Imagine a service provider (or a digital marketing agency) that operates like a product shelf, offering pre-packaged solutions with clear features, prices, and processes. That’s the essence of a productized service business model. Unlike traditional service providers who tailor solutions for each client, these businesses standardize their offerings, making them scalable, predictable, and customer-friendly. Also, we all know that from the Gartner survey, 83% of B2B buyers say they like ordering or paying through digital commerce.
It sounds more sustainable than hourly billing or per project; right? Keep reading to discover more about productized services for digital agencies.
Back to Basics: What Are Productized Services?
In probably the most basic terms, the productized service model is a way to standardize your offerings, transforming them into pre-defined packages – whatever the sort of your agency. It allows you to embrace transparent pricing, making it easier for customers to understand and buy your services. And in fact, this clarity attracts more clients, leading to increased revenue and streamlined operations.
Unlike traditional marketing agencies & service providers who tailor solutions for each client, productized services offer pre-defined packages with clear outcomes. This also eliminates the necessity for custom proposals and negotiations, making the method easier for each customers and repair providers.
As we mentioned before, each service package has a predetermined and transparent price, it’s also an amazing way to make budgeting easier and faster sales cycles. When it comes to systems and processes, productized services enable scaling to serve more clients without sacrificing efficiency.
Further details? Here are some real-world examples of agencies offering productized digital marketing services:
Sprout Social provides monthly plans with various levels of content creation, community management, and social media promoting support.
Adzooma offers tiered subscription plans based on ad spend, delivering transparent pricing and predictable results.
Semrush delivers tiered subscription plans with features like keyword research, competitor evaluation, and website audits, helping customers optimize their online presence.
Mailchimp provides various plans with email creation, automation, and analytics tools, making it easy to manage email campaigns.
Why Do You Need to Start a Productized Service?
No doubt; by offering standardized packages with clear features, advantages, and pricing, digital marketing agencies are reaching recent levels of efficiency, transparency, and growth – especially crucial when considering the service industry is commonly shrouded in vague messaging. This strategic approach to defining services and pricing is essential to growing an agency successfully.
In that case, productization empowers digital agencies to have a standardized set of features and advantages while tailoring packages to address specific client needs. It also differentiates the agencies from the “all things to everyone” crowd.
What’s more, as all we all know, “predictability” is the lifeblood of sustainable growth. By simply offering products as a substitute of services, digital marketing agencies can establish consistent KPIs & success indicators, allowing for data-driven decision-making. Building predictable sales pipelines based on standardized offerings and understanding the contribution of every service to the underside line are other advantages, crucial for optimizing marketing agency profit margins.
Benefits of Productized Services in Digital Marketing
Beyond the final advantages of productization – we mentioned above -, the digital marketing landscape offers unique opportunities for this model to shine.
✌🏻Showcasing expertise
Productization allows agencies to discover (or refine) their area of interest, creating pre-defined packages targeting specific marketing needs like website positioning, social media management, or content marketing. This translates to deeper knowledge, sharper insights, and more impactful results for clients.
Especially, smaller agencies & startups often struggle to compete with larger firms offering an unlimited service portfolio. Productization levels the playing field by allowing them to showcase their specialized expertise, attracting clients searching for focused solutions at competitive rates.
👛 Offering clear pricing
Productized services offer defined deliverables, transparent expectations, and clear pricing. Additionally, unlike custom projects with uncertain outcomes, productized services generate predictable revenue streams. In that way, digital agencies can plan funds, allocate resources strategically, and spend money on the long run.
What’s more, the standardized nature allows for efficient scaling and replication, enabling them to serve more clients without compromising quality, thus fueling sustainable growth.
🎖️ Scaling operations
The standardized nature of productized digital marketing services allows for the efficient replication of successful solutions; it enables agencies to scale their operations without compromising quality.
On the opposite hand, with defined packages, agencies can predict the resources – team, tools, time – needed for each project. That approach enables optimal resource allocation, ensuring the precise team members are assigned to tasks, leading to increased efficiency and value savings.
⚖️ Building trust
As all we all know, custom digital marketing projects often include uncertain timelines and unpredictable outcomes. Productized services, with their standardized processes and deliverables, offer predictable results and timelines. Clients can expect consistent quality and know their campaigns are on target, constructing trust and reducing surprises.
From the View of the Customer: Saving Time, Money & Effort
As for clients searching for digital marketing support, productized services offer a compelling alternative to the standard, often cumbersome, approach.
🔧 Clarity & speed: Offering productized marketing services simply means transparent pricing and pre-defined packages. That allows clients to quickly select the choice that most closely fits their needs/budget. In other words, with that approach, gone are the times of waiting weeks for custom proposals and wading through pages of jargon.
🗂️ Streamlined onboarding: Instead of lengthy discovery calls and project kick-offs, productized services offer standardized onboarding processes. This means less paperwork, quicker activation of the campaigns, and faster time to results.
💵 Reduced risk of scope creep: Custom projects can often balloon in cost due to unexpected changes. Productized services, with their defined deliverables, minimize the chance of scope creep, ensuring clients stay inside your budget and avoid unpleasant surprises.
How to Productize A Service: Guide for Digital Marketing Agencies
Transforming your digital marketing agency from offering custom projects to providing productized services can open the best way to significant advantages like scalability, efficiency, and increased revenue. But where do you start?
Here’s a fast guide to allow you to navigate the method:
Step #1 Analyze your existing process/services
📌 Start by taking a deep dive into the services you’ve got on tap. Decide on what core
solutions you provide and the way much customization they involve.
📌 Chart the steps your team takes to deliver each service. Pinpoint what you’re aiming to achieve at every stage and spot the threads that tie your methods together.
📌 Group clients receiving similar services, prioritizing those highly satisfied, profitable, and valued by your team.
📌 Analyze how the processes involved in these “winning” client accounts differ from others. Are there specific steps absent or modified?
P.S. In case you usually are not sure about how to classify your services amid that transformation, take a look at our marketing agency services list first.
Step #2 Define your buyer/client persona
📌 Define your personas and understand their specific pain points and wishes.
📌 Create value propositions for each service on offer, pinpointing the perks that’ll hit home with audience.
📌 Map out a technique to craft engaging resources that showcase your know-how.
📌 Decide on which social media platforms you’ll be using to reach your audience & drive traffic to your service offerings.
Step #3 Choose your model
📌 Create one-off solutions which are ideal for services with clear deliverables and an outlined timeframe. Like website audits or content creation packages.
📌 Offer monthly subscriptions. They are perfect for ongoing services with recurring tasks, like website positioning management or social media marketing.
Step #4 Simplify and streamline
📌 Break down your services into their core components and eliminate unnecessary steps.
📌 After deciding on pricing, plan a concise delivery process. That may be easily replicated for each client.
📌 Offer solutions that address their specific needs without unnecessary complexity. At that time, remember clients are buying value, not the variety of hours you spend.
Step #5 Create sales materials & protocols
📌 Craft “written” descriptions for each productized service & explain each package’s value proposition.
📌 Ensure your agency is consistent with service delivery.
📌 Inform clients about regular updates on progress and performance. Plus, give them a transparent picture of their return on investment.
📌 Embrace clear communication protocols and spend money on automation tools to streamline tasks.
In conclusion, the productized services model isn’t only a fad; it’s a game-changing move that provides digital marketing agencies the upper hand in nailing down clarity, growing without limits, and forecasting outcomes with confidence. Shifting from just saying “yes” to delivering top-notch solutions paves the best way for long-lasting achievement.
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