Jan 5, 2022
Across the United States, hiring has never proven more difficult, and digital agencies are no exception to these staffing roadblocks. When new client opportunities arise, does your current bandwidth allow you to say “yes” to them?
Let’s be honest. Saying “no” and passing up on can’t-miss new accounts flat-out sucks. It cuts directly against an agency’s ability to scale and drive new revenue.
Through a premium white label digital marketing partner, however, you can overcome these common hiring challenges. With a trusted external ad operations team serving your clients in lockstep with your in-house team, you can position your agency to be prepared to land and expand these white-whale accounts.
Today, we’re going to peel back the curtain on wholesale digital marketing. We’ll cover everything from how the wholesale model works for agencies and how to select the right solutions for your needs.
How Wholesale Digital Marketing Works: The Reseller Playbook 📘
As a general concept, wholesaling involves purchasing a product or service from a provider at one price point, marking it up internally, and then reselling it at a higher number that allows your business to remain profitable.
A produce wholesaler, for example, purchases fruits and vegetables from a commercial farm, marks up the prices of these goods and then sells them to grocery stores. The markup covers both the wholesaler’s own expenses as well as enough space in the margin to generate a profit to grow their business.
In the same vein, a digital agency can purchase a wholesale product like SEO managed services from a white label provider. You can then mark up the cost of these services based on the partner’s rate card, and resell them to the client. The partner handles the fulfillment while your team can spend more time on core internal competencies and sales.
An Example of Wholesale Digital Marketing in Action 🔎
Mark is an agency owner in the New York Metro area. His agency was recently approached by Sarah’s successful law firm about the possibility of helping them manage large-budget SEO and PPC advertising campaigns.
Mark’s agency has served lawyers in the past, and he would love the opportunity to pursue this new potential account. However, his internal team is maxed-out on their bandwidth and they specialize more in public relations and social media marketing campaigns. From his perspective, it would take too much time away from current client work to have his team take a crash course in these product areas in an attempt to bring on this account.
After a quick online search for “wholesale digital marketing,” Mark finds a white label partner that offers a full suite of products, including both SEO and PPC. The partner’s in-house team features certified experts in these disciplines that can manage this lawyer’s campaign for him. After reviewing the provider’s rate card and deciding he could sell these services at a profit with Sarah’s current budget, he begins a white label partnership.
Once the partnership begins, Mark submits an Insertion Order for both an SEO and PPC campaign. The partner’s team handles all aspects of fulfillment from audits to campaign builds, ongoing optimization, reporting, and communication. The urgent need to train his internal team or try to quickly hire an in-house search expert is removed from his laundry list of agency leader duties, and he did not have to say “no” to this account opportunity.
How to Select the Right Wholesale Digital Marketing Solution
In the digital marketing field, wholesale, white-label, turnkey, managed services, and other similar terms refer to an outsource provider that can act as an extension of your agency’s in-house team. However, within this niche there are three main types of providers: platform, vendor, and partner.
Here’s how you can tell the difference between the three:
🌐 Platform
A wholesale platform can help reduce the learning curve when adopting new digital services at your agency, but it is usually heavily software-based and requires a large amount of manual control. Someone in your agency’s in-house team would need to still have a heavy hand on the controls, and the platform may not provide sufficient resources to master its features. As a result, there is still a large amount of internal education required and it can still become difficult to gauge results.
📦 Vendor
A vendor refers to an outsource solution that operates on a strictly transactional basis. This could be a lone freelancer or a specialist provider that focuses on either one or a small handful of products.
As an example, the vendor might only offer solutions related to social media. If you want to expand your accounts over time into new services, they may not have the ability to scale with you.
Because vendors also operate on a mostly transactional basis, it can become difficult to anticipate the quality of deliverables they provide. Once they have checked each box on their agreement, they often disappear back into the digital ether until you pay them again.
🤝 Partner
A wholesale digital partner is both a true wholesale and whole-scale solution for agencies. A partner provides features not found with platforms or vendors, such as:
Holistic suite of digital services
Complete in-house implementation
Custom live reporting
Responsive human communication
Flexible onboarding and offboarding of services
By definition, a partner is equally invested in your accounts’ success as your in-house team. This allows your agency to drive true performance, and prove it, on an ongoing basis.
Make a Resolution to Enable Better Opportunities with Wholesale Digital Marketing 💪
As the new year begins, make a resolution for your agency to solve hiring challenges and drive complete performance for your clients. With the right partner in your corner, you can turn wholesale digital marketing into your business’s greatest strength by allowing you to continuously scale at a profitable rate.
At Conduit, we provide world-class wholesale digital marketing services for successful agencies around the globe. Offering a complete suite of services, sales support materials, and world-class fulfillment completely in-house, we equip your agency to say “yes” to more of the right opportunities. To get started, reach out to us anytime to learn more.
