am stuck going to lectures. That caused me to think about ways I can leverage my free time to make money.

This isn't my first attempt at starting my own online business. I had started another digital marketing agency back in September last year that specialized in Google Ads. Looking back at it now it deserved to fail as it did - before it even started. Rather than put systems in place, all I did was act as a glorified freelancer. When I sent emails to leads I was ignored 99.9% of the time. That caused me to think that no one wanted this service. Instead of looking at myself and what I was offering, I blamed the market. I didn't know any better. The complete lack of a positive feedback loop coupled with going away to Uni caused me to neglect my agency and it slowly decayed away. I fell in a rut, my motivation was also gone.

I recently came up with the idea of launching another digital marketing agency, only this time I would approach it in a completely different way. I asked a friend to be my partner and he said yes. We then sat and discussed how we are going to do this. This time we not only had a strategy, but we also had systems to implement and twice the manpower do to it.

Now we are in the beginning stages of our company. We are currently doing 100 outreaches per day, 50 each. Mainly focusing on Instagram DMs while waiting for our email addresses to warm up (we are using Instantly). We are sending personalized Loom videos to each warm lead. We already have 3 brands that showed interest by giving us their emails. I will send short personalized videos detailing how we can solve their problem(s) for them and see where it goes.

As I said, this thread will detail my progress so we can keep track of how we are evolving. I would love to hear any feedback on the stuff I write here. Thanks for reading!
 
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upsilonceo

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...in this thread I'll be detailing my progress.

Quick Backstory: I am a 19yo uni student majoring in Business Administration and Economics. I only needed one semester to verify that I am indeed wasting my time and money on university. I kept witnessing people my age already seeing some success while I am stuck going to lectures. That caused me to think about ways I can leverage my free time to make money.

This isn't my first attempt at starting my own online business. I had started another digital marketing agency back in September last year that specialized in Google Ads. Looking back at it now it deserved to fail as it did - before it even started. Rather than put systems in place, all I did was act as a glorified freelancer. When I sent emails to leads I was ignored 99.9% of the time. That caused me to think that no one wanted this service. Instead of looking at myself and what I was offering, I blamed the market. I didn't know any better. The complete lack of a positive feedback loop coupled with going away to Uni caused me to neglect my agency and it slowly decayed away. I fell in a rut, my motivation was also gone.

I recently came up with the idea of launching another digital marketing agency, only this time I would approach it in a completely different way. I asked a friend to be my partner and he said yes. We then sat and discussed how we are going to do this. This time we not only had a strategy, but we also had systems to implement and twice the manpower do to it.

Now we are in the beginning stages of our company. We are currently doing 100 outreaches per day, 50 each. Mainly focusing on Instagram DMs while waiting for our email addresses to warm up (we are using Instantly). We are sending personalized Loom videos to each warm lead. We already have 3 brands that showed interest by giving us their emails. I will send short personalized videos detailing how we can solve their problem(s) for them and see where it goes.

As I said, this thread will detail my progress so we can keep track of how we are evolving. I would love to hear any feedback on the stuff I write here. Thanks for reading!
Hello Zlatin, thank you for sharing your story. I started my digital marketing agency in 2015, so I understand your struggle to get things moving. Congratulations on starting over. It's a great business model, though quite saturated. But you can carve out a profitable piece of the pie in the right niche with the right USP. Are you still specializing in Google ads?
 

Laksh Ramesh

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It depends on what niche you are looking to target, I am starting to be a digital marketing freelancer at age 18 coupled with school and their hectic exams. Digital marketing for me I think its all about identifying all the problems and basing your solutions driven by your skills and offering them to it and thats how you could scale fast
 

Black_Dragon43

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...in this thread I'll be detailing my progress.

Quick Backstory: I am a 19yo uni student majoring in Business Administration and Economics. I only needed one semester to verify that I am indeed wasting my time and money on university. I kept witnessing people my age already seeing some success while I am stuck going to lectures. That caused me to think about ways I can leverage my free time to make money.

This isn't my first attempt at starting my own online business. I had started another digital marketing agency back in September last year that specialized in Google Ads. Looking back at it now it deserved to fail as it did - before it even started. Rather than put systems in place, all I did was act as a glorified freelancer. When I sent emails to leads I was ignored 99.9% of the time. That caused me to think that no one wanted this service. Instead of looking at myself and what I was offering, I blamed the market. I didn't know any better. The complete lack of a positive feedback loop coupled with going away to Uni caused me to neglect my agency and it slowly decayed away. I fell in a rut, my motivation was also gone.

I recently came up with the idea of launching another digital marketing agency, only this time I would approach it in a completely different way. I asked a friend to be my partner and he said yes. We then sat and discussed how we are going to do this. This time we not only had a strategy, but we also had systems to implement and twice the manpower do to it.

Now we are in the beginning stages of our company. We are currently doing 100 outreaches per day, 50 each. Mainly focusing on Instagram DMs while waiting for our email addresses to warm up (we are using Instantly). We are sending personalized Loom videos to each warm lead. We already have 3 brands that showed interest by giving us their emails. I will send short personalized videos detailing how we can solve their problem(s) for them and see where it goes.

As I said, this thread will detail my progress so we can keep track of how we are evolving. I would love to hear any feedback on the stuff I write here. Thanks for reading!
Congrats on taking action, most people dream but never do.

It sounds like with your first agency, you struggled to articulate the value you offered to get people to book meetings with you.

This is a positioning and market strategy issue, and it comes before marketing (outreach) and sales (closing) because if you don’t get this right, the other two won’t work.

Here’s a thread to help you improve your positioning and messaging to get meetings more easily:
 
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Last edited:

Mavsen

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Thanks for sharing! I'm just getting started as a webdesign freelancer and want to turn this into a web development and marketing agency at some point.
It's definetely hard to get clients in the beginning, I can relate to that haha.
But it will only get easier once you can show them results with other clients.
Looking forward to reading more on this!
 

Zlatin Manahov

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Hello Zlatin, thank you for sharing your story. I started my digital marketing agency in 2015, so I understand your struggle to get things moving. Congratulations on starting over. It's a great business model, though quite saturated. But you can carve out a profitable piece of the pie in the right niche with the right USP. Are you still specializing in Google ads?
Thanks! It's true that there is a lot of competition, but there's even more people to help and $ to earn. We are specializing in FB and TikTok marketing which is still a very needed service for many online stores who are struggling.

Also, mind sharing what came of your agency? I really love hearing about fellow owners' journeys!
 

Zlatin Manahov

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It depends on what niche you are looking to target, I am starting to be a digital marketing freelancer at age 18 coupled with school and their hectic exams. Digital marketing for me I think its all about identifying all the problems and basing your solutions driven by your skills and offering them to it and thats how you could scale fast
Hey man! I recently read your intro post and I can only say congrats for starting your journey! School can be a pain in the a$$ but its still better than slaving away at a 9-5 job! Just focus on doing what you feel makes sense long-term.

What you say about digital marketing is 100% true. No one cares about you past results unless they believe you can solve their problem(s) just as succesfully.
 
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Zlatin Manahov

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Congrats on taking action, most people dream but never do.

It sounds like with your first agency, you struggled to articulate the value you offered to get people to book meetings with you.

This is a positioning and market strategy issue, and it comes before marketing (outreach) and sales (closing) because if you don’t get this right, the other two won’t work.

Here’s a thread to help you improve your positioning and messaging to get meetings more easily:
Thanks @Black_Dragon43!

I feel you on this. It's actually what I was speaking with my co-founder about earlier today. We have to build such a value-bringing offer that our prospects feel like they are stealing from us. Also even more important - the angle we come at this from can use some work. Thanks for pointing it out!
 

polaroid22

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What do you offer the clients if you don't mind me asking? I am a videographer, and often I work with big companies that have their own marketing team that run the fb ads etc. But I was thinking I could offer smaller companies the actual video's + running the ads (do need to look into books of fb ads and google ads though), not sure what pricing is involved in this niche.
 

Zlatin Manahov

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What do you offer the clients if you don't mind me asking? I am a videographer, and often I work with big companies that have their own marketing team that run the fb ads etc. But I was thinking I could offer smaller companies the actual video's + running the ads (do need to look into books of fb ads and google ads though), not sure what pricing is involved in this niche.

Our service has two parts: 1) we make performance creative for the brand and 2) we run the ads for them. Not sure about pricing for photography but running ads is most often done on a simple retainer model + the price of each piece of content (ex: $200 per video).
 
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Zlatin Manahov

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Update 12.01.23:

Spoke to another agency owner employing a similar offer who is already doing over $50K per month. He showed me a few things, the main ones being his outreach process and how he usually closes deals. That call was super valuable and now I feel like I have a clearer roadmap to getting that first client.

We are currently in the process of finding someone from who we can buy leads in bulk. There are a few good candidates so in the coming days we'll surely have a good pick. After we find that person, he or she will be tasked with finding 300 or so leads.

We will send cold emails to all those leads. Aiming for at least a 25% open rate and 5% responses but should be much better.

We restructured our offer to be much more specialized, more transformation-focused and more value-packed. Now we will test if it actually resonates with our niche.

Finally, my co-founder is currently in Argentina on holiday and communication is tougher because of the time difference, but we're making it work so far. He's been posting content on IG and Tik Tok for us. The goal with that is to start building an audience right from the start. Most smaller and boutique agencies are lacking in presence on social media so we are aiming to leverage that.

Thanks for reading!
 

Andy Black

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Update 12.01.23:

Spoke to another agency owner employing a similar offer who is already doing over $50K per month. He showed me a few things, the main ones being his outreach process and how he usually closes deals. That call was super valuable and now I feel like I have a clearer roadmap to getting that first client.

We are currently in the process of finding someone from who we can buy leads in bulk. There are a few good candidates so in the coming days we'll surely have a good pick. After we find that person, he or she will be tasked with finding 300 or so leads.

We will send cold emails to all those leads. Aiming for at least a 25% open rate and 5% responses but should be much better.

We restructured our offer to be much more specialized, more transformation-focused and more value-packed. Now we will test if it actually resonates with our niche.

Finally, my co-founder is currently in Argentina on holiday and communication is tougher because of the time difference, but we're making it work so far. He's been posting content on IG and Tik Tok for us. The goal with that is to start building an audience right from the start. Most smaller and boutique agencies are lacking in presence on social media so we are aiming to leverage that.

Thanks for reading!
There's a guy who runs a video marketing agency and he posts short videos on TikTok and LinkedIn and I'm sure it brings him clients.

I'll dig out his name/handle.
 

polaroid22

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Our service has two parts: 1) we make performance creative for the brand and 2) we run the ads for them. Not sure about pricing for photography but running ads is most often done on a simple retainer model + the price of each piece of content (ex: $200 per video).
Thanks, that really low price for video? Are they cutouts from a bigger video or something (so the amount adds up to a bigger price)? I usually don't do any video under 1K (60%shooting, 40%edit). Bigger companies pay around 10K for a video.
 
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Andy Black

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There's a guy who runs a video marketing agency and he posts short videos on TikTok and LinkedIn and I'm sure it brings him clients.

I'll dig out his name/handle.
This guy:

 
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Zlatin Manahov

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Thanks, that really low price for video? Are they cutouts from a bigger video or something (so the amount adds up to a bigger price)? I usually don't do any video under 1K (60%shooting, 40%edit). Bigger companies pay around 10K for a video.
Yeah, depends on the client and type of video - $200 is what the small to medium-size creators usually charge but you can negotiate a smaller fee when you're buying in bulk (like 10 or more videos from the same creator). For now, I think we will let the creators edit the videos themselves but when we get a few clients we can hire one guy to edit the content.

What kinds of videos do you make for your clients?
 

polaroid22

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Yeah, depends on the client and type of video - $200 is what the small to medium-size creators usually charge but you can negotiate a smaller fee when you're buying in bulk (like 10 or more videos from the same creator). For now, I think we will let the creators edit the videos themselves but when we get a few clients we can hire one guy to edit the content.

What kinds of videos do you make for your clients?
Mostly branded social media ads or for website use.
 

upsilonceo

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Thanks! It's true that there is a lot of competition, but there's even more people to help and $ to earn. We are specializing in FB and TikTok marketing which is still a very needed service for many online stores who are struggling.

Also, mind sharing what came of your agency? I really love hearing about fellow owners' journeys!
Sorry for the late reply. I still operate my agency. When I started the agency, there was no focus. We went after and accepted every kind of business or project we could get. It wasn't until we found a niche (healthcare) that we started to make real progress--and profits. Today we help private practice physicians grow thriving medical practices using digital marketing.
 
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Zlatin Manahov

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UPDATE:

Finally, we have a freelancer generating leads for us. Now we can free up so much time to do more important tasks. Starting off, we bought 150 leads from him and ran a campaign. Before the campaign is even finished, we already got 2 positive responses from brands in our niche, one of which has 84k followers on IG (not that that's a good metric to judge the size of the company, but it does give a hint of it). Pretty happy with the result. We still could improve the message much more than what it is currently.

Also, my co-founder is back from holidays so now we can both go 100% in on the process.

Finally, an older friend agreed to help out until we get our first client. He will try and get us leads out of his business owner buddies. I don't expect anything to really come out of this but it's still a decent opportunity. He can also provide valuable experience and advise us when needed, kind of like a mentor.

That's all for now. Hope all of you reading this are having a fine day!
 

jacklacy

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Any tips for someone getting started for landing first client?
 

TeeJay_

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Any tips for someone getting started for landing first client?
Focus on an industry. For me, it was a realtor so I was able to find a couple of more real estate brokers in need of my services. Once you listen to the "complaints" of a couple of people in the same industry, you can start to reorient what you have to offer.
 
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