Many small businesses cannot afford to maintain a digital marketing department in house, but because digital marketing is so essential to success in the Digital Age, most small businesses happily acquire digital marketing services from third-party firms staffed with dedicated digital marketing experts. You have been happy with the quality of service you have received from your digital marketing partner for years — but what happens if you discover that the digital marketers you know and trust are not the ones providing the services upon which your business relies?
Some digital marketing firms themselves outsource specialized digital marketing tasks to more specialized agencies. The practice of selling marketing services is called reselling, and it is more common than you might think. Here is what you, as a marketing client, need to understand about reselling before you go in search of a new digital marketing partner.
Most Digital Marketing Firms Specialize
Digital marketing is vast and complex, and few digital marketers are skilled in every aspect of the field. Though there are some exceedingly large digital marketing firms with massive in-house staffs comprised of various teams of subject-area experts, the truth is that most digital marketing agencies are specialized in a single subfield of digital marketing — and any services they offer outside of that subfield are likely delivered by resellers.
Of course, there are benefits to specialization, for agency and client alike. By specializing, agencies develop an intimate knowledge of a certain aspect of digital marketing, which allows them to deliver high-quality results to their clients. The broader a digital marketing agency strives to be, the more likely it is to be stretched too thin to deliver any real value to its clients.
Reselling Allows for a Broader Range of Services
Because most digital marketing firms are specialized, most digital marketing firms can only provide a narrow range of services to their clients — unless they work with resellers. A digital marketing industry without resellers would be exceedingly difficult for clients to navigate; you would need to find another digital marketing partner for every discrete service, and working with so many different marketing vendors would swiftly become time-consuming and tiresome.
Resellers allow marketing agencies to package certain services alongside those they offer in-house, reducing the number of marketing contacts for clients like you and ensuring that different marketing services are working in concert to achieve results. This is especially important for fundamental digital marketing services, which is why SEO resellers are so highly demanded in the digital marketing industry.
Resold Services Tend to Be High Quality
There is a common misconception that resellers become resellers because their services are not good enough to attract their own clients. In truth, client acquisition and maintenance are extremely energy-intensive tasks for businesses, and many digital marketers simply lack the interest or expertise in completing them. By functioning as a reseller, a digital marketing firm can strip away inessential components of the business and focus intently on the services they deliver to clients — which often means that the services they offer are of a much higher caliber than those provided by jack-of-all-trade agencies.
Admittedly, there are some marketing resellers that deliver less than stellar results. If you are in any way dissatisfied by the work completed by your digital marketing firm, you must communicate with them so they can address issues with their reseller or find a new reseller partner.
You Might Never Know About Reselling
In the vast majority of reselling partnerships, responsibilities are allocated to eliminate contact between resellers and clients. The digital marketing agency you work with typically controls communication with clients to ensure a cohesive client experience and to coordinate services with other aspects of digital marketing strategy. As a result, you are unlikely to realize that some of your digital marketing services were performed outside the firm you hired.
There are some exceptions. In cases of highly technical or specialized services, resellers might request meetings with clients to better understand their goals, their products or other details that can inform strategy. Checkups on project progress might put you in touch with a reseller. However, you will pay your typical digital marketing agency, and any commendations or complaints you have about your service will go through them.
Reselling in digital marketing is more common than you think — but that doesn’t mean you have any reason to worry. As a client, you can sit back and enjoy the benefits of high-quality reselling partnerships with your favorite digital marketing providers.