What Are The Best Services to Offer At Your Remote Agency

What Are The Best Services to Offer At Your Remote Agency

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
September 10th, 2020
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Setting up a remote agency to handle specialist marketing services doesn’t have to be that difficult.

There are services that you can offer easily and efficiently.

In this article, we take a look at the easiest and the most profitable ones that you can deploy.

How to Define an MVS (Minimum Viable Service)

Here’s a quick definition of MVS or minimum viable service: it’s the least amount of work that you have to put in for a series of functions to be considered a particular service.

It is the best thing for service agencies and the way they structure their organizations.

Wait, doesn’t that sound lazy?

No.

It’s the most efficient solution to a lot of the questions or needs that your customers have.

Think about it.

Do they need customers? Conduct lead generation without all the bells and whistles to start bringing the customers in.

Do they need to rank on search engines? Make sure that they cover all their important bases for bringing fancy ranking techniques.

Defining your MVS keeps you focused on what you do best and helps you provide services that fulfill what your customer needs. Once you get their needs down, you can start working on what else they could want.

Figuring out your MVS helps you set the standards to which you build products, and it also prevents you from providing products that you are not competent in. If you’re thinking of launching a specific product, think about meeting the minimum qualifications for the product.

You could look at your direct competitors and find out how they handle selling products that are similar to what you want to launch. Check out what comes with their products and see if that’s the market standard.

Concentrate on your MVS first.

There are several types of minimum viable services in the digital marketing industry. They don’t require a large investment in human capital or technical expertise, they are cost-effective to outsource, and they represent basic services that most agencies provide.

For example, a service like link building will always have high demand because webmasters want their websites to rank higher, but they are also easily deployable since you can outsource them, and they’re inexpensive.

B2B lead generation, outreach, and social media marketing have a lot of providers, but you can always niche out their outputs and they’ll always be in demand.

SEO services are another great example because even though we have a lot of agencies offering SEO services, they come in different niches and you can always specialize in a particular field.

How to define ‘Wow’ factors during the service delivery process.

Here’s the truth:

There’s a lot of competition with remote agencies.

But that shouldn’t discourage you at all.

The market is still expanding, but beyond that, you’re not merely selling your services. You’re selling your remote agency’s “wow” factors.

A lot of digital marketing agencies have similar products, but their patronage has become a battle for who has better quality and who has the best customer experience.

If you’re trying to identify what your “wow” factor is, take a step back and think about the last time you have been swept away with a service. It doesn’t have to be one in the digital marketing scene, but rather any general service that has left you wondering, “why can’t I do that, too?”

Surely, it must have been the combination of the experience of being catered to, receiving the best value for your money, and how you felt your worth was to the company.

Now, the question is, how do I replicate that with my customers?

Great Customer Service

The first thing your customers will notice – and write about in reviews – is the customer service that you’re giving out. Now, understand that you’re working in an industry that’s highly competitive with similar products even though there’s a lot of market share to go around.

One of the best ways to stand out is by having exceptional customer service. Now a lot of remote agencies might make the mistake of being always available for their clients, but that’s not the case, you still need to set boundaries.

You want to be able to respond to customer queries via email as quickly as possible, have an account manager ready to deal with them and centralize their concerns, be friendly but professional, and be willing to provide a personalized level of service.

At BAMF, we make sure that we focus on getting the client connected with our creative teams so that they are in constant communication with them and they can monitor what’s going on. This keeps them in the loop and aids in promoting the customer experience.

remote agency, What Are The Best Services to Offer At Your Remote Agency

These aspects of customer service all depend on extending a little more effort, but they can increase customer retention and add to overall satisfaction.

Reporting

A lot of digital marketing agencies have turned to up-to-the-minute reporting for their clients because it reduces client questions and helps them understand where they are in the process.

Good reporting has now switched from weekly reports and updates to dashboards that can display when certain KPIs are met.

This isn’t only a professional way of doing things, but it also shows clients that work is being done in a timely manner.

Use of Technology

Chatbots, AI, and automation technology, when used correctly, aren’t just going to make your life easier, but they also tell your customer that you are an organization that is on the cutting edge.

Zapier is leading the way when it comes to automation technology because they can pretty much connect all the apps that you regularly use. Say your client sends you a quick email, you can have the email recorded on Google Sheets.

The app can also connect with Autopilot which is software that allows you to visually create the customer’s journey on your website.

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This is critical in the digital marketing world because things are always at the forefront of change. By keeping up with the times, your clients know that you’re a provider of the latest products and services so they can also keep up.

Also, who doesn’t love cool new technology?

The Packaging

Given that you’ve created the perfect product take note of how it’ll be packaged before you send it out to your client.

Will it come with a bunch of extras? Are you including a referral code for their next purchase? Will you be publishing their work in your portfolio online?

These little things are part of the “virtual” packaging of your product. They help in reminding your customers that the amount they paid was money well spent.

At BAMF, we provide a complete LinkedIn package. We consult with you and help you find your niche, we optimize your profile, fix up your content, and set up systems for you to turn your lead generation into a killer machine.

· Aftersales

What happens after-sales delivery is often as important as what happens during, and excellent after-sales services are great to have in a company. They provide extra value at no additional cost to your customers, and they are excellent for your remarketing efforts.

Here’s what:

There are a lot of things that contribute to the “wow” factor during the sales delivery process, and it’s not just one factor, but rather a delicate balance between adding additional value while delivering a wonderful product.

One thing’s for sure.

You won’t have a market if you can’t deliver the “wow” factor.

 

The Best (and Easiest Services to Offer)

A remote agency can offer a large portfolio of services along with what they do best, but there are a couple that comes up as standard services that all digital agencies have in their lineup.

We’ve put together a list of the most profitable and easiest services that you can start offering under your brand. You can start offering them in as early as a couple of days, and you don’t necessarily need to hire an in-house expert to get the ball rolling.

Here’s what you should be doing.

Links are one of the most – if not the most – significant factors for ranking well on SERPs. They signal the relevancy of a site when it comes to a particular subject and boosts its authority to rank better on search engines.

There are different kinds of links from web 2.0s to guest blogs, and they stand as a market of their own. People have been building links for years, and to this date, there’s always massive demand.

Providing link-building services starts with having a list of websites where you can host content that can link out to a prospective client’s site. These can be a list of websites that accept guest blogs for a price, a list of web 2.0s that you can create and post content on yourself, PBNs or private blog networks, editors that you know, and even writers who work for other websites.

Take note that there are different tiers when it comes to link building. You can do guest blogging, reach out to real media outlets, or even get social media links going on.

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Determine which resources you have and price them accordingly.

Although you can get links that don’t have the need for content, useful links will always have some form of content that wraps around the anchor to create relevance for search engine crawlers. For this, you’ll need a pretty good writer which you can outsource the work.

If you find that you don’t have the resources to start link building, you can always do the following to get you started.

· Find a freelancer that specializes in link building and outsource the work to them.

· Talk to your white label partner and ask if they sell link-building packages that you can resell to your prospects. Make sure you customize the packages that they have to create individuality and create different tiers and upgrades that they can buy.

A quick way of doing this is to add or remove a couple of websites from the options that they offer.

· Start doing outreach by contacting different publications and asking them if they’re interested in posting content that you have.

Here’s something you should always remember.

Some websites don’t even require that you have a writer; they could charge you a nominal fee to get some content and your link on the site.

Press Releases (Syndicated)

Press releases are used by almost all types of organizations mainly for two purposes: to promote new products or developments in their companies to a wider audience; and, to gain website authority through the multiple inbound links that a syndicated press release provides.

They’re also one of the easiest things to execute with a significant profit margin.

Why?

All you need is a writer and a subscription with a press release service.

If you’re starting out small, you can write the press release yourself. It’s 600-800 words written in the inverse pyramid format, and there are a lot of templates that you can follow online. (We even have a couple of press release templates for you to look at!)

Alternatively, you could hire a professional writer on a freelancing platform such as Upwork or Fiverr. They’ll charge you per 100 words, and you can find a lot of great writers with competitive rates. A lot of the good ones will have experience writing press releases, and this will come in handy in the beginning.

A press release service will cost you around $40 and there are a lot of reputable ones out there such as AB Newswire. You can do one-off press releases or sign up for a more feature-rich subscription.

remote agency, What Are The Best Services to Offer At Your Remote Agency

The service will allow you to insert photographs, links to the client’s sites, embed HTML code (on certain services), and choose where you want the content to be released. We generally advise that you syndicate it to as many news sites as possible so that your client gets the full power of your press release.

remote agency, What Are The Best Services to Offer At Your Remote Agency

If you’re looking for a more premium service, you can try out PR Newswire. They allow you to measure your efforts and access a myriad of other premium features.

remote agency, What Are The Best Services to Offer At Your Remote Agency

If you have connections with other journalists or have done outreach in the past, you can also send out the content to them, but this could get expensive.

If you’re thinking of profit margins, you can quickly charge your customer up to double the cost of syndicating the press release and the amount that your writer charged you. Depending on your writer’s speed, you can establish a minimum turnaround time of 24 hours – although it’s generally safer to make your clients wait for about three working days.

You can create different press release options and charge your clients accordingly.

Here are a few examples:

· Buy three press releases, for the price of 2

· 1,000-word press release

· Press release with an HTML embed

· Different rates depending on the writer level

We suggest that apart from selling press releases, you should also include them in a bundle or as an add-on if they want content marketing done.

B2B Lead Generation and Outreach Services

The goals for a lead generation campaign usually entail getting a specific number or value of leads in for your client. There are several ways that you can do this for your client using email marketing, LinkedIn, telemarketing, sales discovery, and even landing pages.

The goal here is to bring in potential clients for your client.

This is a highly profitable venture because a lot of lead generation companies can get paid with commissions given the nature of the industry they’re acquiring leads for.

BAMF’s LinkedIn lead generation is one of the major services that we have. We help people and organizations optimize their profiles, generate organic leads, and get clients into their funnels.

remote agency, What Are The Best Services to Offer At Your Remote Agency

Also, we generate a generous amount of leads through LinkedIn itself. This establishes our social proof as a good provider. You can do the same thing with your B2B lead generation services.

remote agency, What Are The Best Services to Offer At Your Remote Agency

In order for you to start a B2B lead generation and outreach service, consider the following:

· Research into your client’s niche – there are a couple of industries like B2B healthcare where getting leads requires specialists and can’t be done easily.

· What platform are you going to use? – Will you be looking for leads via email marketing and lists, sales discovery calls, organic leads through SEO, etc. You can also use a combination of multiple channels if you have the resources for it.

· How will you charge your clients? – Will it be commission-based or by the number of leads that you have.

· Lead nurturing – ask your client if you have to be involved in nurturing the leads as they go in through their pipeline.

A great thing about lead generation is that you can outsource the work to a third party. For example, appointment setting can be outsourced to micro contact centers, and email marketing can be assigned to an email marketing expert.

Here’s one thing you have to remember.

You need to be able to personalize your communications and do your research beforehand. Effective B2B marketing is a game of patience and research.

This is why techniques such as account-based marketing, that are focused on hyper-targeting exact markets work so well, and they make sure to cater, personalize, and provide value to their ideal customers.

Social Media Management

Almost everyone has an account with a social media platform. Over the years, social media has grown to be one of the best mediums to market online, and it’s still a lucrative one if you ask us.

There are different types of social media management that you can offer to your clients.

You can do social media content planning, create content, control accounts, conduct lead generation, create ads, and read customer insights to help companies make informed decisions.

You can even specialize in a particular social media platform in the same way that BAMF has always been a badass when it comes to LinkedIn lead generation.

There are plenty of ways to go about social media management, but here’s a quick guide on how you can build products and services to sell to your prospects.

  • Decide on which platform(s) you want to specialize in. You could do a combination of Facebook and LinkedIn, or just focus on helping people get started on Instagram. Make sure it’s a platform that you have a good amount of knowledge and experience in.
  • Decide on what tasks you want to do. There are full-service social media managers that decide what and when to post, do consumer research, handle ad budgets, and even handle public relations. There’s social media management that deals with pure content production and singular tasks. And, there are those who offer a mixture of both.
  • You can probably come up with different packages to offer on a monthly basis but stick to those that you can do well. You don’t want to dabble in everything.
  • Also get a social media management tool like Hootsuite to help you out.
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After you’ve planned out those two critical points, it’s time to move on to the work that you’ll have to do.

· The first thing that you have to do is build an SOP for each social media management package that you have. This should include building a content calendar based on an organization’s needs, when to have brainstorming sessions with a client, conducting competitor analysis, etc.

· Although you can handle one or two accounts on your own, it makes sense for you to get someone on your team to focus on managing social media accounts.

· If you have a graphics designer on your team – or are willing to have on call for projects – it will help with content creation. If not, you can always take your – or your account manager’s – idea to a platform like Canva to create graphics.

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· Make sure that your account manager has an excellent command of the English language or whatever language your clients’ market focuses on. If not, get a good remote content writer.

· Some clients will want ads, and if you can’t handle that on your own, you should get someone who can do it on a per-project basis.

If you’re absolutely badass on a particular social media platform, you can also offer consultancy services on an hourly basis for your clients. This can include a live audit and suggestions on how they can increase their business.

Since you’re a provider of services, your organization can then be relied on for fulfillment services.

Social media management is a broad field that can include a lot of options for your client. Fill in what you can do for them and make sure that you set expectations and boundaries before onboarding them.

You can easily grow your company with social media management products and services.

Here’s a free case study on how you can create viral campaigns and how you can use these techniques for the clients that you onboard. Once you use and apply these techniques – as well as practice them – you can soon start offering them as services.

You’ll find that getting your client viral is a combination of solid research, proper procedure, and a little creativity. A feat that a lot of agencies can pull off.

You can also check out this reporting template that you can use to show clients your progress on their web properties so far.

Email Marketing

Email is one of the most powerful marketing tools that you have at your disposal, and selling email marketing services can result in long-term contracts with customers. Running email marketing campaigns, requires a skilled copywriter, a robust CRM platform, and the creative ability to test campaigns.

Organizations often turn to email marketing providers to launch lead generation campaigns or to remarket to their existing clients.

Email marketing campaigns can be packaged depending on the purpose that they serve a potential client. You could run it for a certain amount of time or limit it to the number of contacts or leads that you can reach.

Here are a few steps to get you started:

· Analyze your client’s current and previous campaigns.

· Identify opportunities for growth and new marketing strategies.

· Create or use your client’s existing email list.

· Check if your client maintains good email hygiene by checking if emails in their email list bounce.

· Create different types of copy for split-testing. Do not forget to test the campaigns that you want to run. It’s the proper way to run email marketing (or any type of digital marketing in general.)

· Check for results, analyze, and report.

One of the important goals of email marketing is to establish communication flows for your clients. This deals with what happens when someone replies, ignores, or performs another action with regards to your email.

Planning out a process flowchart can be automated with the use of your email CRM tools, but sketching it out is the challenging part.

There are different CRM platforms that you can use for your needs, apps like Mailshake works for individual clients, but if you’re starting to take on larger projects, we’d suggest using platforms such as Mailchimp.

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As you continue to scale, you can focus on the creative planning and analysis of results as you delegate or outsource copy and supervision of email flows.

While you’re at it, make sure that the emails that you send out to your own clients and your own process flows are as good as the ones that you sell. Your prospects also look at what you currently have to check if you’re a good match for them.

They won’t trust you if you can’t get it right with your company.

Search Engine Optimization Services

The world of SEO has a wide range of services that you can offer to prospective clients.

You’ve got technical SEO which deals with backend issues of your site, on-page SEO which is optimizing what you’re showing to both search engine crawlers and your visitors, local SEO – getting companies to rank using local signals such as Google My Business (GMBs), regular general optimizations, doing competitor analysis, etc.

At times, it does seem daunting to even think of offering SEO to your prospects.

However, offering SEO services doesn’t have to be all that complicated.

At the very least, you can offer an SEO audit, which you can get using either an application or a third-party partner – for more detailed results – to do for you, and slap on a sizeable margin.

Boom.

You’ve got an SEO product.

However, you still do need a foundational background in SEO to sell products, and you want to avoid getting into selling really complicated stuff unless you’re specializing in a particular product.

The best way to go about selling SEO services is to sell them in packages.

If you think about it, most of the products we’ve mentioned in this exhaustive list contain some of the well-known departments of SEO, such as link building. There are so many different combinations of SEO services that you can rebrand as packages for your customers to try out.

There are loads of simple SEO tasks that people will pay good money for, and you can always start outsourcing.

Here’s what you can do:

· Offer small one-off packages, to begin with, such as an SEO audit plus some link building and lead generation, or you could do an audit plus on-page SEO. There are a lot of applications that can help you do this.

Here are some, for example:

Screaming frog – allows you to check for technical SEO issues

Page Optimizer _ – lets you compare on-page optimization for your client’s site and its competitors so that you can fix their issues

Don’t do anything complicated just yet; you don’t want to spread yourself too thin.

· Hire a remote team with individuals that specialize in different areas of SEO, such as technical SEO, and pay them per project. This way, you don’t get slapped with high overheads if you were to build a team from scratch. This also gives you flexibility if you have to scale up or scale down your operations. (Note: if you’re scaling up, it’s better to work with an agency.)

· Hire a white label agency to create packages for you. This is the best advice that we can give anyone because white label agencies maintain a roster of specialized individuals that they can draw talent from in case of an increase in demand.

Also, you don’t have to worry about any management issues since they’ll be handling everything.

· Continue building on your experience in the SEO world so that you’ll be able to excel and grow in it. Remember, the SEO world is a highly dynamic one that can change often. It helps if you constantly stay on top of things.

A lot of prospects are also interested in SEO subscriptions, and they’re a great way to rake in a large amount of cash on a monthly basis.

But, more on this in the next section.

Subscriptions

We love subscriptions.

They bring in more revenue – compared to one-off products – and they keep your customers enjoying your services for a long time.

Even if you plan on selling one-off products when you first start off your remote agency, you should consider adding in subscriptions as soon as you can.

Many of the services we talked about here can easily be turned into subscriptions.

For example, you can do 6-month link-building packages or sell press releases via credits that they can purchase from you in bulk.

Subscriptions reduce your churn rate and ensure that you always maximize the customer’s LTV. They keep your current customers with you, and in turn, you can develop better relationships with them as time progresses.

Tiering

Adding in tiering lets you charge your customers more for better variations of your products. Try to implement a tiering system where a better alternative is offered at a slightly higher price.

Packages

We like packages because it provides a more holistic approach to helping a client grow their organization. Instead of concentrating on one particular aspect of digital marketing, you get to leverage multiple points to achieve a common goal.

Packages and bundles will also help you sell high-value products with larger profit margins, and if you’re working with a badass white label partner, this can also bring your costs down significantly.

Add-Ons

When building your packages and products, make sure that you offer your customers add-ons. Adds-ons help you make more from a singular transaction, especially if they are priced correctly.

Say you’re selling B2B lead generation services; you can always put in an add-on such as social media management at a discounted rate. You’ll still make money from both transactions, but prospects could be more inclined to purchase because of the discount, and you make more from the transaction.

At the end of the day, it’s all going to depend on your creativity and strategy. There are a number of products that your remote agency can pull off, but what’s important is to execute well and provide more value than your competitors.

If you’re looking for help to start up, BAMF’s here for you.

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
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