Why Standardize Software and Processes at a Digital Marketing Agency?

To look more professional to clients and make more money, of course.

As usual when I write my posts, it’s late. In fact, at 12:49am it’s later than usual. So let’s dream a bit – together – and go to place where you start your own business. I’ve been there before – where you are now – all the dreams, all the highs and all the lows, all the challenges, all the sweat and all the tears. We are working with digital marketing entrepreneurs every day who are living the same dream.

So keep dreaming with me, and let’s walk hand-in-hand on this post. You have your business, and to get started you call or email every person you know. You get 3 or 4 or may 5 clients because you’re good, and because your friends/colleagues/clients trust you, and most importantly because you can really help them sort out their digital marketing priorities to get the most for their money.

And now, just that quickly, YOU’RE OUT OF BANDWIDTH. You don’t have enough time in the day, even working 90 hour weeks, to service all of your clients. What are you going to do?

If you’re like 90% of the other digital marketing firms we work with, you’re not going to hire a bunch of professional W2 marketers at high salaries. Nope. You’re going to hire a couple of communications majors out of the local university with 1-3 years of experience on 1099 contracts for $16-20 per hour. And somehow, those folks need to be able to deliver services to clients and look experienced doing it (at least if you hope to keep your clients).

Sound familiar? Maybe I’m just guessing. Or maybe I’ve had this discussion 25 times in the past quarter with partners of ours. And so just maybe, I’m hitting a nerve. And even more to the point, just maybe we’re creating software and aligning our product here at Optify to meet those requirements. Now we’re all dreaming together, aren’t we?

You see, at Optify we have built a digital marketing software suite to address your specific needs a digital marketing agency. Take a person with 2 years of experience, give them a few hours of training on Optify, and you begin to standardize delivery of services at 60-80% of the professionalism that you would provide yourself. Just that fast, you can extricate yourself from services delivery. Instead, focus on what you do best – bring on clients and manage relationships.

What do you get from standardizing all of your employees/contractors and all of your delivery on a single platform? Well, I’m just guessing now, but let me take a cut:

• Anyone on your staff can create an email or Twitter campaign with an optimized landing page for far better lead conversion rates for clients.
• Your entire team can provide some baseline SEO services and expertise on a page-by-page basis.
• Your monthly reporting for clients can be standardized on a single platform based on data from a single system, saving you 4-5 hours per month per client (ie more gross margin per client).
• Whether you hire folks with some search engine optimization skills or digital marketers with a background in email/database marketing, they can all provide any service with a high degree of professionalism.

Wow! It’s pushing 2am. I’ve got the Rolling Stones “Sway” keeping me company, and I might just be dropping into a deep REM cycle. So let’s just call it good and hope that I’m really not just guessing. Get in touch on twitter: @roberteleveld – if you want to trade notes or just to convince me I wasn’t really dreaming. I’m out. Rob