How to Start a Successful Digital Marketing Agency in South Africa

Are you looking to start a successful digital marketing agency in South Africa? If so, you'll need to have the necessary skills and knowledge at your disposal. After all, your success is directly related to how valuable you are to your customers. You may have a hairdressing studio, panel shaking service, or dry cleaning company that can't be offered online.

The most common path is to gain this experience for yourself. Start as a freelancer, providing small-scale marketing services to a limited number of customers. Or develop your skills working for an established marketing agency. Before you begin, it is important that you educate and understand as much as possible about digital marketing for agencies. Invest your time and money in learning from leading institutions and never stop learning.

You'll also want to have an understanding of the industry. Once you understand it, you'll want to find your niche. Before launching your website, you need to consider content and competition. You also have to decide how you are going to find customers for your business. Next, you'll need a domain name and hosting service for your site.

An agency MD with more than five years of management experience can expect to earn a minimum of R$150,000 a month in Joburg and about R$130,000 in Cape Town. A doctor with two to five years of experience will earn 100 000 R150 000 per month and between 90 000 and 150 000 RN in Cape Town. Just go, co, za and search for digital marketing jobs and you will see that there is a huge earning potential with men earning up to and sometimes more than R60,000 a month with 3 to 5 years of experience.

Like many other countries in the world, also in Africa, countries are demonstrating a high demand for trained digital marketers. If you are interested in starting a business in the digital marketing industry, de Beer, together with Wandile Shabangu, director of strategy and sales at V8, offer you information on how to do it. The main function of an advertising agency is to create a marketing plan suitable for your business. You should complement this by continually practicing different digital marketing specialties that you may want to offer to your customers in the future, including copywriting, social media management, and even Photoshop skills.

List your agency among industry leaders, promote your work, create original content, find new team members and keep up to date with digital marketing events. Not to mention that most marketing managers agree that SMS marketing has a higher open rate than email marketing. It's not possible for you to become a specialist in all areas of marketing (otherwise you wouldn't be a specialist), so it's worth hiring freelancers for certain projects that help you meet customer requirements.

As the CEO of a marketing agency with virtually no marketing experience, you would find it difficult to make interesting recommendations to your customers. This is why marketing agencies are important; many marketing agencies have crucial data on consumer behavior patterns.

The digital marketing industry stimulates me because there are always changes, says Jandre de Beer, CEO and founder of the digital marketing agency Version Eight Media (V8 Media). Whether you're a CEO, director or solo entrepreneur, the sooner you realize you're in the marketing business (no matter what your product or service is), the better.

Esther Woodcock
Esther Woodcock

Esther has been in Marketing field for 15 years