How to Start A Digital Marketing Agency In Nigeria      

If you are reading this, I assume you want to break into the digital marketing agency world, and this is a nice thing to do.

You have honed your skills over the years as a professional digital marketer. Now it is time to take the next leap by starting and scaling a widely successful digital marketing agency, especially in a place Like Nigeria. Still, you are unsure how to get started.

Starting a digital marketing agency is good; at least, it affords you the freedom to decide your pricing, ample opportunity to choose when to rest/work, and the ability to oversee the tasks of others (Being the boss). However, it comes with loads of challenges, and I owe you the duty to disclose everything in my post.

As a reminder, I will cover (Extensivly) how to start a digital marketing agency in about 10 Simple steps (From my experience), I will also make you a list of services most digital marketing agencies offer, I will outline all of the problems you should look out for to stay afloat in business, I will cover the pricing strategies for services, and lastly, I will cover scaling – i.e. how you can scale your digital marketing agency.

Sounds like what you want to consume? – Let’s get right into it.

Why Should You Start A Digital Marketing Agency?

There are several motivating factors for wanting to start a digital marketing agency, especially in Nigeria. In the end, you may need to carefully consider your motivations because these will serve as the propelling force driving you further when things get really tough.

Financial Freedom:

In my personal experience, this is a strong motivating factor and it constitutes more than 65% of the reasons most digital marketing specialists venture into digital marketing agencies.

In a place like Nigeria for example, most 9-5 jobs salaries may not be enough to cater for the monthly expenses, and with this comes the quest to find alternative sources of income to augment. This is where many digital marketers in Nigeria finally decide to launch an agency.

TIME FREEDOM:

Time freedom is another motivating factor for starting a digital marketing agency. Many digital marketers want time to spend more time with family and loved ones, time to travel and explore places, time to rest and so on.

FREEDOM TO DECIDE FATE:

The freedom to be the only decider of one’s fate is another big reason many people pick up the challenge of starting a digital marketing agency.

The fact that you can make independent decisions and not get to be checkmated by a superior whose thoughts and goals may not be in alignment with yours is another big reason to want to start, own and scale your digital marketing agency.

How To Start A Digital Marketing Agency in Nigeria in just 10 steps.

1. Gain Good Experience

To start and scale a widely successful digital marketing agency in Nigeria, you must have a long and practical experience with digital marketing.

This is the first thing anyone should do without question because one cannot give what one does not have. If you check the following boxes, then you qualify to start a digital marketing agency in Nigeria:

1. You have at least 3 years of continuous digital marketing experience.
2. you have worked on digital marketing gigs either as a freelancer or a volunteer
3. you have failed at some points in digital marketing
4. You have some wins to show as a digital marketer

2. Choose Your Services

There are a ton of services you can offer as a digital marketing agency in Nigeria from SEO to Conversion rate optimization.

You can choose to niche down to specific areas of digital marketing or not, it is completely up to you to decide on what you want to do.

Should you niche down or not – Quick comparison

TYPES OF SERVICES YOU CAN OFFER AS A DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY

This is the first place to get started if you are looking to start a profitable digital marketing agency.

Knowing the various types of services will help you to understand the resources (Cash and time) required to get started and to scale.

SEO SERVICE

Search engine optimization presents an opportunity to acquire traffic and close deals at a ridiculously low amount i.e. SEO allows businesses to lower the cost of acquiring customers, and this is one of the many reasons businesses will ordinarily opt for this service.

If you are looking to start a successful digital marketing agency, offering SEO as a service will help you attract a lot of high-paying clients.

Types of SEO Services You Can Offer

Sometimes, clients may prefer to opt for a specific SEO service and not the complete package. Here is a list of SEO services you can offer to your clients.

1. On-Page SEO Service: This type of SEO allows you to optimize the client’s website from within. With this service, you can write well-optimized blog content for the client, optimize the various pages within the website and drive massive traffic to the client’s website.
   
2. The Off-page SEO Service: The primary goal of off-page SEO is to drive a massive backlink campaign for the client’s website. Backlinks are ranking factors that signal to the search engine your content or website is a credible source. Off-page SEO allows you to grow the client’s brand credibility outside of the business environment by simply engaging in activities like link outreaches, guest postings, granting interviews, doing press releases and so much more.
   
3. Technical SEO Service: Sometimes things happen on our websites that we did not cause or cannot immediately fix. Issues like slow websites, hacking of our websites, and so on are examples of technical issues your clients may want you to fix.
   
4. Local SEO Service: The fact is that every search is first local before it goes international. Optimizing and ranking for local search terms can help a business gain trust and credibility from their immediate environment before gunning for trust outside. Local SEO is another high-paying type of SEO service you can offer as a digital marketing agency.
   
5. International SEO Service: Going international i.e. getting found on the international scene is a goal for most businesses. As a digital marketing agency, you can help clients optimise the CCTLD or help them infuse hreflang tags on their pages to rank organically for search terms with global appeal.

How Much Do SEO Agencies Make On SEO Services

From experience managing SEO jobs for clients as an agency owner, the total monthly income for SEO service range between $5,000 – $45,000. This also depends on the number of clients, the location of the client, and the type of SEO Job they want.

SEO Pricing Model For Agencies

WEBSITE DESIGN SERVICE

I highly recommend that you add website design to the list of services you want to render as a digital marketing agency in Nigeria. This is because, businesses are beginning to understand and appreciate the need for a branded online presence, and owning a website is usually one of the many first things they will do to achieve that uniqueness online.

Types Of Website Builders To Master

As a digital marketing agency in Nigeria, you should have good expertise in several website builders so that you can deliver on your clients’ jobs as and when they need them delivered.

Let’s consider some important builders you should master:

1. WordPress:

WordPress is a content management system by which great and functional websites can be built. Sometimes, people refer to WordPress as a drag-n-drop builder”.

WordPress allows you to build websites for your clients without having to write a single line of code which makes it a great option for quick website delivery and obviously, more money in your pocket.

How Much To Charge For WordPress Website Design

From experience, the amount you charge to build a website for your client on WordPress depends on the industry and the size of the website (including the pages and copies) as well as the hosting/domain cost, but the least you should charge to build a WordPress website should range between $150 to $1500

Let’s break this down a bit for better understanding.

As a digital marketing agency, a client reaches out to you and seeks your website design service for a food delivery business. After planning, it has been established the website will have a total of 20 Pages (Index page, about us, contact us and other important pages).

Let’s say the client has not also registered a website (No domain and hosting), this means you will need to purchase a domain or hosting. In this case, you will have to charge for domain and hosting.

The best way to charge for a WordPress website would be to charge per page, the domain name and hosting purchase, and the monthly website maintenance fee. Believe me, WordPress website design is profitable if you know your onions.

2. Shopify

Shopify is another website builder you can master and offer as a service in your digital marketing agency. Just like the WordPress builder, you also don’t need to write a line of code for a Shopify website. All you will need to design a Shopify site is:

a. A domain name
b. A hosting account
c. a product that can feature on the site.

Other types of builders include:
a. Joomla
b. Bubble and so on.

PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING SERVICE

Pay-per-click advertising is another very lucrative digital marketing service you can offer as a digital marketing agency in Nigeria. With this service, you can help businesses promote their brands across PPC platforms like:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. Linkedin
4. X
5. Tiktok and other PPC Platforms.

To learn more about the profitability of PPC as a service, you can do well to check out our content: How Do PPC Agencies Make Money.

DIGITAL MARKETING TRAINING SERVICE

Inculcating training services into your digital marketing agency may be a good way to make additional cash for the growth of your agency.

Apart from helping clients handle various aspects of digital marketing, you can simply train some of their staff to handle these key areas of digital marketing from within.

3. Understand Customers’ Pain Points

At the end of it all, you are not in business if you cannot solve your customer’s business problems with digital marketing.

You have to do what you’ve got to do to help a business achieve its pressing needs/Pains.

A customer pain point may include:

a. Poor visibility on the search engine
b. Poor sales
c. Poor product or Service optimization for conversion e.t.c

You have to find out and solve their problems as though they were your problems, and they will trust you more.

Here are five questions I Often Ask my Clients To uncover Their Pressing Business Needs—you Can apply them, too.

1. How would you describe your target audience, and what strategies are you currently using to engage with them? This question allows your clients to express themselves in a way only they better understand, helping you to get a good grasp of who they are trying to sell to.
   
2. What areas of your business do you see opportunities for improvement or optimization? This is another open-ended question you can ask your clients to narrow down their pain points. This question allows you to learn about the opportunities in the business you may never have thought about before as a digital marketing agency.
   
3. What would a successful partnership with us look like for you, and what outcomes would you consider most valuable? This is the killer of them all. With this question, the client states categorically what success means to him, is it more leads, more paying clients, more engagement, more following on every platform, less bounce rates, ranking on the first page of the SERP and so many others.
   
4. Can you describe some of the biggest challenges your business is currently experiencing? The client is merely doing you a favour by disclosing threats or dangers you should avoid in the course of working with their business. With this, you can play safer and not fall into problems. A good example here may be the identification of government policies regarding the advertising/promotion of certain types of goods or services or the taste of the immediate audiences of the business.
   
5. What specific goals or outcomes are you hoping to achieve over the next 6-12 months? With this question, you now understand the timeframe you must work with as a digital marketing agency. Since you know the client’s time and when they expect results will trickle in, you are better prepared to launch.

4. Register your Business

Some opportunities may become inaccessible to you if your digital marketing agency is not registered. Examples may include:

1. Small business loans or grants
2. Tax rebates
3. Tax holidays
4. Government business incentive or business palliative.

Some customers will rather choose to do business with registered digital marketing agencies and also pay into cooperate accounts in the agency’s registered name rather than opt for a digital marketing agency that is not registered.

5. Build a solid online Presence

It is now a known fact that the pandemic create a bigger opportunity for businesses to leverage online to gain wider coverage or visibility.

The post covid period has seen a towering surge in the adoption of online marketing as a form of marketing by plenty businesses.

The Official Website of the International Trade Administration reports that, Post covid, as a result of consumer transition to online sales channels, there has been an increase of 19% in worldwide ecommerce revenue.

Businesses that have solid online presence are in a better position to attract, relate and convert visitors than businesses with poor or no online presence.

Tools Needed to Build Solid Online Presence

1. Social Media Tools.

There are several things a social media tool can help you achieve.

1. Consistent social media posting
2. Creating viral content
3. Content planning
4. so many others

Tools like:

1. Hootsuite will help in the scheduling of your content
2. Facebook Planner is another social media scheduling tool. This is equally an important tool especially if you are low on budget.
3. Capcut is another great social media tool. Capcut helps to create video content for your social media platforms.
4. Canva is another great tool to consider for your social media content. Canva helps you to create good-looking images or short videos for your next social media content.
5. ChatGpt is yet another tool that does a fine job when it comes to social media content design. This AI tool can help to craft copies and captions for your next social media post.

2. Responsive Website Design Tools

Apart from social media presence, you need a good website that represents your brand anytime a potential client goes surfing on it. As you may already know, there are two options open to you for building your website: The first option is using CMS tools like WordPress, Shopify, Divi, and Elementor to build, or you can simply employ the service of a web developer who writes the raw code and deliver them to you.

Markt and Finance planning

Define the structures

Hire Right

Plough Back into the Business

Tools Needed To Build a Successful Digital Marketing Agency

Pricing Models To Adopt In Your Agency

Important Questions To Ask Yourself.

Patrick Ezeji

Patrick Ezeji is a seasoned SEO Specialist currently residing in Lagos Nigeria. He’s got over a decade of experience doing Search engine optimization, and he’s got several ranking contents plus several Keywords ranking and doing well on the SERP. Here at digital success place, Patrick works as the in-house SEO guy writing new content, optimizing or repurposing old ones and ensuring the entire website is optimized to drive in the needed results (Lead or sales)