5 Components to Guarantee SMMA Success
(Plus, The Easy Way To Get And Sell SMMA Clients)
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I f you told me a decade ago that at-home solopreneurs, not brick and mortar agencies, would eclipse a billion-dollar niche industry in digital marketing I’d laugh in your face. But the joke’s on me. Today I have dozens of friends that have created multi-million dollar companies from the comfort of their own homes.
Specifically, the Social Media Marketing Agency (SMMA) industry has exploded on the scene this last decade. In this next one, it’s going to be huge. It’s 2020 and it’s never been a better time to get into digital marketing. Everyone from Gary Vaynerchuk to Seth Godin has emphasized this countless times.
Though still far from saturation, hundreds of top-notch SMMAs around the world have proven their value and businesses can’t get enough of them.
But it wasn’t always this way.
In the early days, it was like they were in Plato’s business cave. Everyone was still figuring out how basic things worked, running into huge client dilemmas, and second-guessing Facebook’s algorithm. We were all quite ignorant of how things really came together. We had an idea of how to do things, but even the major social media agencies were still in the dark on the best way to monetize on Facebook’s platform. A lot of things would change and we had to go with the flow. Early SMMAs had it rough.
Today, the third-wave of SMMAs have figured nearly everything out. They have agency formation, monetization, and automation down to an exact science. It’s just a more mature industry now. The problem is that we are still in need of an established set of industry standards and a professional code of conduct. It would be nice to take a course that was accredited by a third-party organization.
For now, most of us wing it and sometimes that doesn’t end well. With the amount of new people entering the industry, there is a duty to make SMMA an ethical and professional space. This is ideal. Unfortunately, we’re seeing a lot of fly-by-night “SMMA gurus” — and this, in turn, reflects poorly on the industry.
That was until Jordan Platten came around.
“I really want to rid the stigma of the online education business and make it a lot more professional. I want to work with official regulations to make sure that what people are actually learning is genuinely valuable and it’s at the benefit of the student, not the guru.”
-Jordan Platten on the Smart Young Money Podcast with Apple Crider
SMMA’s Coming Of Age
When you look around the internet, you’ll notice that there’s a “kiddy version” of SMMA. It’s SMMA information by and for teenagers. The way these people look, talk, and act really connects to the younger crowd. That’s great for what it is, and I’ve known many teenagers who run highly-profitable agencies.
But teens make it look a lot easier than it is. Some even boast so much, it’s hard to believe them. They go on about their cars, watches, and vacations. Everyone likes to envision a dream. However, adults often see right through this. You might see agency owners misleading the public about their skills and results. Since none of this is regulated, it’s hard to verify the facts.
To be clear, the SMMA business is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It takes hard work and dedication to earn the big bucks. For some time, it made me feel a little weary about being a part of the industry. No one wants to be associated with an industry where some of the biggest course creators are sketchy.
However, lately my mind about all of this changed.
Recently, Jordan Platten has released version 2.0 of his online SMMA program. For a year, he had a course that was quite effective for many of his students. Now he has improved upon that course and created something so effective that he guarantees your success with it (more on that later). It’s called The Affluent Academy and it has already minted dozens of six and seven-figure SMMAs.
Just how good is this SMMA course?
I had an opportunity to evaluate it and see if it was any good. I was very critical because I felt like I had some of the best SMMA training myself. In a way, I felt biased in my analysis. I took a great course on SMMA before I even heard of Platten. So to be fair, I began to research all SMMA courses on the market. I wanted to know what the best of the best had. It had to go beyond training and deliver superior client results. This was the research question I came up with:
In this new decade with new challenges, what does an SMMA need to guarantee his or her success?
I came up with are five components to become a lucrative SMMA. If you implement them, I can almost guarantee SMMA success. In this article, I’ll use Jordan Platten’s Affluent Academy course for reference because he has all of these essential components and so many people are already familiar with it. Plus, he includes a special bonus component no other course is doing that will further guarantee SMMA success. It’s a game-changer. (Note: I am not an affiliate for this course.)
So here are the five components the ideal SMMA course must cover (in order): Mindset, Business Foundations, Hard/Soft Skills, Systems, and Community. We’ll go over each component below.
1. Mindset Is Everything
Over the years, I’ve taken over 50 online courses for work and leisure. I’m self-taught in journalism, SEO, and SMMA. As you can imagine, some of these courses were great and some were absolutely terrible. Let me add that my critique of any course is especially fine-tuned because: 1) I have experience as an instructor of ten years, 2) In my last role, I served as a university supervisor, 3) I served as the state representative for vocational education in Oregon for two years. (All these things sound better on paper than what they actually were.) Suffice it to say, I know what a good online course looks like and what outcomes it should achieve.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a lot of great technicians out there teaching online, but the ones that really connect with students aren’t always the most experienced. Yes, expertise does count! However, I think the best courses are taught by a seasoned expert that also teaches the right mindset. I’d take a newly-minted expert with a great mindset over a 30-year expert with no mindset training.
Here’s why.
When you teach the right mindset for your course and the framework to solve problems in your industry, you’re really teaching people how to succeed.
I’ve taken countless courses where I really liked the topic, but the course was dry and the instructor didn’t really seem to care. Instructors have to take into consideration that every course is a possible transformation and there must be preparation for that.
Teaching adult students has its own challenges. We often need a lot of help with clicking off old, self-defeating beliefs or habits. In their place, we need to activate productive beliefs or habits. That’s one key to educational transformation.
We’ve all been there. We want to make a change, we’re ready for a transformation, and we have an outstanding course right in front of us. And yet part way through this journey, some of us never complete the course. Some studies point to a dismal 4% completion rate of online courses.
Sometimes it’s the instructor’s fault, but oftentimes it’s the student’s fault too. Great learning comes from nailing the right mindset at the start. Mindset training is a great opportunity for the instructor and student to bond and build a system for success together. Sadly, most instructors completely omit the mindset part and go on to teach modules the student might never get to.
2. Creating A Sustainable Business Foundation
For Platten, the right mindset is foundational for business and life. He continually emphasizes how to think about your business. It’s reminiscent of Robert Kiyosaki’s advice on why you should “work on the business, not in the business.”
One key lesson Platten points out is the employee to employer mentality. He reminds us that there is a sea of specialists at our disposal on sites like Upwork, but a profitable business needs a leader and manager. Doing all the little things is counter-productive. An agency founder works smarter, puts in as many hours as it takes, keeps their eye on the prize, and holds themselves to a higher standard. Therefore, leaders need discipline and habits.
To stay on track, Platten continuously emphasizes the importance of building habits. He takes the Charles Duhigg method to create habits. Included in his course is a worksheet on documenting your habits, triggers, and rewards. This helps you think about new or better habits that are designed to get results. It’s the daily short wins that add up to achieving the big long-term goal.
In my own experience, I’ve discovered that the right habits with an unstoppable mindset almost guarantees success. Any great SMMA course should show you how to start small and build momentum with great habits.
3. It’s All About Skill Stacks
While mindset serves as a good motivator, we’re all on the quest to improve our hard skills. It’s like Alex Becker or Scott Adams said: every entrepreneur should pursue the right skill stack to achieve their career goals.
Single skills won’t cut it in SMMA. It requires a full-stack entrepreneur. Think of the T-shaped, Pi-shaped, or comb-shaped worker skills. They have a broad knowledge of several relevant skills. However, they specialize in at least one commercially viable hard skill (probably the one they’re best at and enjoy doing). With this skill, they go deep.
For SMMA, Platten outlines the full-stack skill set needed. You must be able to: lead source, run Facebook ads, write good copy, implement sales funnels, automate emails, and onboard clients. Sales is probably the one skill you have to go deep on, but that’s a soft skill (see below).
Now you could outsource a few of the broad skills listed early on or when you make ample revenue. Usually, the first person to hire is a Facebook Ads specialist. That would really take a lot off of your plate. Facebook policies change all the time, plus consistently achieving a high Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) for your clients is practically a fine art.
Mastering Facebook ads takes real skill and dedication. However, Platten is intent on teaching students to do it themselves at first so they at least know what they’re talking about in a sales presentation. Plus, they get to pocket more profit. (His ROAS module in The Affluent Academy is called “The Science Of Getting Results.”)
The Essential Soft Skill Newbie SMMAs Underestimate
Soft Skills matter a lot too when running an SMMA. Soft skills are people skills. They include communicating, managing people, presenting, collaborative problem-solving, and selling.
By far, the most important soft skill for agency owners is selling. Sales is the heart of this business. Like many other services, despite its demand social media services don’t sell themselves.
The job of making sales falls to the founder, and they have to be good at it. In fact, you can be successful with your SMMA even if you’re terrible at Facebook ads (hard skill), but decent at selling (soft skill). With incoming revenue, in a pinch, you can always hire an ads specialist. However, you need money to do that. Someone needs to sell.
I’ve learned SMMA sales from a lot of great people. What I learned is that most of the sales strategies and scripts sound the same. Usually, it’s one mentor’s words refashioned into another person’s version. This was until I encountered Platten’s take on sales. His script is easy and brilliant.
When I say easy, I mean that it just rolls off your tongue. He has a sequence of points to make in his structured sales presentation to the prospect. His advice on how to handle objectives is easy-going too. It comes back to his whole mindset and attitude toward sales in general. In fact, if you nail his principles of sales it wouldn’t matter what objections the prospect had: you could handle them effectively off-script.
This sounds too good to be true, I know.
Take it from an introvert that pretty much hates sales: Platten’s sales process works. It works because it doesn’t feel like sales. When I was using it, it actually made me feel good about the things I was saying!
The principles he uses comes from his early experiences in the field. You see, he thought he had it made with his vast experience in corporate sales. Platten thought that with his 2,000+ hours of heavy phone sales experience, nothing could stop him. However, early on his aggressive tactics didn’t work with his agency. Businesses didn’t want to talk to a salesperson, they wanted to talk to a consultant who could genuinely solve their problems.
Reworking his approach, Platten’s sales meetings became more like casual conversations over coffee with a friend. He asked smart questions about the business and what they were struggling with. He dug up the metrics that really mattered to the prospect. And when it came time to “close the deal”, he used those bits of information to demonstrate how he could improve their business exponentially.
Platten’s sales process is at the perfect mix of emotion and logic. The true genius in it is that he takes lessons from Professor Robert Cialdini’s best-selling book Influence, and makes it applicable to SMMA sales. (Platten gives you this sales process in his book 15-Minute Agency and his course The Affluent Academy.) Newbies always fumble on this soft skill, so it’s important that any course you take on SMMA has strong sales training. I’m completely biased, but Platten’s training is par excellence.
4. SMMA Systems That Practically Run Themselves
Let’s say you’ve followed the right process and you land a few clients. Next thing you know, clients are coming in at different times and needing different things. Your days are so jam-packed, you’re no longer working a “freedom business”, you’re back to the old 9–5 grind. Sure, the money is good. But the hours you put in are starting to take a toll. You’ve painted yourself into a corner.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
If you build your SMMA right, you should have plenty of time to do the things you love. The key to all of this is building scalable systems within your business. I’m not talking about hiring a personal assistant or technician. I’m talking about having a process and system for every major component of your business. When something is triggered to engage that system, it goes to work automatically.
When you learn what business components can by systematized, your whole quality of life improves. You must have a system for prospecting, booking meetings, processing electronic payments, communication, onboarding, selling, and hiring. Most courses do cover this (to what extent is up to the instructor). Where things get much easier is when you implement automated tasks.
Luckily, most tasks for running an SMMA can be done online with software. You can automate sales funnels with ClickFunnels, emails with GetResponse, ad posting times with the Facebook Ads Manager, and training with Process Street. Tools like IFTTT and Zapier make it simple to connect automated tools to each other for a seamless multi-functional process.
These are just a few tips, but the point is that you free up your time by implementing systems and automation tools. Your goal as a business owner is to periodically test, evaluate, and improve every system in your business. That’s how you truly become free. The money keeps rolling in, and your time becomes more manageable. Even with numerous clients, organized SMMA owners like Platten only work on each client a few hours a month.
However, the one thing vital thing that can’t by systemized or automated is building an authentic SMMA community.
5. Community
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” -Attributed to Peter Drucker
The funny thing about being a part of an SMMA community is that your success starts and ends there. It’s like this. You take a course and start using the private membership group. In it, you ask questions, attend live workshops, and make friends. After you finish the course, you go out into the world and start spending more time with clients. Soon, you’re figuring things out on your own and you don’t need the course or community for support. Months may go by, and then hopefully you make it big. When you do, you let your SMMA community know.
What I rarely see people do is go back to the course after they complete it (if they even complete it). What I always see people do is come back to the community to share. If we’re stuck, it’s there to ask questions. If we can help inspire others with our success, it’s there for us again. It all comes back to community, so it’s imperative you find a good one. A good SMMA community is a model for the community we can build for our own clients.
But what if the SMMA community simply isn’t enough and all your answers have not been answered by the course material?
Then it calls for a different kind of customer service. Platten is so focused on the success of each individual in his course that he gives them his personal “VIP email Support” address. Therefore, students have a variety of ways to get help including direct access to Platten. This is something you only see in high-priced inner-circle programs.
So as you can see, the best SMMA courses provide these five essential components so students can get superior results in the field. But is that it? What would take a course and community to the next level?
Improving Industry Standards And Guaranteed SMMA Success
What I’ve observed in Platten’s Affluent Academy community is special, and it begins with raising the standards for what real success looks like in SMMA. As mentioned, this industry is not regulated yet. People can say whatever they want about their clients, results, and reviews. It will remain so until a third-party organization sets standards and verifies all claims. This is where Platten’s great idea for his students come into play.
When you enroll in The Affluent Academy, you are invited to participate in the Affluent Agency Award program. This is based on external merit. Currently, in the industry, it’s common for SMMA course instructors to give away awards or acknowledgments if you reach certain revenue milestones. (Some have $10K, $100K, and $1M awards.) This is a good motivator, but it puts the focus on the agency and not necessarily client results.
Platten’s SMMA course represents a radical shift in the way we rate and perceive agencies. He is the first to require objective proof of an agency’s digital marketing effectiveness, value, and return on investment.
No more empty boasting about client case studies. No more using the amount of ad spend you’ve managed as experience. The metrics here are things like ROAS (Return On Ad Spend), conversion rates, and client revenue. Here’s the objectivity part. Clients must nominate their agency for the award. None of this is self-reporting like most SMMA awards.
It’s one thing to get a couple of clients to recommend your services. However, it’s another thing if several more do it and a clear pattern is established. Since it’s not likely clients would endorse something they don’t believe in and they probably don’t know each other, a level of objectivity is achieved about an agency’s true performance. There are minimal advertising fluff and bragging here. This agency does what it says it can do.
It’s great that Platten invented a way to reward his most successful students while giving them public and private praise. The true focus or praise is not on the SMMA educator, but rather on the agency and client results.
Maybe one day, there will be a Yelp or Trust Pilot for SMMA that will transparently show all the good and bad ratings. And maybe that will align with an awards committee to qualify agencies by merit. For now, I like what Platten has done in lieu of this governing body. It really works. So far, he has well over a dozen Affluent Agency Award winners with his previous course. With his new one, he expects to 10X the number of winners in 2020.
Platten is so confident of this right mix of training, standards, customer service, and awards that he can literally guarantee SMMA success. If you follow his program and you don’t find success in 30 days, he’ll refund your money — and you get to keep the course! The risk is entirely on him.
No one in the SMMA teaching space is doing this, so if you are skeptical of how good the course is this should ease your mind. The combined components of a quality SMMA course, the money-back guarantee, and Affluent Awards criteria all make The Affluent Academy a hard course to beat.
Conclusion
SMMA is not easy. To succeed, you must find training that covers five vital SMMA components: Mindset, Business Foundations, Hard/Soft Skills, Systems, and Community. You have to master the SMMA sales process. There are a lot of good courses out there that do this. However, Platten does this exceptionally well with his community while simultaneously improving the industry as a whole.
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