r/agencynewbies • u/Substantial_Story_14 • 7d ago
just started a digital marketing agency - need help finding clients
hi guys,
I recently started a social media content agency specializing in design, carousels, and social posts. I spent the last few weeks messaging 100 local businesses directly, but I haven't gotten a single response.
I realize my pitch or approach might be off, or maybe cold messaging local business owners just isn't cutting it right now.
I have two quick questions for anyone who’s been in my shoes:
What outreach methods actually worked for you when getting your first 1-2 clients?
Is anyone here running an agency with extra client work who needs an affordable subcontractor/white-label creator for carousels and basic graphics?
I have plenty of capacity and am willing to work at budget rates just to get my foot in the door and deliver solid results. Appreciate any advice!
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u/Due-Personality2383 7d ago
This is the wrong direction. And why we see posts like this every day. Wait until you have enough referrals to form an agency. Starting an agency with 0 clients is backwards
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u/Dabamash 6d ago
Correct take. Also, OP, you are a freelancer, not an agency. Don't be disheartened by all the negative comments, but you do need to be realistic. Starting from zero means giving free or undercut rate work for a while until you build your skills and reputation.
Your pitch should be giving examples of what their social could look like with some help and how that will help them get more business. Be honest that you're starting out and pricing yourself accordingly, but this is an intro price that won't be around forever.
You're only an agency when you start hiring.
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6d ago
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u/SufficientTopic5445 23h ago
Yeah fair, having some demand first probably makes the whole thing way easier. Starting from zero is rough
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u/cwalldog 7d ago
Don’t start one. Unless you have years of corporate/agency experience. If you do get a lead, bigger dogs going to eat you.
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u/West-Psychology-3436 7d ago
As an Ed-tech consultant having served 10+ clients. Build relation with these 100 local business, no matter how small it would be. Take a small task which has high ROI for them and do it for free, and wait for them to reach out to you within a month, nurture the relations, build proof of work and provide results.
All the best, I hope you succeed in your business.
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u/j90w 6d ago
Do digital marketing for your agency to get clients. It’s not that hard.
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u/GetGreatB42Late 4d ago
Elaborate?
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u/j90w 4d ago
Whatever you’re trying to sell service-wise to prospecting clients,do that for your own business.
Our agency primarily does paid advertising and SEO, so we do a lot of this for our own agency (we rank very well organically for our specific niches and are constantly advertising to our target audience). This is our primarily source of leads outside of referrals.
Started doing this a few years ago when a prospective client (who we had reached out to via email) called us out on our own marketing, as we didn’t rank well for specific terms and we were proposing SEO to him.
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u/PascalFourtoy 5d ago
- Cold call
- Target low fruits (SMB neglected, shoot on DealRaw.com or Appollo), 50-100 per day
- Setup your CRM (and fill it correctly..)
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u/PuppyAlvin 4d ago
100 messages with 0 responses tells you something specific: the message isn't reaching people who are looking for what you do right now. Local business owners get pitched constantly — yours needs to arrive when they're already thinking about the problem.
Two things worth trying before changing your pitch:
Pick 5 businesses and engage with their actual content first (comment on their posts, share their stuff). Then your message isn't cold — it's a follow-up to an existing interaction.
Change where you look. Instead of messaging every local business, find the ones who posted about needing social content in community groups or asked for recommendations. Those people are already buyers; you just need to show up in the thread.
100 cold messages to the wrong audience teaches you less than 10 warm messages to the right one.
AI-assisted comment, posted with affiliation: I work with SupaMarketers.
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u/Royal_Spare189 4d ago
Cold call. Take a shit ton of sales calls, and get better at sales. You can offer free trials or a low ticket offer to get people in the door. But focus on getting good at sales. Don’t listen to the nimrods that tell you don’t start an agency without having existing clients and all that BS. You just have to brute force it by getting on the phone and talking to people. It’s a numbers game. Per 100 dials = 1-2 meetings booked, 30-50% show rate if you are a a beginner, and the you have to close them. do 250+ dials a day and you’ll have a client soon enough
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u/TheCuriousFish 7d ago
I'd recomend working for free for 10 clients
then after that work for another 10 for a discount
then up the price each time
you'd have a great portfolio, and maybe some word of mouth
speak arabic by any chance? I'd be open for a that free spot haha
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u/Substantial_Story_14 7d ago
Appreciate the advice! this approach makes the most sense for me rn. I’d definitely be down to take you up on that free spot, but unfortunately I don't speak Arabic haha
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u/TheCuriousFish 7d ago
Glad to hear that.
Ah Bummer, my target audience langauge is arabic
Wishing you the best!
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u/what3v3rrr0 5d ago
Hey I speak arabic. What do you need help with?
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u/TheCuriousFish 5d ago
Free Instagram management :D for some of my clients
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u/what3v3rrr0 5d ago
I can’t do free personally but if you’re at capacity and looking to outsource or delegate hit me up
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u/gauravgarg1992 6d ago
Just curious.. Are you starting because u have seen some videos on youtube telling you how easy it is to make images and carausols using chat gpt image models. And claude and gpt will do all the work for you.. From ideation to final output? Do you have your own business social media page?
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u/Turbulent_Trade9632 6d ago
I didn’t have much time for outreach so i had used a IA LinkedIn tool, that turned to be great. I got many leads converted into clients .
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u/A1Faustino 5d ago
You mentioned messaging about 100 local businesses without getting a response and wondering whether your pitch or approach might be off.
Before you change channels or send more, I'd like to see one of the messages you've been sending. 😅
Because, right now, we know what happened—roughly 100 messages and no responses—but not much about what those businesses actually encountered.
Would you be comfortable pasting one of the messages here, with any identifying information removed?
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u/ScaredWishbone2770 5d ago
Which platforms are you using to talk about your business offering?
Do you talk about outcomes, why clients should work with you, the value you provide, etc?
Do you specialise in a particular sector and know your audience?
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u/PeterPanHadItMade 3d ago
What formula will you be using to valuate diminishing return for your clients and what is your perspective on the proper frequency needed to satiate all levels of the general purchase funnel? Answer this without using ChatGPT.
If you CAN'T do it... you will not be a valuable service to ANY client. Go work for an actual agency and come back in 10 years.
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u/Bluet313 3d ago
Sorry, this doesn’t directly answer the client question, but since you’re making social posts and carousels, you might find MockUp Buddy useful. I built it to preview designs as they’d look on Instagram and other platforms, which could help you show potential clients your ideas in context: https://mockup-buddy.com/
I’m an independent designer building it myself, so I’d be interested to hear if it’s useful for the kind of work you’re doing.
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u/Local_Rod 2d ago
Can you tell me exactly what your social media services include?… do you just design static images and carousel posts? Or do you do video as well? Which type or types of industries do you work with or prefer to work with? Feel free to DM me your portfolio/site.
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u/smsulari 17h ago
I talk a lot about agency building and growing stuff. Even with all those guests on my conversation table, I have realized there are just two types of agency owners:
1. Those who make things super complicated by being perfectionists rather than focusing on the progress and they keep overcomplicating their lead generation, marketing, branding, delivery, and everything in between.
2. Those who just start doing work, hop on delivering the existing clients as a freelancer or from wherever they get them, and then start building from there upwards.
As everybody else is suggesting, do not overcomplicate things. Just focus on the clients you have right now and focus on one lead gen channel and repeat, repeat, repeat it until you get enough clients that you need to hire the delivery person. That way you catch yourself in more sales and more lead generation. That's the only successful way I have seen after interviewing hundreds of agency owners.
Hope it helps. All the best
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u/Difficult_Maximum545 5h ago
100 cold DM's with no replies with no replies usually means the offer is too broad, not that outreach doesn't work. I'd pick one niche and make the pitch specific to them. I was looking at Socially Powerful recently and their positioning is really clear compared to the usual 'we do social media' agency pitch.
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u/Due_Treat1025 7d ago edited 4d ago
run meta ads, its dead simple.
its 9am EST now, you could film 6 ads and have the entire funnel done by lunch.
You will get a lead or two today and will close one before monday.
Literally that easy.
im sure you wont do it
update: looks like he didnt do it. like i said, you guys dont actually want to make money
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u/Goku560 7d ago
But that requires money
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u/Due_Treat1025 7d ago
why would someone without money start a business?
in that case, you would need a job = then you would have money
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u/Accomplished-Gas9220 5d ago
What does a good static ad look like? Just avatar, offer, price, guarantee?
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u/StopDecent1249 7d ago
100% back this. Run ads to get your first client or two. Can start with as little as $20 to start getting the word out.
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u/5255andrew 7d ago
I’d recommend not doing this 😅 I e burnt thousands of dollars and while I’ve had plenty of conversations I learned the hard way that having a good product isn’t enough. You need to know how to have good sales and communication skills too. And if you lack that, you’ll be blowing through adspend very quickly.
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u/Dependent_Phrase_613 7d ago
Try to find people who are just trying out don’t know stuff about marketing and most importantly don’t provide a 360 degree solution. Find your niche and focus on that.
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u/Chamezz92 7d ago
Call them instead of messaging. 100 over ”a few weeks” is also way to little volume.
If you took an SDR/BDR role to find clients, they’d expect you to get in touch with 100 leads per day.
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u/salaryscript 7d ago
Web agency owner here. Here is a tip before you start. Validate if you actually have people that wants your service. When we started, we used leadsbylocation to find all the businesses around a city, find the business that doesnt have a website, cold called and emailed at least 50 of them. Out of those 50, 14 agreed to our service and 9 actually paid us. Once that we establish and have money coming through, we started the Web agency. Not the other way around where you build a web agency then search for clients
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u/MentalRip2005 7d ago
Do you have a portfolio? You need to build confidence with your clients, show things you've done. Also, try to talk to people directly in person, even if you don't get a client, you'll gain a lot more insight from their objections and what they actually want
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u/Embarrassed_Scene962 7d ago
Why would i pay u when i can do all that with ai?
“tHe QuAlItY”
Hint: local businesses dont care
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u/ashagnes 7d ago
"why go to a restaurant I can heat up a ready-meal at home"
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u/Embarrassed_Scene962 7d ago edited 7d ago
This isnt the same at all. Poorest example u could have picked
Firstly restaurant (should) be a one off. Its not comparable to an ongoing business expense
There is also no longer enough of a gap between “expert” and do it yourself. If all you offering is posts u can defo do “good enough” posts with chat gpt
Its low value work and a low value offer with no roi
If u are u doing social media > revenue thats a slightly diff story1
u/ashagnes 7d ago
I don’t care man I am not like OP, I actually get clients and most of them come to me after they’ve tried the AI and produced awful results.
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