11 Steps to Starting a Marketing Business With No Experience
Starting a marketing business from home might be the best option for you right now. Maybe you lost your job, maybe you are ready to try something new, or maybe you just want an additional stream of income. All of those can be great reasons for starting a marketing business, but what if you’ve never done anything like that before? Well, in this post you’ll learn 11 steps to starting a marketing business with no experience.
Follow these simple 11 steps when starting a marketing business with no experience and for the full breakdown, read the post below
- Choose a business, product, or service to promote
- Invest in your marketing and business education
- Get a website/sales funnel system
- Get an email autoresponder
- Define your ideal customer and target market
- Create a lead magnet
- Write a followup email series
- Set up social media accounts
- Use content marketing to drive traffic to your website
- Respect the process
- Scale-up with paid advertising
1. Choose a business, product, or service to promote
The first thing you need to do when starting a marketing business with no experience is to choose a business model to promote. There’s a lot of talk going around online of starting a marketing business by providing marketing services for companies, which can be great, but it probably isn’t the best option for someone with no experience.
If you are looking to start a marketing business providing marketing services like a marketing agency, it’s often best to have some experience and proven results first before attempting to charge others for that service. But with the strategies you’ll learn in this post, you will be well on your way to getting results and at that point, you can certainly branch into starting a marketing business such as a marketing agency.
For now, we’ll stick with business models that are best for starting a marketing business with no experience. The major business models that jump out right away are affiliate marketing, network marketing, and a third option of promoting your own products and services.
Affiliate marketing is a model where you choose an existing business’s products or services and sell them through your personal affiliate links. Each time a new customer buys through your links you earn a commission. If you’d like to learn more about starting an affiliate marketing business check out my affiliate marketing beginners guide, and this 15-day business builder challenge.
Network marketing is a similar concept to affiliate marketing, but you also have the ability to build a sales team and can earn commissions from their sales as well. This concept is like being a real estate broker or an insurance broker. You teach and train agents and earn a commission from their sales. Check out this post to learn more about starting a network marketing business.
2. Invest in your marketing and business education
The next step once you have chosen a product or service to promote is to invest in your education. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you are building, likey there are courses, books, seminars, and even coaches that specialize in that business model.
You wouldn’t hope and expect to be a successful doctor without going to medical school. Well, it’s the same concept when starting a marketing business with no experience. You will develop your skills through trial and error, but you can also learn through the experience of others.
This is especially true when it comes to starting an online marketing business because there is so much information already out there on exactly how to do it. For example, I’d recommend checking out this post I did on the top internet marketing books every entrepreneur should read.
There is a wealth of knowledge out there on starting a marketing business, and the faster you can get through your learning curve the better. The good news is that if you are starting a marketing business you can earn while you learn.
Follow the rest of the steps in this post while continuing to invest time and money into your personal development and your business can grow quickly.
Your business will only grow to the point that you do. Click To Tweet3. Get a website/sales funnel system
Now that you have decided on a product and made a commitment to continue on your personal development journey, the next step is to set up your website. Your website is going to act as the hub of your marketing business.
Having a website that you own is going to be crucial for building a successful marketing business especially if you promote an affiliate marketing business, or a network marketing business. Certainly, people have become successful in affiliate marketing or network marketing without a website, but having one gives you an edge over the competition.
Typically when you are starting a marketing business with no experience you choose a business model promoting other people’s products or services. Without your own website, there is nothing to brand yourself or distinguish you from anyone else who markets the exact same thing.
With a website, you can position yourself as a trusted resource and authority in your chosen niche, which can help increase your sales with online marketing. Designing a website can be complex and making it look nice but also functional can be rather difficult and expensive.
You eventually want a website to run your marketing business, but if you are just starting out and don’t have a large budget, a sales funnel system could be a good place to start. With a sales funnel system, you’ll be able to create simple landing pages and sales pages with pre-made templates that look professional.
In most cases, you’ll probably end up using both a sales funnel system and a website, but if you’d like to check out a free trial of a sales funnel system I recommend, click here.
Also, check out the video below on how to set up a simple landing page for your website to start generating leads.
4. Get an email autoresponder
One of the essential foundation marketing tools that any online marketing business needs is an email autoresponder. Most people who visit your website for the first time are not going to buy from you.
With this in mind, you are going to need a compelling way to get people to return to your website if you want them to buy your offers. This is exactly why you need an email autoresponder.
An email autoresponder will allow you to put your leads into a list that you can remarket to in the future. This essential online marketing tool will also give you a lot of leverage for building a marketing business.
In the few minutes to write an email you have the potential to reach thousands of qualified potential customers for your business. Also, an email list is something you own as a business owner.
This is extremely important because you’ll also be using a lot of online social media platforms that you have zero control over. Building your business with social media is a great way to grow a marketing business online, but you don’t truly own those accounts. They could get shut down, policies could change, they could become a pay-to-play platform, or people could simply lose interest in it and the platform becomes useless.
For these reasons and more, make sure you get an email autoresponder while starting an online marketing business. Two email autoresponders I recommend and use are Aweber and Activecampaign.
5. Define your ideal customer and target market
Once you have chosen the business model, products, or services you are going to promote, you need to understand who you are trying to target. If your targeting is off and you try and promote your marketing business to the wrong people, no one will buy from you.
Trying to market to everyone is like marketing to no one. Click To TweetYou may have heard this before, but you want to define your ideal customer and create a customer avatar. This is a general model of the ideal person who is most likely to buy your products or services.
Once you have that ideal customer in mind, you can then create content and offers that will appeal to them. You need to know things like their common questions, their pain points, needs, wants, and goals related to your marketing business.
By knowing all of this information it will make marketing your business much easier. People will be attracted to your content, and they will buy from your sales offers. This is the foundation for creating a successful attraction marketing strategy.
6. Create a lead magnet
Now that you have a better understanding of your target market and ideal customer, you want to develop a lead magnet. The lifeblood that will maintain your success when starting a marketing business with no experience is consistent leads.
To generate quality leads that come in consistently for your business, you need to develop a lead magnet your ideal customers want. A simple lead magnet to create is an ebook for example. You can write a several page document on Google Docs, for example, save it as a PDF, and then you have an ebook!
At the same time, if you want to generate leads, you should focus your ebook or giveaway on solving a big problem for your ideal customers. For example, if you were looking to generate real estate leads, you might create a check-list for first time home buyers. You could also make a check-list of what to look for in your first investment property.
Again, make it something that would provide value, but also would fit with having your product or service as the next step for your lead. Another example could be if you made a lead magnet that was a free 15-minute yoga workout video, and then you sold a 30-day weight loss yoga video series for your yoga business.
As long as your lead magnet is valuable and solves a problem, answers a burning question, or helps achieve better results, and is congruent with your business, you should generate leads. Check out the video below on how to create an ebook for your lead magnet!
7. Write a followup email series
If you’ve followed the steps above on starting a marketing business with no experience, you should be ready to start generating leads, the next step is to convert the leads. The best way to convert your leads into sales for your marketing business is going to be to get on the phone or a Zoom call with them.
I prefer a Zoom call because it’s the closest thing to being in person with someone. While this may be a bit out of your comfort zone, but when people can see you on a live call it builds more rapport and trust which is crucial in business and sales.
If you are starting a marketing business with no experience, you need all the help you can get, and as you are learning any little bit to help improve your closing ratio should be taken into account. With that said, in addition to doing sales calls, you can bring in sales passively through an email series.
An email series is typically 5-7 emails that go out over a week or two and they further educate your potential customers on your products or services, and the solutions to their biggest problems. Throughout this email series, you will point to your products or services as the ultimate solution to their problem.
This email marketing sales process is extremely effective, it works passively, and it can sell without being pushy or salesy. The bottom line is if you are starting a marketing business with no experience, building out an email series that sells your products for you is essential.
Check out the video below on a more detailed explanation of this passive income business model using email marketing.
8. Set up social media accounts
At this point, you have set yourself up with a proven foundation for growth even if you are starting a marketing business with no experience. Another branch of your successful marketing business should be with social media marketing.
At this stage of building your marketing business, you need to start thinking about the various ways you should promote your business. Social media marketing has a lot of benefits to help you grow your marketing business faster, with only a few drawbacks.
A huge benefit of using social media marketing is that it can help you to attract targeted followers which can help you promote your business for free. Social media marketing can help you reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time to grow your marketing business.
Depending on the platform, you can also automate parts of the management and growth process of your social media accounts. Social media also gives you the benefit of being able to reach your ideal customers in real-time and answer questions, educate them on your services, and even sell your products.
Building an audience and engaging with your followers on social media should be a foundation of your overall marketing strategy. The only major downside to social media marketing is that you don’t own social media platforms.
Your accounts could have the potential to be shut down without warning, it could become a pay-to-play platform like Facebook, or even become unpopular like MySpace. It’s a good idea to use social media marketing, but use it to also build something you own like an email list.
9. Use content marketing to drive traffic to your lead magnet, website, and offers
Part of your social media marketing strategy needs to consist of content marketing. Content marketing is one of the best ways to grow an online marketing business.
Content marketing is what is going to help you to drive traffic to your website and create a steady flow of leads for your marketing business. Creating content is very important for building a successful marketing business, but if no one sees your content, it won’t matter.
Promoting your content is essential to build a following, and drive a steady flow of traffic and leads to your business. There are 4 key steps to the content marketing process, blogging, YouTube, email marketing, and social media posting.
Blogging is a great foundation for building your marketing business because it is put on your website and is something you own. Blogging can continue to attract targeted traffic to your website for years to come and it can be the basis of content for other platforms.
Similar to blogging is YouTube marketing. YouTube videos have the benefits of being found through SEO, just like your website and blogs can. Plus video marketing on YouTube is one of the best ways to build rapport with your ideal customers, and as your channel grows it can even be monetized with ads. It’s like getting paid to talk about your business!
From there, you’ll want to post this blog and video content on your social media platforms, as well as email it out to your email list. This strategy will allow you to continue to remarket to your lists and following and can help you convert cold traffic into warm leads that are ready to buy from you.
10. Respect the process
One crucial thing to understand with building any business but especially when starting a marketing business with no experience is that you need to respect the process. Starting a marketing business from scratch is going to be tough.
When it comes to starting an online marketing business, most people think it’s going to be easier than it is. You need to have proper expectations when you start a marketing business and realize it is going to take time to grow to a significant income.
If you are looking for something that is getting rich quickly, you are in the wrong place. The great thing about starting a marketing business is that you can do it part-time, and if you follow the steps outlined above consistently, you can start to build exponential results.
It’s almost a matter of when your marketing business becomes profitable rather than if. There are no guarantees in life or business, but it’s hard to fail when you do the right things consistently over time.
The real foundation that builds your successful marketing business is the concept of build, engage, sell. What this means is that you build an audience, on social media, your email list, and visitors to your content first.
The next step is to engage them with valuable content that helps your ideal customers solve their problems, answers their questions, or helps them achieve their desired results faster. Doing this will build massive rapport, trust, and credibility for you and your marketing business.
Finally, you sell to this audience that knows, likes, and trusts you, and it is much easier to close sales because of this. From there you simply repeat the process until you reach the success you desire in your marketing business!
11. Scale-up with paid advertising
Now at this point in building your marketing business, you might want to start to scale up your results faster. That is where running paid ads comes in to play.
Growing your online marketing business organically is how you should start, but you don’t need to let that be your only marketing strategy. There is only so much time in the day, and building organically typically takes the most time.
Once you have your marketing system set up and running smoothly, you can put money into paid advertising to scale your business quickly and return a profit. A word of caution though in that you shouldn’t jump into running paid ads too quickly.
If you are starting a marketing business with no experience, likely you have a big learning curve to get through. Running paid advertising has a learning curve as well. If you think you can just put money into paid advertising without knowing what you are doing and think you’ll make a profit, you are sadly mistaken.
It’s a good idea to save running paid ads for the last step because likely if you are profitable and your marketing strategy is working organically, then running paid ads is just a matter of getting the right targeting. If you’d like to learn more about running paid ads like Facebook advertising, check out this post on running Facebook ads for small businesses.
Also, if you’d just like us to run your Facebook ads and marketing for you, check out one of our Facebook advertising packages. Follow these outlined steps to starting a marketing business with no experience, and you’ll be in profit sooner than you think!
If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also enjoy our post on The 15 Best Ways of How to Earn Money From Digital Marketing.
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Mike MacDonald
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