MarketingHero

Took me a while to decide to build in public, it's definitely nerve-wracking particularly as I'm considered a veteran in my industry. Regardless, I've decided this is what I will be doing and I'm hoping to learn, improve and help others along the way.

Here's a short summary of how I got here...

Decided to leave the workforce early 2023, last day of employment was on June 2023 and started to work on my content marketing agency concept full time.

I was inspired by DesignJoy, the simplicity of managing clients through Trello, offering unlimited designs and revisions for a flat fee seems like such a great idea. And it was, it still is! There are tons of flat fee agency services popping up everyday now.

So I got to work and built my first website focused on content marketing services for a flat monthly fee, unlimited requests and revisions. My initial price point was between $8k-10k a month as that was what I was accustomed to charging. This took me about a month to setup.

Took my new business and website to potential customers and learned a couple of hard truths.

1. I didn't have case studies for my new service, aside from my linkedin profile, it's hard to build trust and credibility.
2. Content marketing is not widely understood or invested in where I'm based, I sit in Asia so this is particularly pronounced in this part of the world.
3. Price points are restrictive, if a client can afford to pay my monthly fee, they can probably afford large agencies with large teams to support them.

Based on this feedback which I received multiple times, I decided to relook at my services and focus on things I excelled at and quite literally can execute with my eyes closed. This is where I am today with a BIG focus on SEO, Social Media and Performance Media, each service has multiple subscription plans all starting at $995/mo. Extremely reasonable, paying for output which overtime will achieve results.

Great, my services are ready. I'm setup to deliver them. Now I just needed clients to build those case studies. To date, I've onboarded a client a month from my personal network at a discount of course. But I'm happy to do the work, to help my clients business and to build case studies for mine.

Where am I today and what's the plan moving forward?

Over the past few months, I've been able to fine-tune my operations and setup a content ops system which enables me to bring in different service providers/freelancers to help with copywriting, design and martech. Will continue to review my operations on a monthly basis as I believe this will help my business scale eventually.

So far, I've been building in stealth mode, I haven't announced my new business endeavor to my entire network but I think it's about time. Particularly as I'd like to expand my customer acquisition efforts for the next few months to learn and to start optimizing my sales funnels. I will focus on the following:

1. Creating an email program starting with my existing network and database, then eventually move towards colder audiences and potential cold lists
2. Creating lead magnets, related to the services I offer

That's all for now. I'll update how the next few months go!