SMMA meaning:
SMMA is short for Social Media Marketing Agency. It's a very popular business model due to its low barrier of entry as well as its resources and knowledge, that's often freely available.
How does SMMA work?
This business model builds around marketing for other businesses. You will advertise their products or services and in return you will receive a retainer/percentage of money you've brought in.
Sounds lucrative, right?
How to start an SMMA agency?
Here's the quickest possible overview of how SMMA works:
Build an agency:
First you will need to build a foundation, which you can use to acquire new customers.
It generally consists of following building blocks:
- Own domain (ideally .com)
- Website
- A way to schedule meetings (e.g. Calendly)
- Email service on your own domain (Godaddy, Namecheap, ...)
Find your niche:
You will need to define one ore multiple niches for which you want to offer your marketing service. Going in broadly, will leave you stranded nowhere, with no expertise and clients.
There are two groups you could choose: Local businesses and online businesses.
There is no simple answer on how to find the best one for you, but here's how you can find it out very easy:
Choose local businesses, if...
- you are living in a medium to big sized city
- the businesses near you have no/bad social media presence
- you have good connections to multiple local business owners
Choose online businesses, if...
- you don't fulfill any of the points above
- you want to work from home/travel
Next you need to choose niches. Choose one, that you already have expertise in, so that prospects know what you are talking about.
Here are some niches you could choose, but feel free to add your own:
Doing outreach
Outreach defines as reaching out to prospects, who might be interested in your service.
This might sound easy, but in reality it's the part where you will need to grind.
Before you do outreach you need to do the following:
- Find a platform/method (Instagram DMs, email, ...)
- Create multiple compelling messages/sequence of messages
- Ways to find new prospects to contact
Once you have all these things in place, the outreach can start. It's important to measure your effort using tools like Google Sheets, so you can make sure to find the most efficient method for your business.
The last steps:
This was just the tip of the iceberg.
Once you get into contact with interested prospects, you often get in a meeting with them, where you can pitch them and maybe get your first client.
You will need to be confident and realistic in your meetings, show your expertise.
After that you need to provide your service. There are many great resources out there for whatever you are doing, be it Facebook Ads, SEO or whatever.
I held this last part very short, because it's something everyone needs to figure out for themselves, their strengths and weaknesses.