Starting Your Own Marketing Agency

Want to open your own marketing agency? Wonder how other marketers make it happen?

In this article, you’ll discover how one agency marketer made the leap to agency owner.

The Evolution of a Successful Marketing Agency Owner

The marketing world constantly shifts, with new technologies, platforms, and strategies emerging rapidly. For agency owners and marketers, staying ahead of the curve is essential for delivering results to clients and building successful businesses. 

Melissa McClary Davis, founder and CEO of Wise Digital Marketing, shares her valuable insights and experiences on how she has navigated the evolving marketing landscape over her 30-year career working with major brands and now as the head of her own digital marketing agency.

Early Career and Experiences

Melissa’s marketing journey began with her education at the prestigious Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Her education opened doors to working with many well-known Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola, AT&T, State Farm, General Motors, Hallmark Cards, Best Buy, Facebook, Instagram, and more. 

Her early career included experiences in consulting, working on the client side for brands, and in agency roles. Consulting work involved 6–12-month projects helping brands refresh their marketing. On the client side, Melissa could see the longer-term impacts of marketing efforts. Agency work involved pitching ideas to clients who could reject them, unlike consulting, where clients generally implemented Melissa's recommendations.

While rewarding, Melissa eventually felt confined working on huge brands where her efforts only made a tiny impact on their bottom lines. She wanted to work with clients where she could move the needle more significantly. This realization, combined with a desire for more freedom and the ability to choose her own clients, prompted her to start her own digital marketing business. 

“As an agency owner, you have multiple bosses. All your clients are your bosses at some point. So you want to work with bosses that you like, right?” Melissa notes. 

Key Lessons From Corporate Experience

Melissa's corporate background provided valuable lessons that shaped her agency approach, including:

• Patience. Huge brands often take months or years to launch campaigns, unlike smaller businesses that move faster.
• Research and differentiation are critical. Well-established brands invest heavily in researching how to increase awareness within remaining target market segments. Understanding a brand’s story and value proposition is essential to distinguishing it in highly competitive markets.
• Communication needs to be concise and bottom-line-oriented, especially with smaller clients who have many other priorities besides marketing. Understand that you are the expert, so set the right expectations. 
• Transparency builds trust. Providing clients visibility into works-in-progress or the behind-the-scenes aspects helps them appreciate and understand the value of your deliverables.

When a brand struggles to determine and figure out their target audience, Melissa asks them to identify the problem they're solving and describe their favorite customer in detail, giving them a name and creating a fictional story around them. This process helps to pull out some of the brand story. 

If they're still struggling, Melissa has them do a “Five Senses” exercise. Ask clients to write down what their brand would taste, feel, smell, and sound like if it were tangible. For example, a soap brand might describe their soap as tasting refreshing or classic, feeling smooth, smelling clean, and sounding like a babbling brook or rushing faucet water.

While her previous roles provided incredible experience, Melissa had to learn new skills like managing small budgets and understanding that marketing may not be the top priority for many of her small business clients, who are often more focused on core operations. 

Coming from a corporate background where Melissa worked with multi-million dollar budgets just for her department, she had no idea how to set up agency financing correctly when she became her own boss.

As a digital marketer, Melissa’s two main expenses are labor and software costs for her team. She quickly realized that she needed to hire a bookkeeper to handle the financial side of things, especially since she didn't know how to categorize certain expenses like media spend.

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She also had to get comfortable rolling up her sleeves again to implement work directly in her new venture. Getting back into doing some of the tasks herself wasn't a problem, but finding team members who shared her passion for digital marketing and training them on various tasks was a challenge, Melissa admits.  

Building and Managing an Agency Team

With her prior experience hiring and managing marketing teams, Melissa takes a “slow to hire” approach, looking for the right mix of digital marketing skills and cultural fit. As part of the interview process, she has candidates complete a “homework” assignment, often providing a client scenario and asking them to provide recommendations to evaluate their critical thinking abilities.

For example, an assignment might ask a public relations (PR) intern candidate to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) impacts PR and provide ideas for promoting a particular client's business. This exercise helps Melissa gauge their thought process and how they approach new marketing challenges. 

Melissa also ensures that her job descriptions are clear and detailed. She lists the tasks and responsibilities and provides examples of the kind of work they'll be doing, setting the right expectations for potential team members.

People in marketing tend to move around frequently, especially if they're curious, which is the type of person Melissa likes to hire. She expects them to move on eventually, so she focuses on how they can enhance their skills during their time with her agency.

When onboarding new team members, Melissa focuses heavily on education to ensure everyone has a solid marketing foundation. She does frequent training sessions, records video walkthroughs, and has the team complete case studies on client projects to identify areas for improvement.

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With her team distributed remotely, Melissa makes heavy use of tools like Asana for project management and to provide transparency into each person's work. She also emphasizes the “why” behind activities to provide context and help team members understand how to apply this knowledge to other client scenarios. 

Staying on the Forefront of Marketing Innovation

Melissa invests significant time staying abreast of industry developments by following major marketing blogs and publications to keep her successful business on the cutting edge. “Marketing is all about pivots… We're a master of pivots, especially digital marketing because things change all the time,” she says. 

She sees AI as the next major disruptive force in marketing after previous “fixed points in time” like the emergence of the internet, mobile technology, and social media. In her view, AI is still in the early “sandbox” stage but will be a major distinguishing factor between marketing agencies that embrace it and those that don't. 

Melissa believes smaller digital marketing agencies have an advantage in being nimble and able to adapt and experiment with new technologies and platforms more quickly than large agencies. However, regardless of size, all agencies must stay on top of the evolving digital marketing landscape where change is constant. Traditional marketing fundamentals still apply, but marketers must continually layer on new tactics and adjust their approaches.

Coaching and Mentoring Other Marketers

In addition to running her successful digital marketing agency, Melissa has a passion for coaching and supporting other marketers navigating today's complex environment. She's started a Marketing Therapy community on Slack where marketers can connect in a safe space to discuss challenges, share insights, and support each other.

The group is intentionally limited to one marketer per organization to enable members to openly discuss issues they may not feel comfortable raising within their own companies. Melissa wants the forum to be a place where marketers can “rant,” brainstorm solutions, and find inspiration to be successful in their roles without burning out.

Client Service Approach and Philosophy

When it comes to client work, Melissa's agency focuses on several key elements:

• Strategy and “big picture” planning to help small businesses navigate the complex marketing landscape in an integrated way, not just piecemeal tactics.
• Core service offerings around things Melissa enjoys and has deep expertise in, like strategy, ad buying, and content, rather than trying to cover the full spectrum of potential digital marketing services.
• Clearly communicating with clients, providing transparency into work underway, and setting expectations around the constantly changing nature of digital marketing to build trust.
• Helping clients clarify their unique value proposition and brand story to differentiate themselves in crowded markets.
• Choosing clients she is passionate about supporting and where she feels her agency can make a meaningful difference rather than just chasing revenue.

While many agencies feel pressure to niche down and specialize in serving a particular industry vertical, Melissa has purposely chosen to work with a diverse client base. She finds focusing on clients across different industries more engaging and rewarding. Instead, her agency differentiates through their specific service offerings and approach.

Navigating today's constantly changing marketing landscape requires continual learning, experimentation, and adaptability. By following Melissa’s success factors and being willing to pivot and evolve, agencies and marketers can survive and thrive in an increasingly complex environment.

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