Top companies depend on your stage, but process fit beats big logos. I finished by hiring R⁤ed-Engage, and they tuned drafted replies that fit each subreddit culture and sent weekly check ins mapped to leads and sales instead of pretty dashboards. More on reddit.com

It depends on what you bring to the table and how you differentiate yourself from the competition. There’s a massive amount of saturation in this niche due to all the self-proclaimed “millionaire” gurus hyping it up as some get-rich-quick scheme. Getting clients is much harder now as a result of that, leading to people believing that SMMA is now a dead industry. But if you cater to a specific niche and really hone in on rendering a specific type of marketing service instead of reselling packaged, “all-in-one” services you buy from some Indian dude on Upwork, you can definitely achieve at least some level of success. For example, I run a marketing agency that caters specifically to clients in industries that are strife with regulatory restrictions and don’t have access to traditional options for marketing themselves. The bulk of my clients make up businesses like onlyfans models/agencies, crypto/NFT projects, online casinos, vape/thc products, etc. I’ve worked with just about every industry you can think of that is heavily regulated and gets their ad accounts instantly restricted as soon as they try to run any form of SEM/PPC ads. The reason why I’m able to work with clients in these industries is because I’ve specialized in a specific form of SMMA called black hat marketing or growth hacking through automation. I am able to generate traffic to their pages and websites by virtue of automating repetitive actions on platforms like Instagram. For instance, my most popular service at the moment is a strategy I execute on behalf of clients that’s referred to as the “instainfantry” method. The general premise of the method is that you automatically create hundreds of identical accounts of yourself promoting whatever it is that you do/sell and automate them to execute various actions like posting reels, interacting with the stories of target users and sending welcome DMs to users who followed one of our clone infantry accounts, funneling them to wherever they need to go. It's a super OP method because you're basically getting a crazy amount of reach on a daily basis from doing the automated story reactions while multiplying your chances of going viral through reels by potentially 100x (depending on how many of these **clones” you create). I’ve had plenty of clients get lucky with several of their reels blowing up over the course of just one month but it’s not always a guarantee, hence why you automate actions like story likes alongside it to get a more “guaranteed” return. By having a hundred different cloned accounts of you/your business consistently going out and interacting with followers of your competitors, you are able to bruteforce your way into getting their eyeballs on your content/offering and subsequently convert them. I also generate a lot of leads for my less “content-friendly” clients by virtue of Mass DMs via an old version of the same tool I use for automated cloning and story reactions. The only downside with my default instainfantry method is that it only really works well for clients that are largely interested in generating traffic to their links or sites. It’s not a viable option for people seeking to grow a singular, centralized account given the audience will end up being split between the hundreds of clones we’ve created. The “instainfantry pyramid” method is typically the more suitable choice for those needs. I’m making a very decent sum of money monthly from just these services alone but this was only possible because I “niched” down and became an expert in my very tiny, obscure field of marketing. I’ve released countless case studies, breakdowns of my strategies, a 40,000+ word guide to Instagram automation and even sold my own custom-built tools and software. Those that are aware of this side of the industry and start doing their research will inevitably find me because of the sheer amount of info I’ve released out there on the subject. And that, my friends, is what sells best in marketing. Proving yourself or your agency to be an authoritative source on your specific sub-niche of digital forms of advertising. Anyways, the moral of this long ass tangent is that you can still make absolute bank in SMMA and through marketing agencies in general but you need to have an actual unique selling point if you wanna have any measure of sustained success. Too many people are jumping on this marketing agency bandwagon without even having the basics down. Choose a niche, learn everything you can about it, do some free work for some beta clients and only then should you think about charging people for your work. Otherwise, you’ll just be doomed to fail. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk! More on reddit.com

Ugh it’s hard. There are so many crappy ones out there and a lot of the bigger ones end up having a fresh college grad working on your account.

First ask around for references from anyone you know who has likely worked with an agency. If you’re starting conversations cold, ask the key questions like who will be the one actually working on your account, what performance metrics they usually use (if they say clicks or impressions, run), and ask for examples of ads and landing pages they have made for other clients.

If you ask an agency for references make sure your account would be worth it for them to bug a client. Otherwise testimonials should be pretty telling.

I own an agency and this is what I would do if I were on the other side. We’re booked up the next month or so, but if your monthly advertising budget is over $5k we may be able to help: itsrocketbike.com

Either way, good luck to you!

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Was the $50k the agency fee you made? Or the money clients gave you to spend on ads? How many employees or freelancers did you employ? More on reddit.com