What is SMMA?

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 the money you’ve brought in.

Sounds lucrative, right?

How to start an SMMA agency?

Here’s the quickest possible overview of how SMMA works and how to start with it:

Build an agency:

First, you will need to build a foundation, which you can use to acquire new customers.

It generally consists of the 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 or 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 easily:

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/sequences 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 final 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 and 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 everyone needs to figure out their strengths and weaknesses for themselves.