As an agency owner, you understand the differences between project revenue and retainer revenue.
Project revenue is like hunting. Projects require you to constantly be “out there” doing business development, closing deals, completing them, and then repeating the cycle.
Retainers are like farming. They provide consistent, predictable returns, every month. Additional advantages include the ability to staff up (or down) more predictably.
You may have retainers related to PR, content development or perhaps social media engagement. But if you’ve yet to develop a digital advertising practice at your agency, you’re missing out on a massive revenue opportunity.
When it comes to introducing digital advertising within your agency, you have several main options:
Train existing employees
Hire a new employee
Hire a contractor
Partner with another agency
Train an Existing Employee
If you have an employee with the desire and intellect, this can be a great option. Lots of online training opportunities exist, even from the ad channels themselves (i.e. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and LinkedIn).
Pursuing certifications is a great metric of success. You can tie compensation increases to them.
Assuming the employee has other duties, you can slowly transition them into digital advertising, which keeps your overhead stable.
The Big Challenge: Experience.
Without practical, hands-on experience, your employee will likely struggle initially. But if you plan on growing slowly, with trusted clients and smaller budgets, this can be managed.
The Details:
Monthly Cost: Portion of existing salary
Ramp-up Time: 2 to 6 months.
Effort: Negligible.
Results: Widely variable.
Hire a New Employee
You can pick and choose the ideal fit for your company.
You can find someone with experience across all the major ad channels.
The Big Challenge: Having enough initial business to pay for this person’s salary.
If you have a good stable of existing clients that are ready to jump into digital advertising, this can provide some good initial revenue, providing you with runway to make it work.
You can always hire a more junior person to mitigate this risk, but you get what you pay for – a junior person will bring junior skills and experience to the table. So be careful to consider whether or not that’s what you want for your agency.
You can also try hiring someone part-time.
The details:
Monthly Cost: $4,000 – $12,000
Ramp-up Time: 1 month
Effort: Recruiting a full-time staff member.
Results: Linked to salary, ranging from OK to Excellent.
Hire a Contractor
This is probably the most popular option for agencies jumping into the digital advertising world.
You can (in theory) find someone with great skills and experience, and only pay them when you have active work for them.
The Big Challenge: Finding the contractor.
A contractor who is both experienced and reliable is a real challenge. A large number of contractors are “fairweather contractors”. They hang out their shingle as a contractor either as an experiment or in between full-time jobs. As soon as a decent offer comes along from an employer, they’re gone, leaving your agency (and your clients) struggling to find someone new.
That said, if you can find a talented, experienced contractor who’s in it for the long haul, you’ve struck gold! They can allow you (and help you) to grow your digital advertising business to the point where you can eventually hire your own full-time senior employee.
The details:
Monthly Cost: $1,000+
Ramp-up Time: 1-6 months
Effort: Recruiting a contractor (finding this type of person can take a long time…)
Results: Ranging from Good to Excellent.
Partner with an Agency
This option is similar to hiring a contractor, but you get more reliability at a higher cost.
One of the key challenges here is whether or not the agency will white label their services under your agency. That might not matter to you or your client, however, but it’s something to be aware of.
The Big Challenges: Bait and Switch, Cost
If you don’t have enough business, or it’s not large enough, the agency a) may not want to take the work on, or b) put their junior people on it.
Agencies, as you know, have more overhead than a single individual. As such, expect between 50-200% higher costs compared to a contractor.
A big upside can be that the agency has several staff members, each with different expertises. So you can get a really high level of quality with this option.
The details:
Monthly Cost: $2,000+
Ramp-up Time: 1 month
Effort: Minimal
Results: Ranging from OK to Excellent.
The 5th Option: The Wulver Way
At Wulver Digital Advertising, we specialize in offering digital advertising services to agencies. We know your pain – we’ve been there. So we’ve customized our service just for you:
The best of the best options.
Hybrid contractor/agency solution that maximizes return on investment.
No fairweather contractors.
No expensive full-time staff.
Prices are reasonable, and allow for lots of mark-up for your agency. Our partners typically mark up our services by 50-200%.
Broad experience and expertise. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok, Programmatic and more. We got you.
Only senior folks. No bait and switch. The person you talk to you on the phone is the person doing the work.
The details:
Monthly Cost: $1,000+
Ramp-up Time: Negligible. You’re here now! You found us!
Effort: Negligible.
Results: Excellent. Obviously.
If the Wulver Way sounds right for you, reach out.
How the Options Stack Up
Train an existing employee: Pretty easy, relatively inexpensive, but questionable quality.
Hire a new employee: Pretty good quality and reliability, but kinda pricey and time consuming.
Hire a contractor: Good quality and priced right, but very difficult to find and keep.
Partner with an agency: Good quality, easy to execute, but very expensive.
The Wulver Way. Maximum benefit, minimum drawbacks. Custom designed for small agencies.
If the Wulver Way sounds interesting to you, reach out.
