How I'd Start an AI Marketing Agency in 2026 (For Complete Beginners)

You can start a digital marketing agency right now using AI tools like Chat GPT without hiring a team, building a website, or spending months learning marketing. This is the exact path that I would take if I had to start from scratch today. And it's the same strategy that I've used to run campaigns for brands like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Adobe, and Snapchat, and for thousands of local businesses, too. Whether you're looking for a full-time business or just want to add an extra $100 to $300 a day on the side, this is one of the fastest, lowest-risk ways to do it. No coding, no copywriting background, no big startup costs. But there's one mistake that I see new agency owners make with AI that tanks their results before they even start. So, I'll show you exactly how to avoid it. And no, you don't need to become best friends with the robot to make this work. In this video, I'll show you how to use AI to deliver marketing results clients actually care about while working fewer hours, charging more, skipping the usual agency growing pains. So, let's dive in. So, let's get started by talking about the first service that I think you should offer, which is lead generation. In the US alone, there are over 32.5 million small businesses, and all of them need leads. All of them. And this is where you come in as a supplier of those leads. By putting together a compelling Google ad or Facebook ad, you're able to make the connection between business and customer, and charge a retainer for providing those services or earn a commission on every lead you generate. This is why lead generation was one of the main services that my marketing agency offered for years, as it was very profitable and it was always in demand. After all, if you're able to generate a lead for a business that say costs $10 and that lead is worth $100 to the business, you, my friend, just generated a 10x ROI, or return on investment, which is kind of like going up to a business and saying, "Hey, give me $10 and I'll give you $100 back." It's a no-brainer. And if you're just getting started, you can offer this service for $500 to $1,000 a month, which means that you only need a small handful of clients in order to reach 5 to 10k a month in profitability. Now, up until recently, the hardest part of running a lead gen campaign was the actual writing of the ad itself, figuring out what to say and how to say it, and what it should look like, and what it should sound like, and feel like. And this is going to sound crazy, but I honestly used to spend between 4 to 8 hours, sometimes more, writing what I felt was the perfect ad. And if we were spending big money on the campaign, well, I'd also bring in friends and consultants and mentors and other people to look over the ad and critique it and try to make sure that it was as good as it possibly could be. But now, this is how I keep my agency running. Systems, caffeine, and fewer moving parts. Most people have the caffeine. What they're missing is the system. I've been using HighLevel to run the back-end of three different seven-figure agencies. It's the closest thing I've found to a marketing cheat code, but here's the truth. The software alone doesn't get results. Systems do. That's why when you start your free trial through my link, I'm giving you my entire system completely free. $10,000 plus worth of assets, including the scripts I use to close clients, templates that actually save time and get you clients, and the exact frameworks behind every campaign that's actually converted. 30 days free, cancel anytime, and yes, you keep the bonuses either way. Links below, everything you need to start is inside. Now, I just head over to Chat GPT, type in something like, "Write me a Facebook ad for the online course, The Digital Marketing Academy. Make the ad persuasive, funny, and conversational, and highlight the benefits and importance of having a solid marketing strategy to grow a business." And just like that, it gives me a perfectly usable ad that I can literally copy and paste into my Facebook or Google Ads Manager. And you can do this as many times as you'd like in order to come up with the perfect ad. If you want to beef up your packages, though, and separate yourself from the competition, and really impress your clients, then you're also going to want to add a way to convert those leads into actual paying customers. In other words, Facebook ads and Google ads, these are the tools that you're going to use in order to get someone to click and to enter their name and their email address or phone number. But you may also want something else to carry on that conversation in order to warm them up and qualify them and nurture them and turn them into an actual paying, buying customer. And my top suggestion here is a tool called HighLevel, and specifically, their AI conversational appointment booking workflow and setup that allows you to automate the entire marketing process. Now, this one isn't free, but if you are doing lead generation professionally, it's one of the top tools that I use, and I can't imagine running my business or my agency without it. So, I'll put a link in the descriptions below that'll get you access to an extended [music] free trial, and I highly recommend you check it out. This video is not sponsored, but this is a tool that I use personally [music] every single day. Okay, the next AI-powered service that you can offer is social media marketing, which is kind of similar to lead gen, but also kind of not. So, let me explain. Social media marketing and starting a social media marketing agency, or SMMA, is one of my top business models for new entrepreneurs, as it allows you to provide a valuable service to other businesses and make a very good living doing it. Plus, with your social media marketing, you can choose whether you want to offer lead generation services or not. Because as great as I think offering lead gen with Facebook ads or Google ads is, I also appreciate there's a learning curve there. And so, it might be something you want to introduce after you've got your first few paying clients. Now, when it comes to social media marketing services, the sky's pretty much the limit on what you can offer. That said, there are three services in particular that I'd suggest you start with, as they're going to allow you to use AI to get you the best results with the least amount of work possible. And the first is content creation. Content creation is where you create posts and graphics and emails and blog articles and pretty much anything that you can think of that a business would need in order to maintain an active social media presence. And the key here is to continue using Chat GPT just like we did for our lead gen ads, but now we're going to ask it to write a blog post or an email sequence or a social media post or whatever else it is that you want to create content for. And you can supercharge this by pairing it with another free-to-use AI tool called DALL-E, which is going to allow you to create AI-generated graphics and visuals and photos, all of which you're going to be able to use alongside of your text-based content. Now, when it comes to creating content, you can choose to niche down and focus on just say a single type of content, like LinkedIn posts, something that a lot of businesses are sadly neglecting. Or you could offer a broader range of services, but then focus more selectively on a certain niche or industry or market, like say fitness or coaching, or possibly even target a local geographic area, like whatever city or town that you happen to live in. Now, content creation rates vary widely depending on your experience and the client that you're working for, but for creating longer-form blog posts, is around 5 cents a word. So, a 1,000-word blog post could net you about 50 bucks, which isn't terrible seeing as it takes you all of about 20 seconds in order to use Chat GPT for, plus maybe a minute or two to read over and make sure that it all makes sense. And as for shorter social media posts, well, you could charge anywhere from say $15 to $30 and possibly look into creating monthly packages around these services, again, around 500, maybe 750, maybe 1,000. You can even offer the next service alongside of your content creation, which is posting and management. One of the biggest objections you're going to run into when creating content for business owners is them saying they don't have the time to post all of the stuff you're making. So, why not offer to do it for them? And use software like Metricool to help you plan, schedule, post, and analyze your content for them. This video is not sponsored, but I'll put a link in the descriptions below where you can sign up for free to that as well. And for this service, you can charge anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a month or more. But there's another service you might want to consider as well, which is a little more niche, but it's still very cool. And that is offering translation services. Fun fact about Chat GPT is that you can also use it to translate all of the content that you just made into other languages for your business clients to use across other social media platforms or maybe even across different websites if they want to reach a more global or more diverse audience. I played around with this a little bit myself, and I'll be honest, it's pretty powerful stuff, or should I say, "Es bastante poderoso." But there's still one more service you can and should be offering thanks to all of the content that you're going to be generating, which is SEO, or search engine optimization. So, let me walk you through that now. Did you know that there are over 2 billion websites on the internet? And do you know what almost all of them would like more of? Is it A, pain, B, bananas, C, a DVD copy of the director's cut of Top Gun: Maverick with behind-the-scenes footage and exclusive interviews, or D, traffic? Well, if you guessed traffic, you guessed correctly, because every website out there wants more traffic. If they're on page two of Google, they want to be on page one. If they're on page one of Google, they want to be higher up on page one. And if they're already high up on page one of Google, they want to make sure they stay there. And you can help them do that by offering to create SEO-optimized content for their websites using, again, the power of Chat GPT by asking it to create long-form blog posts and articles that are 1,000 or 2,000 words or longer. Because if there's one thing that search engines love, it's content. That said, there is a problem that you might run into in creating all of this good content for them, which is that because the content is being written by a robot, it can often come out looking, feeling, and sounding exactly like that. And that's not good. Fortunately, there is a two-part solution. Part one, use software like Writer to quickly analyze the text in order to make sure it passes the grade. And if not, then run it through another piece of software like QuillBot that'll rewrite your text for you. But as cool as all of this is, it's really just the tip of the iceberg. So, if you want to see how I got Chat GPT to build me an entire marketing campaign from start all the way through to finish, then you're definitely going to want to check out this video right here, where I'm going to walk you through everything I did step by step so you can do it, too. So, make sure to check that out now, and I'll see you in there in just a second.