I want to talk about selling digital marketing services.
More importantly, I want to talk about why it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
Hear me out.
The truth is, I’ve been selling digital marketing services for a long time and I understand the allure. But it seems like EVERYONE these days is trying to become a digital marketer. Everywhere you turn you see courses, trainings, stats that say that digital marketing is the number one skill you should acquire if you want to be successful in business (and in life).
I want to let you in on a secret, though: Learning digital marketing isn’t all sunshine and rainbows… but if you want to know how to make the most of it, if you want to know how to make it REALLY easy to make money in this industry, I can show you how.
Here’s the truth about selling digital marketing services (and my number one tip for how to be successful):
Don’t have seven minutes to watch that video right now? Let me give you the short version.
If you want to sell digital marketing services, your sales will be in one of these three categories:
- DIY digital marketing (Do It Yourself)
- DWY digital marketing (Done With You)
- DFY digital marketing (Done For You)
First off, let me tell you something important: You are not going to make significant money from people who want to buy Do It Yourself Marketing Services. The more your clients have to do on their own, the less they’re going to be willing to pay you for your time and expertise.
The real money – and often the real stress – comes from selling DWY and especially DFY digital marketing services.
Done With You marketing services are where you sell your coaching, your consulting services, your training programs that have a mastermind where you are teaching your clients your secrets so they can do it themselves. There can be a lot of money there, but also a lot of effort.
Done For You marketing services, however, is the final rung, the one where you can make the most money… and also make your life extra miserable.
Why miserable?
Because if you don’t have a plan, if you don’t have a system, you are going to be selling different services to almost everyone you work with. For one client you may be building a website, for another running fitness Facebook Ads, for a third you may be managing social media for a beauty account. Everything is different, requiring different strategies and time commitments and your success will be measured in different ways.
So many marketers fall into this trap – even the ones who only sell one kind of digital marketing service. Say the only service you offer is funnels or Facebook Ads. It’s tempting to just say yes to every client who comes along, even if they are totally different products in totally different verticals from the one where you have had the most success.
And that’s where selling these services can become a double edged sword.
When someone is paying you to manage this service – especially when they are paying premium prices – they are expecting you to get them results. You can make a lot of money, but if you don’t get results it can absolutely come back to bite you in the form of pissed off clients, refunds, super negative reviews… so you have to be careful.
So what should you do when you want to scale your business but don’t want crappy, upset customers?
My #1 Tip for Selling Digital Marketing
There are two things that matter if you want to sell digital marketing services well and scale your business.
The first is choosing your clients wisely. I know that it doesn’t always feel like you can choose your clients… but trust me, you can. And it’s important that you only work with clients when you know you can help them. So if you know you can help local gyms, make sure that the clients you take on are local gym clients or in similar verticals so you can actually get them results.
The second thing you need to do is stop selling individualized services and start selling systems.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t individualize what you are doing for each client… but you should be selling a duplicatable system that you can create over and over again in a similar way. Something you can continue to do repeatedly with similar results for every single client you take on.
Sure, it can seem boring because you’re no longer taking on new “challenges” or giving individual strategy sessions, but if you want to give your clients (and your digital marketing business) consistent, scalable results, you have to build systems you can use again and again.
If you have one core type of client and one core type of system, then you can bring on a team and really deliver consistent results for everyone you choose to work with. Then you can charge higher prices while still attracting high quality clients.
That’s how you get away from just selling digital marketing services and start making real money in marketing.
