May 23, 2022
Beyond performance and communication, digital marketing is a deliverables-driven industry. Your client invests all or some of their marketing budget in your team’s services and they expect something tangible in return.
However, without a strategy in place for producing deliverables on a consistent basis, these tangible assets can fall to the wayside in the midst of any marketing campaign. This can impact your ability to scale and show your client the incredible work that you have done for them.
Instead of an ad-hoc deliverable process, committing to a production schedule will ensure that your agency is able to regularly provide your clients with something concrete that proves your performance. In this guide, we are going to cover exactly how you can do this.
How Consistent Deliverables Benefit Your Agency
While each digital marketing agency will have its own pulse, there are a few universal benefits of consistent deliverables for any business in the industry. These include:
Managed Expectations
With a strong deliverable infrastructure, both your team and client know what to expect and when to expect it. This helps create more transparent internal and external communication and provides an objective foundation for the client’s campaign.
Better Revenue Management
When priced accurately, consistent deliverables can impact your agency’s revenue in multiple ways, such as:
You’ll know how much time is spent on them (labor costs)
You’ll know how much a client is paying for each deliverable each month
You’ll know how many deliverables are sent to clients each month (total revenue)
You’ll know how to better price your services at the start of a new campaign
Providing a client with tangible deliverables on a month-in, month-out basis will allow you to better forecast your agency’s revenue on both a line item level and a holistic level. This will also equip you with greater financial insight to make more informed decisions for your agency as a business.
A More Efficient Work Environment
When you tie your agency’s deliverables to a recurring schedule, your team knows exactly what is expected of them for client work each month. They can better plan for months and weeks in advance and prioritize the most important services for your client with greater clarity.
A full view of deliverable expectations also opens up more transparent communication. If you need to address certain roadblocks in your processes that impact performance, you can identify these issues, discuss them, and correct them in collaboration with your team.
Manage Capacity More Effectively
Lastly, but certainly not least important, a transparent view of your expected deliverables can help visualize your internal capacity. Is your team at their maximum? Is it time to hire someone new or find a partner to help you manage overflow?
Common Types of Digital Marketing Deliverables
Have you ever itemized the individual types of deliverables that you offer to your clients? Here are some general and product or service-specific examples that you might fulfill on a regular basis:
SEO or organic social content audits
Paid media campaign reports
Creative assets (graphics, videos, etc.)
Content marketing assets
Strategy blueprints
Price quotes for new campaigns
Monthly performance recaps
There are certainly many more possible deliverables than the ones listed above that your agency could produce for your clients. However, these are some of the most commonly used in the industry and are relatively seamless to implement into a consistent strategy.
4: Tips for Creating a Scalable Deliverables System for Your Agency
1: Create a Standardized Universal List of Deliverables
What are the core deliverables that you offer a client when they onboard with your agency? This can be decided on a holistic or product-specific level. For example, you may include a monthly report that offers an overview of each of their individual campaigns’ performance metrics.
At the product level, you may have more specific deliverables that pertain directly to that service. Many search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns often include some form of content marketing deliverables like blog posts or on-page content optimizations.
You may also benefit from creating a tiered system so that you can standardize your deliverables more efficiently. For instance, you can offer SEO blog posts to your client by approximate word count and price them uniquely based on the scope.
2: Tie These Deliverables to Time Spent
As the ancient sages of business wisdom have said for eternity, time is money. Spending too much time on creating a deliverable can cut against your profits and affect your agency’s scalability.
When creating new deliverables, time tracking is essential. A 750-word article should take less time to produce than one that exceeds 1000. As you produce deliverables for your agency’s clients, make sure your team is tracking the time spent on creating them so that you can gauge the average turnaround for each.
This does not mean that you have to be the chief of the time police as an agency leader. As an inescapable factor of agency life, you will encounter some outlier deliverables that take longer to complete than others for one reason or another.
One client may be more detail-oriented and desire more granular information in their report than another. If you notice that this becomes a consistent obstacle for your team, initiate the conversation to see how you can help them reduce the excess time needed to complete their deliverable.
3: Create a Reasonable Calendar for Turnarounds
Deadlines drive consistency. When deliverables are expected on a recurring basis by a certain date, your team has the necessary advance notice so that they can start working.
However, a deadline calendar should never be decided in a silo. Meet with your team and ask them how many days they need on average to produce specific deliverables for your clients. They may need five business days to develop a blog post and ten to finish a paid social campaign report.
You can also set objective calendar dates for specific deliverables. For example, you could create a policy that all reports from the previous month are due to the clients by the 15th of the current month. This creates universal expectations that become easier to track agency-wide from the managers to the analysts.
A deliverables calendar does not have to remain set in stone. As you implement one at your agency, monitor how it impacts your team’s performance for better or worse. If you need to improve in some key areas, have open conversations with your team and ask them where they are encountering friction and how you can collaborate to make it more effective.
4: Join Forces with a White Label Partner
As your agency scales and volume increases, you do not have to shoulder the burden of the added pressure alone.
Instead, combine your efforts with a trusted white label digital marketing partner that can assist you in stabilizing your capacity, managing your expenses, and assisting you in consistent deliverable production. You can leave your client’s campaigns in the trusted hands of certified experts in their product areas so that you can continue focusing more on your business’s core competencies without deliverables falling to the wayside.
Unlike a highly transactional and unpredictable white label platform or vendor, a partner is fully invested in your agency as a true extension of your in-house team. With a full suite of products, agile communication, and comprehensive reporting, partnership positions your agency to scale as new and better opportunities present themselves.
Start Your Journey Toward Partnership Today
Conduit Digital partners with successful agencies to elevate your ability to scale profitably by outfitting your team with the necessary communication and performance infrastructure to confidently say “yes” to any incredible new opportunity that presents itself. Working with us, your agency will experience the following:
100% U.S.-produced campaign deliverables
Access to certified in-house product experts
24/7 live reports
Monthly recaps for client campaigns
Personalized SEO and Social Content audits
Campaign launch blueprints
Client-specific monthly deliverables
Margin-friendly rate cards
Though we’re immensely proud of our work, we understand if your agency wants to keep its branding consistent. That’s why all of our deliverables can also be custom-branded under your agency or client.
Are you ready for partnership? To learn more about scaling your digital marketing deliverable capabilities higher than previously possible, schedule a call today.
