If you’re looking to start an online marketing agency, you’d better be prepared to sink or swim. Since the industry is still largely untapped and the competition can be cut throat, you’re better off taking the plunge and seeing what happens.

Step 1: Select A Niche

As the name would suggest, an online agency typically works with brands and businesses that are online-savvy.

If you’re launching a new agency, make sure that you pick a segment of the market that you can master and for which you can find enough clients to support your growth. If you can’t comfortably satisfy all of your customers’ needs, you might end up in a bit of a pickle.

Step 2: Hiring The Right People

Whether you’re an experienced marketer or a digital marketing novie, you’ll need to start by hiring talented individuals to help you build the agency. With big brands and multinational corporations looking to cut corners and save costs, Hiring the right people is critical to your success.

You don’t need to take on a team of experts. Instead, focus on sourcing the most talented individuals from across the globe that you can find. With the world’s most reputable tech companies expanding across all industries, there’s no longer a clear division between marketing and tech. This is great news for anyone looking to dive into marketing or online agency creation.

By bringing together marketers and techies, you can tap into a wealth of talent. Plus, these combinations often produce unexpected results. Take Google, for example, one of the world’s most reputable tech companies. Without a doubt, Google does plenty of marketing itself. However, many traditional marketing tactics, like TV ads, still reign supreme. As a result, the combination of a brilliant mind behind the scenes and a highly capable marketing team, made up of people trained in traditional advertising, has resulted in some pretty interesting and unique experiments.

Step 3: Establish A Work Ethic

Now, you may have the talent in-house but you still need to establish the proper work environment. Establishing a good work ethic is one of the most critical elements to a successful agency. Without a working environment that encourages creativity and a sense of ownership, you’ll be in a quandary as to whether or not your employees actually produce good work. If you’ve ever worked for a large corporation, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Before you start hiring and developing your team, take some time to think of ways that you can provide an excellent working environment. Does your office have good WiFi? What type of food does your staff enjoy eating? How about comfortable, sleek offices?

Step 4: Find A Way To Measure Success

Last but not least, we have the matter of measurement. In any industry, measurement is paramount to understanding whether or not you’re doing well. In a nutshell, measuring your successes versus your failures will tell you a great deal about your agency’s current health. In a very short amount of time, you’ll be able to assess the strength of your agency, as well as, pinpoint areas where you could improve. In the beginning, you’ll need to find a way to measure success that doesn’t involve money. As you grow and develop your agency, look into finding ways to benchmark your performance in terms of revenue earned and conversions achieved.

Include conversion data, such as the number of people that visited a certain webpage or signed up for a certain newsletter, in your scope. In addition, consider tracking the number of leads that you’ve accumulated.

The bottom line is that a good agency must be able to track its progress and assess whether or not it’s making the right moves to succeed. By following these steps, you’ll be able to start your own online marketing agency and make it last a lifetime.