How to Create a Digital Marketing Agency Business Plan
Starting a digital marketing agency isn’t as simple as registering a domain, hiring a few people, and starting your outreach campaign to find your first clients. It requires thoughtful planning in order to be able to compete in a tough market.
Before you use your savings to start a company, make sure you have a clear digital marketing agency business plan. This plan acts like a roadmap showing your company where to go and what to do. It saves you a lot of time, money, and sets you up for success.
If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry. I have created a fictional agency to demonstrate how your business plan can look like. It can serve as your digital marketing agency business plan template.
I. Executive summary
Qisa is a digital marketing agency from Mexico City. We’re all about making money in the art world. We help artists sell their work like it’s something people need, not a luxury.
Our mission is to make art businesses earn more money in a way that’s easy on the wallet. We profile our clients’ products and services as a met need, not as a whim.
To achieve our mission, we offer art-oriented and well-crafted digital marketing services. These include smart partnerships with other brands and influencers, as well as content and newsletters that change the way the customers perceive the art.
II. Market analysis
The world of digital marketing is constantly changing. It now relies heavily on new technology, such as AI and data analytics.
At Qisa, we focus on the right groups of customers:
Artists who work on their own, like digital artists, photographers, or plastic artists.
Art galleries, art schools, and museums.
Art-related businesses like art materials sellers, framing studios, and others.
To stay ahead of the competition, we aim to offer great customer support and competitively priced services with decent profit margins. We’re also aware of our competitors and know how to compete with them.
Some of the biggest current competitors for Qisa include Social House Inc. and Kobe Digital.
Social House works on developing brands of the future. However, they aren’t too accessible for smaller brands. Kobe Digital blends advertising, website design, and video production in a fresh way. But, their large offering can make it difficult for them to maintain quality across their services.
Our customers often have a hard time finding the right mix between being creative and making money.
Here are four reasons why they struggle:
Lack of exposure to reach real potential clients.
The need to establish a recognizable brand in a crowded market.
Tight budgets and the need for affordable marketing solutions.
The urge to switch the perception of art from a luxury to a necessity in the eyes of consumers.
III. Services offered
At Qisa, here’s what we can do for art businesses:
We craft content marketing strategies that emphasize the unique art the client creates.
We use SEO to help our artists get noticed online.
We design email marketing campaigns for specific customers to keep them interested.
We focus on building winning e-commerce stores so that our clients can grow an online business quickly and seamlessly.
Qisa focuses on productized services to maintain the best possible price and quality. We offer ready-made solutions to fulfill the unique needs of art businesses.
This approach ensures consistency and scalability. By avoiding custom solutions, Qisa streamlines operations and reduces costs. Our artists get a crystal-clear picture of what they’re signing up for.
Our value proposition
At Qisa, we help art businesses transform the way art is marketed. We feel great about helping artists in a world that constantly discourages them and their ability to make a living doing what they love.
We change how people perceive art, and we offer scalable services that grow with our clients.
IV. Marketing & sales strategy
Our marketing plan is simple: what we do for our clients, we also do ourselves.
Content and social media marketing
Tactics: Regularly publishing clips with tips, fun facts, examples of our work, and behind-the-scenes.
Goals: Build authority, increase brand awareness, engage with the community, and drive organic traffic to our website.
Email campaigns
Tactics: Develop a newsletter featuring industry insights, client success stories, and customized offers based on data.
Goals: Nurture leads, maintain client relationships, and drive conversions.
SEO
Tactics: Optimize our website for search engines.
Goals: Improve search rankings and increase organic traffic.
With our sales strategy, this is what we’re aiming to achieve.
Lead generation
Tactics: Use authority content marketing and social media campaigns to attract potential clients.
Goals: Use lead generation to find people who are interested in Qisa’s services.
Client acquisition
Tactics: For our client acquisition, we understand the client’s wants and needs and explain how Qisa’s art-oriented services can help them.
Goals: Nurture cold leads into customers.
Client retention
Tactics: Provide top-tier services and support to build long-lasting relationships. Keep using our content and targeted email marketing strategies with engagement rewards.
Goals: Ensure client satisfaction and loyalty, resulting in ongoing projects and referrals.
We also want to create strategic partnerships: working on marketing projects together, promoting each other’s stuff, or even teaming up on limited-edition products and collaborations.
Strategic alliances with universities that offer post-graduate art programs, e-commerce platforms, streaming services, and fashion brands. This can enhance Qisa’s credibility and grow our reach.
Collaborations with art influencers and bloggers to promote Qisa’s services. This may boost our visibility and gain the trust of the art community.
Partnerships with other agencies or consultants who are interested in offering our services to their clients.
V. Business operations
Our organizational structure looks like this:
CEO/Founder
Marketing Manager
SEO Specialist
Content Creator
Social Media Manager
Client Success Manager
With the help of technology, we improve our processes and get done more in less time:
CRM: We use CRM systems to manage client relationships and keep all information in one place.
Project management: We manage everything in Service Provider Pro to easily keep track of tasks.
Analytics tools: These show us how well our SEO campaigns are doing by tracking and analyzing our site’s performance.
Email marketing automation software: This saves us time and effort by sending out emails automatically.
Content creation: Software that saves us time when creating content for our social channels.
Qisa’s workflow and processes are set up to as illustrated below.
Client onboarding
Initial chat to understand their needs.
Setting goals and expectations.
Send order form to complete purchase
Service delivery
Keyword research, optimize website content, and track performance.
Create and publish content, and track its engagement.
Develop a content calendar, schedule posts, and engage with the audience.
Set up and optimize online stores, and add newsletters to the mix.
Client reporting and review
Deliver ongoing performance reports.
Provide support and accessible communication.
VI. Financial plan
Let’s chat about the initial expenses of starting a business. At Qisa, we think this is what our start-up costs will be in the first three months:
Office space: $4,500
Technology and equipment (computers, software, and office equipment): $10,000 (one-time expense)
Initial marketing efforts: $500
Initial salaries for key staff members: $30,000
Initial legal and accounting services: $3,500 (one-time expense)
Website Development: $2,500 (one-time expense)
Unforeseen expenses: $3,000
To kick off on our own, this is the revenue model we designed (prices vary depending on factors like volume, frequency, and complexity):
SEO services: $500–$2,000 per month
Content marketing: $1,000–$3,000 per month
Social media strategy: $500–$2,000 per month
E-commerce integration: $3,000–$5,000 per project
Packages: Starting at $4,000 per month
Now, let’s discuss our financial projections. Taking into account the start-up costs and the revenue model, here’s what we can expect for the years 3–5 in terms of revenue, expenses, and profit:
Year 3
Revenue: $1,170,000
Expenses: $372,000
Profit: $798,000
Year 4
Revenue: $1,560,000
Expenses: $444,000
Profit: $1,116,000
Year 5
Revenue: $1,950,000
Expenses: $516,000
Profit: $1,434,000
We can’t make it on our own, though. Starting a digital marketing agency needs a lot of money at first. To reach our goals, we need $92,000 in funding to pay for all the start-up costs for the first six months.
VII. Risk management
The risks Qisa might deal with include:
Changes in what customers want, client dissatisfaction, and staying behind in a busy field.
Big economic events that affect our clients’ financial health.
Underperformance in the SEO and content marketing efforts.
Security breaches that compromise our own and our client’s data.
We’re all set to handle these risks with key mitigation strategies:
Niching down to focus on art businesses to differentiate from generalist agencies. Also, improve service quality all the time and conduct satisfaction surveys.
Diversify client base to cover all different budget levels. Offer discounts on quarterly and annual payments.
Use analytics tools to make data-driven adjustments. Keep the team updated with content marketing trends and business best practices.
Use a secure client portal to ensure data is in safe hands and backed up regularly.
Additional resources
There are many tools for creative businesses you can benefit from:
Managing the organizational bit of the business can be overwhelming, but there are tools like SPP that help you streamline your processes. The SPP client portal allows you to easily sell your services and manage projects.
The business proposal templates from Envato are designed by professionals. You’ll also find many digital marketing agency business plan examples there.
Closing thoughts
A good business plan is key to doing well with your digital marketing agency. You can look at it when you need help deciding which way to go. It’s useful when you need investors. It also serves as a starting point for every part of the business.
Taking the time to make a great business plan will lay the groundwork for a thriving and long-lasting company.
Renata is a staff writer at Envato. She’s passionate about all things film, streaming, sports, and outdoors. Find her reading several unfinished books at the same time. Connect with her on LinkedIn.