Step 3: Define Your Point-of-Difference

With a glut of agencies in your town, what will you do to differentiate yourself in the market? Finding your point-of-difference will be key to your initial marketing campaign.

Are you brand-specialists? Are you the foremost experts in the digital space? Are you results-oriented in your thinking? Do you provide solutions to a particular industry? Do you offer an affordable solution for app development or mobile marketing? Have you created a unique service that isn’t offered anywhere else?

As you begin thinking about your services, packages and pricing, zero in on what makes your agency different from the rest. This will become the focus of your launch campaign.

Step 4: Cultivate New Business Contacts

Your agency is in the business of doing business, so you need everybody in the business community to be talking about you. This means, you need to get out there and talk to as many business owners as possible about who you are, what you’re doing, and how you can solve their problems.

Visit newspapers and radio stations with press material, attend every networking event you can find, always eat your lunch with a new business contact, and reach out to online influencers on social media. Get 100 new names in your Rolodex and you’ll be well on your way to a successful launch.

Step 5: Launching in 5, 4, 3 …

Now that you’ve assembled a crack team and you understand what makes your agency different, you’ll need to build buzz about your agency prior to launch.

Generating buzz can be as simple as creating and promoting a Facebook page, or as complex as an elaborate and hilarious billboard campaign.

If you’re in the creative sector, it helps to get really creative with your launch efforts. Rather than simply tell clients, “Oh, we’re creative”, you should show them. Host a chocolate rave, curate an art exhibition, or launch a fantastic mobile app. Whatever you choose to do, make sure your agency launch is an event to remember.

Launching your own agency is a lot of hard work, but if you approach it with a solid plan and a look to future growth, you’ll quickly find yourself with more work than you can handle.

Have you launched an agency? What advice do you have for startups using an agency model?

Steff Green is a New Zealand-based copywriter and illustrator, and director of the Grymm & Epic Agency. Her creative team specialize in focused, results-oriented creative online content. She also writes about running an agency and the business of creativity for the WorkflowMax blog.