3 strategic ways your digital services agency can make more money

For small and medium-sized digital agencies, making more money comes down to three options.

1) You could raise your rates, making more money for the same work without changing much else.

2) You could get better at attracting and retaining clients, increasing your work load.

3) Or, you could add real value to your product offering, setting your agency apart and creating a competitive advantage that’s based on much more than price.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, success begins with your value proposition. Your competitive edge is why your customers choose you, and keep coming back to you. Your clients are looking for you to bring real results; it’s your job to make them more successful.

If you’re already great at what you do, keep doing that. And then raise the bar by adding in these three strategic service offerings that will make you even more valuable to your client’s bottom line.

1. Build sleek and sexy sites

Any digital agency knows that PageSpeed is massively important: Google tells us that users have a high expectation for speed on the sites they visit, especially on their mobile devices. In fact, failure to deliver quickly – literally in 1 to 3 seconds – has a dramatic impact on KPIs:

Even knowing this, along with the fact that Google is now including PageSpeed in their searching engine ranking algorithms, the vast majority of sites load far too slowly on mobile:

What’s the problem? For many digital service agencies, optimizing for speed is a real challenge; the technical work required to truly minimize render start times is often beyond the scope of most smaller shops.

How to bring the value for PageSpeed:

Easily become a PageSpeed superhero for your clients simply by building their sites on (or moving existing sites to) an intuitive site builder that’s already optimized for speed. Comparison speed tests show us that, while many site platforms are working on improving speed, the top performer is Duda, when compared to WordPress, Weebly and Wix.

“We knew two years ago that PageSpeed was going to be a massive problem for site builders,” explains Duda’s CEO Itai Sadan. “Duda sites were already getting a pretty good score compared to other site platforms in the industry,” explained Duda’s CEO Itai Sadan. “But, since Google is constantly making changes to the way it calculates PageSpeed score, we made it a priority to get a very high score for all Duda sites.”

Faster mobile loads mean immediate improvements to your client’s results, and a competitive advantage for you.

2. Become a source for video ads

Professional quality video production, up until now, has been the domain of specialist agencies. Yet as video becomes increasingly important to marketing strategies, brands need quality videos in more and more quantity. In fact, user data suggests that video is poised to make up to 75% of all web-based traffic.

Data from Visually shows videos on a landing page can increase conversions by as much as 80%, and social video generates 1200% more shares that text or images.

The challenge, however, is that small brands can’t afford the time or the expense to create quality videos with consistency. “We learned early that no one stands up and applauds just because you posted one video,” explains Promo’s CEO Tom More. “Video marketing isn’t a one-play gig. Brands need to approach this commitment and consistency.”

How to bring the value for video:

Promo by Slidely is one of the best services we’ve found to make fast, affordable and pro quality promotional videos … literally in minutes. The service is pay-as-you-go, a great option for agencies and their clients, and offers a huge library of available footage from Getty Images, plus music options and plug-and-play copy.

3. Become a membership site expert

Nonprofits, B2B associations, and coaching entrepreneurs are all realizing the value of a good membership site. “From the business-y side of being an entrepreneur, the potential for recurring revenue is a huge pull in favor of creating a membership site for your business,” writes Maria Myre of AmbitionAlly.

But as she notes, developing a membership that “wows” can be a huge challenge. For your clients, it may be well worth it to invest in a good membership site. It’s a great way for them to offer consistent value to their members and build a strong community. Yet integrating the various technology pieces behind them – from registration to payment to resource creation to email marketing – can be a challenge for web developers.

How to bring the value for membership sites:

By using a site like GoPaywall you can solve the membership site issues for your clients for as little as $20/month. While we did find several plug-ins you could use for WordPress, etc, we like this idea of a comprehensive system that requires no coding, has payment integration built in for PayPal and Swipe, and an intuitive, step-by-step interface to create the site.

Conclusion

Making more money in your digital service agency isn’t just about raising your rates or finding more clients. It’s about really understanding what you bring to the table for your clients. By adding these tactics to your client services, you’ll be helping your clients make more money. At the end of the day, that is what will set you apart from your competition and tap into truly meaningful business growth.