By Scaling is a universal issue—no matter the size of your agency. Every company wants to scale, whether it be in revenue, growth, resources, client base, or other areas. Yet, you're always going to be restricted in one way or another: whether it be by time, money, people-power, or with knowledge. So how do you really break through those boundaries, and get everything you want, without capping your limited resources?
By using a white label agency.
Learn about white-label agency fulfillment on social, websites, email, and more.
Scaling: Getting More for Less
Thousands of companies are turning to external fulfillment services to manage their growth. Finding the right fulfillment option, like a white label agency, is your ticket to more for less.
Hold up—what exactly do I mean by that? A variety of things.
- More money for less added work: The more you can outsource your work to other expert team members, the less salary, sick time, vacation, and other costs to your agency you can avoid. Plus, you gain what your clients pay for the services.
- More offerings for clients with less tedious fulfillment
- More experts under your brand with less salary and overhead costs: The more expert knowledge you can add to your team, the better you can serve your clients, and the more solutions you can offer them.
- More time to focus on running your business with fewer distractions: The more you free up your time, no matter the size of your agency, the more you're able to focus on your core business model and attend to all the other tasks that fill your schedule.
- More resources at wholesale costs, which you can resell at your own price point
Ready to start outsourcing? I thought so!
But not so fast, you can't just Google “outsourcing work” and pick the first overseas fulfillment team you find. You need to consider your options, so you're not sacrificing quality of work and reliability. White labeled service fulfillment through a specific agency is likely the best bet for your marketing agency, but there are a few other outsourcing options you can consider for your fulfillment services.
White Label Agencies vs. Other Outsourcing
There are a few options an agency can consider when exploring fulfillment services and offering them to clients.
- Hiring in-house experts
- Outsourcing work to freelancers
- Outsourcing fulfillment overseas
- Using a white label agency
Here's a little breakdown of each one:
While each outsourcing option has its merits, a white label agency is a reliable team of experts that adds to your company brand and allows you to grow quickly. Who doesn't want that?
Outside of the initial onboarding process, there's little-to-no time wasted with the agency, and work is done quickly and fulfilled by local industry experts.
What is a White Label Agency?
A white label agency is a team of people that work under your brand to fulfill your services. Most often, it is a marketing agency that handles the fulfillment work of social media management, digital advertising, SEO, or other digital marketing solutions that your agency offers. All the fulfillment work is done by the external team, but the team is disguised as being part of your brand. A reseller agency can buy this service from a white label service provider.
Here's a visual example to show how it works:
- Vendasta, a white label service provider, sells their white label service team to SweetRentals Agency to re-sell.
- SweetRentals Agency then rebrands the services with their own logo and sells it to a local business.
- Team from Vendasta fulfills the digital services the local business purchased from SweetRentals Agency under the SweetRentals Agency brand.
With these white labeled services, any company can add a variety of digital marketing services to their basket of offerings and be confident in the level of expertise that will be provided to their clients under their own brand.
Related reading: The Ultimate Guide to White Label
What companies can benefit from a white label agency?
Since the agency is white label, it means that all the expertise, skills, knowledge, and work fulfilled by the agency is being done under your brand.
A white label solution is perfect if you:
- Are a startup with no fulfillment team or expertise
- Are a large company with many clients that need fulfillment
- Want to offer new products and services you're unfamiliar with
- Want to scale but are bogged down by tedious fulfillment
- Want to expand your team without all the overhead costs
Why use a white label agency?
There are a lot of reasons to use white label agencies, and one of the biggest ones is that white label agencies are a ticket to more money/growth/services/time for less overhead/work/stress.
These white label service fulfillment agencies can have an entire team full of social media managers, bloggers and writers, reputation management specialists, website designers and developers, and so much more.
5 Benefits of a White-Label Agency
Here's a breakdown of the main benefits for using a white-label agency.
1. It costs less
Using white labelled services through a team of agents is a set monthly cost for an entire team of experts. Hiring a social media manager, website designer and developer, paid advertising specialists and more can add up quickly in terms of salary, benefits, and training costs. And that's all if the hiring goes well.
A bad hire can cost a company quite a bit. According to FastCompany, almost 30% of U.S employers said that a bad hire costs their company more than $50,000. Compare that to the cost of a white labelled agency (somewhere in the ballpark of $500-$2500/month), and you know where to put your money.
2. You can expand your service offerings quickly and easily
Many agencies start out in the biz doing one thing, maybe reviews or social marketing. Then you land some bigger clients but they leave because they also want listings and SEO. You want to become more of a full-service agency to keep your clients and offer your clients more value, aside from continually attracting more business. Well, the more you can do, the more you can bundle and provide value for your clients. You can be their one-stop-shop and reduce some of that vendor clutter they have been facing.
Related reading: How to Sell Website Services to Local Businesses
3. It allows for explosive scaling and growth
When you use white label digital services, you just bill the client. Your dedicated white label digital agents onboard your new clients with branded calls and emails, and handle all customer service duties in relation to the services. The hired agency does all the customer service, fulfillment, and heavy lifting.
4. It frees up your time to focus on your core competencies
When you have an agency handling your fulfillment work, you can focus on running your business. You can focus on things like selling, building your book of service, and handling your other service options that your chosen white label team doesn't specialize in. Make a name for yourself in the industry with your brand, while a team of digital agents handles the tedious service fulfillment.
In Hubspot's State of Inbound 2017 report, 70% of companies said that converting leads into customers and closing more deals was a top priority for the year. Additionally, 55% stated website traffic growth as a top priority. By letting external agents handle your fulfillment work, you'll be able to refocus your attention on matters like selling and traffic growth.
5. You expand your team of trained experts
You don't have to deal with the overhead of additional resources such as taxes, insurance or other overhead. By hiring the services of an agency, you don’t have to deal with turnover of employees, or the cost to acquire and retain new employees. And maybe most importantly, you don't have to deal with HR issues, hiring, training and professional development on employees outside your realm of specialty.
A study by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte found that 23% of marketers said they needed to develop a stronger talent model, with recruiting, hiring, and development of their employees to reach digital maturity. By hiring a full team with a white label model, you skip the problems of hiring in-house and recruiting, and get straight to the benefits of having a team of highly-qualified experts working under your brand.
Hiring Vendasta's white labelled agency is like signing one paycheque per month, and receiving the dedicated services of a team of 50+ digital experts. As we work with 1,700+ agencies, quality of our work is also a top priority when it comes to fulfillment for our partners.
Agency Case Study
One of Vendasta's fastest-growing partners used our white label service fulfillment through our in-house agency to scale from a basement startup to a full-service agency in two years. In 2014, Hard Rock Media was a twinkle in an entrepreneur’s eye. Two years later, they're a full-service online reputation management company with over $1 million in revenue.
Hard Rock Media utilized Vendasta's white label digital agency services to scale up their services without exponentially increasing costs. By adding the white label agency to their team, they could effectively sell more digital solutions to local business clients with less workload. Vendasta’s in-house digital agents and copywriters managed the fulfillment of their digital offerings, such as correcting listings, and monitoring and responding to reviews their clients’ businesses received. The Vendasta digital agents worked under the Hard Rock Media brand, expanding the Hard Rock Media team, without the increased costs of salaries, benefits, vacation time, and other overhead expenses.
Combining Vendasta's Reputation Management with Digital Agency allowed Hard Rock Media to hit their target market on a massive scale, while keeping costs down. They are now able to serve a larger client base, and hand off each client to Vendasta's Digital Agency for fulfillment of the reputation management services.
By outsourcing fulfillment of services to the Vendasta team, they were able to achieve:
- 126% growth of reviews generated in 2 years
- 112% growth in reputation management accounts in 2 years
- 84% growth in reviews per SMB in 2 years
Get the full case study.
How A White Label Agency Works
How the agency works under your brand can vary depending on the type of services they're fulfilling, but these agents will generally have an email address associated with your brand, and communicate with your customers on behalf of your company.
For example, here's how Vendasta's agency adopts your brand.
- Discovery calls: A call to discuss how you want your brand to be communicated. We will follow your guidelines as we represent your company as a digital agency.
- White label set-up with your branding: Create custom white label materials such as email addresses, signatures, and a toll-free number.
- Client onboarding: After you close a new client, our agents will walk clients through the services you've sold them. We discuss social language and review tone, and get credentials for account(s) access, so we can get to work.
- Ongoing ROI reporting: Receive monthly full-scale ROI reports on the productivity of our digital agents' activity, as well as your clients’ progress. This breaks down exactly how our agency services are providing value to your clients, so your clients know that their dollars are being well spent.
In the State of Inbound 2017 report, 39% of companies list “proving the value of our marketing activities” as a top marketing priority for the year. You can cross this off the list with a white label agency!
A white label agency is a great option for companies that make growth as a priority. The services an agency team fulfills can be a variety of things, from social posting to digital advertising campaigns. If you pick the right white label service provider to partner with, you can be sure that your work, clients, and reputation are in the right hands.
Checkout the full success story of a partner that used our white label services, then sign up to add a full team of digital experts to your brand.
