The Secret to Scaling Your Marketing Agency – Fast!

By Darren Johnson on Aug 11, 2021

If you want to grow your digital marketing agency, the key question is “How can we scale quickly?” For many businesses, it’s also the most challenging question. Fortunately, the answer to scaling your digital marketing agency fast is simple. Resell white label services. With the help of white label fulfillment, you can resell SEO services, and a vast array of other services without incurring a large overhead.

How Do Reseller Programs Work?

Reselling is simple. One company sells services (such as web development or SEO) to an agency for a “wholesale” price. The agency then resells those services to customers for an added cost. The best part? Reselling is beneficial to all parties – from the end-customer to the reseller. In other words, agencies benefit from the growth opportunities, and their customers benefit from working with one vendor for their marketing needs.

Four Ways Reselling Can Help Your Agency Grow

Reselling comes with a lot of perks, scalability being the most obvious one. While scalability is a simple concept, scaling a marketing agency is challenging and complex. It’s important to take a closer look at the specific challenges that come with scaling your agency to understand how reselling services can help you overcome them.

1. Hiring, Training and Retaining Talent

Working with a reseller is like having an in-house team at your fingertips. It’s no secret that hiring and training new team members is time consuming and expensive. When you resell SEO services and other digital channels, you don’t have to worry about hiring a bigger team. Reselling cuts costs by dropping onboarding expenses, such as:

• Recruiting resources
• Signing bonuses
• New equipment
• Training resources

Reselling also cuts costs after employee onboarding. Larger teams, for example, require more managers. Buying fulfillment through a reseller platform enables agencies to run light, agile teams. In the long run, this saves time and money.

2. Getting New Customers

White label services can also make it easier to manage your sales pipeline. While hiring more SEO experts, paid advertising experts and social media managers is one way to grow with your agency’s client load, it’s not scalable long-term. In other words, your profit margin won’t increase faster than your need for new staff. It’s also common for agencies to run into “hiring lag” when the pipeline bottlenecks or becomes volatile.

Agencies that choose to resell SEO services and other digital marketing must services can fix this problem. When you partner with a white label fulfillment agency, you don’t have to worry about staffing your support teams to back your sales funnel. Instead, your resources can grow at the same rate as your customers. This makes it simpler to sell to clients over time. It also means you can increase or scale back resources as your customer demand evolves. In other words, you’ll never have to ask the question, “Do we have what it takes to service this customer?” The simple answer will always be, “Yes.”

3. Creating Low-Risk Growth

In agencies where in-house resources support all client fulfillment, growth and risk go together. Think about it like this: Your revenue target includes 20% new-customer growth per quarter for the rest of the year. To support that goal, you’ll need to not only get customers but also the resources to deliver to them. This is a risk because it assumes your delivery team and sales revenue will grow at the same pace.

On the flipside, risk-based growth isn’t always practical for small or medium-sized agencies. Let’s say your company specializes in paid advertising and website development, but your clients are interested in organic search. By reselling SEO services, you can expand your service offerings without investing heavily in a new product. Additionally, any technical or SEO-specific questions can be fielded by your fulfillment partner. Of course, your client’s main point of contact (you) doesn’t change.

4. Generating Upsell Opportunities

Working with a fulfillment partner for key service offerings isn’t just for creating new growth opportunities (although it’s great for that!) Reselling can also help your agency protect its revenue by retaining and upselling current clients into new channels.

This strategy is crucial for long-term growth because it allows you to offer clients what they need without the overhead of starting a new program from scratch. If your agency focuses on paid advertising for example, offering SEO services at scale may seem like a pipe dream. With the help of a capable reselling platform, you can easily expand to accommodate new offerings.

Is Reselling White Label Services Profitable?

Profitability is a common concern when it comes to buying white label marketing services. What’s more, many agencies experience relatively narrow profit margins to begin with (less than 20%). In other words, every expense must drive the bottom line in the right direction. While this is a valid concern, a capable fulfillment partner can solve any hesitancy agencies bring with proven results. Here are a few things to keep in mind when looking for the right platform:

• Aim for a profit margin between 50% and 80%. You should make at least 50% from your reseller agreement.
• Identify other areas where reselling could minimize unneeded costs, such as expanding your support team and onboarding expenses.
• If possible, find a reseller that works on a per-result basis. This ensures your budget is leveraged fully.

As an agency, your goal is to create a growth path for your company and then find the best marketing services reseller platform to reach your revenue objectives. By identifying reselling value and the revenue protected by lower costs, it’s simple to see that reselling can be extremely profitable for growing agencies. For many businesses, choosing to resell SEO services is ideal because SEO requires a high overhead and ample staff to execute.

Finding Your Next Opportunity with Reselling

If you’re looking to buy fulfillment services, you may wonder which services you should resell first. After all, white labeling comes in all shapes and sizes. Which new opportunity is best for you and your team? There’s no simple answer to this question. However, you can narrow your search with the following questions:

• What service(s) do my clients need the most?
• What service(s) would require significant training and hiring to support?
• What service(s) would complement our current offering best?

The goal is to find offerings that your agency won’t be able to provide effectively without reselling. This might include niche offerings like ADA compliance or high-demand services such as Google ads management. At the end of the day, the right services to resell depend on your agency’s capabilities and growth goals.

Take the First Step to Growth Today

Umbrella offers results-driven fulfillment services to help ambitious digital marketing agencies like yours give their clients the deliverables, conversions and leads they need. Our fulfillment services include SEO (search engine optimization), Google paid ads, website conversions, eCommerce, reputation management, website accessibility and more. If you’re ready to start growing your business today, contact Umbrella now to speak with a member of our team.