Given how fierce the competition is in the industry, today’s marketing agencies are finding it challenging to win new clients. This is why it’s so important to keep hold of the customers that you do manage to acquire for as long as possible.
The costs of the sales cycle for marketing agencies can be make or break. Forrester estimates that the average budget for account-based marketing, whereby an agency surgically targets and nurtures prospective clients that match their ideal customer personas, is around $350,000. That’s just for software and media buys, mind you, as it excludes human resource costs.
If your agency invests significant time and resources into winning new clients and too many deals don’t eventually close, then it could put your cash flow position at risk. That’s why it’s safer and potentially more lucrative to focus on finding new ways to serve your existing clients.
One strategy that agencies have been seeing traction with is to offer a subscription-based tech product, as it brings in recurring revenue that adds stability to your finances, can be integrated with the managed services that you offer, and can open new doors for targeted, value-added upselling.
Yet it may feel intimidating to build your own software product from scratch, as it would be a significant investment and less aligned with your core expertise. This is why more agencies are partnering with software providers as resellers. By partnering with vcita, a small business management platform, you can provide a cobranded app to your clients, where you can help them to manage their marketing and business needs in the future.
This is a promising way to increase the revenue you see per client. Let’s take a deeper look at why.
Marketing capabilities aligning with services
With its robust features, vcita’s platform offers comprehensive capabilities that agency clients might need, spanning lead capture, appointment booking, CRM and customer communications email and SMS.
For emails, through your cobranded app, clients would be able to quickly create and send marketing campaigns using customizable templates. They would be able to segment clients based on different fields of their choice and send personalized emails too. For SMS, clients would be able to use your app to send campaigns that see 98% open rates.
Using the cobranded app, your agency can work side by side with the client’s in-house team, setting up nurture workflows to convert leads captured as a service. This way, the client has independence and feels they are in control but they can always count on you for guidance or to manage the tasks they do not yet feel comfortable overseeing on their own.
This type of service arrangement helps you demonstrate to your clients that you care about their long-term success. It also means you keep eyes on the ground to observe what struggles the client is facing, which helps you to tailor your offers to them in the future.
Value for clients beyond marketing
Indeed, vcita gives you the power to go beyond just marketing. About 60% of marketing agency leaders acknowledge that they need to create a more profitable new strategy. Simply sticking to the tried and tested services that agencies currently provide may not be enough to survive.
In today’s rapid innovation environment, the lines between different areas of specialty expertise are blurring. You’ll likely be aware that your staff are more than capable of learning adjacent skills and assisting your clients with issues beyond marketing.
Through the vcita cobranded app, you can tap into the competency of your staff to increase the revenue potential of each client.
For instance, using the cobranded app’s CRM and financial reporting capabilities, you can enable your clients to better track and communicate with their customers, boosting their own customer experience for superior retention, scheduling and cash flow management. It’s a skillset that a good marketer needs already, so your team can provide valuable insight into how a client can best benefit from the app.
How it actually works
Your app can be customized for your particular needs, starting with your branding to keep you front and center of the clients’ minds. Your agency derives all of the benefit of offering a professional app to your clients but without all of the overheads that would normally come with building from scratch.
To get started, you’d reach out to vcita, who collaborate with your tech team to bring your app to market within weeks. The app structure is modular, which means you can pick what you want to support based on your resources, business needs and what you believe your clients will benefit from most. It’s easy to later expand the app to other features if you want to start small first.
If your agency has more advanced technical capabilities and uses other apps to currently offer services, you’ll be able to integrate these with vcita too. You can also integrate whatever third-party services you like, with these appearing as app modules in users’ dashboards.
This means clients can access your existing offers through the vcita app, which decreases the friction for them in requesting more of your services.
How FCR branched out with Sitee
Belgian agency FCR Media is a great example of a digital marketing company that has used a vcita cobranded app to increase the loyalty of their customers – and broaden the types of businesses they target as clients. Sitee, the app that FCR developed with vcita, is designed to serve the needs of the agency’s self-employed and small business clients.
The agency’s Director of Strategy and Innovation, Bart van der Heijen, describes the purpose of their app as a means for small business digital transformation: “Sitee is an easy to use small business management platform that enables small business owners to pivot online, complete their online offering, and manage everything remotely, in a single location, removing any confusion or chaos.”
The site makes use of almost the full suite of features that vcita offers, including a customer communication portal, payment capabilities, digital marketing software, online appointment scheduling and a full CRM.
FCR Media is just one out of over 60 strategic partners that vcita has across 34 countries.
Final thoughts
While focusing on winning more clients for your marketing agency is certainly important, you should also be thinking about how to maximize the revenue per client. Creating a vcita cobranded app is a great way to do this, because you build a longer-term relationship that involves more diverse services.
