Consider the consequences of leaving online reviews, both positive and negative, unattended:
How should digital marketing packages be priced?
Pitching and selling digital marketing packages is often straightforward given business owners often understand the reality of why their online presence is important.
The harder part for agencies is how to tailor and price their service offering in order to meet the requirements and budgets of local business owners.
Rattanavong suggests digital marketing packages can be built in three ways, outlined below:
Package #1: Do-it-yourself (DIY)
The simplest and low touch of all service offerings, DIY is where an agency simply re-sells foundational solutions (Reputation Management, Listings Builder, and Social Marketing) to a client, educates them on how to best use it, sets up one-off response templates and leaves the restaurant to its own devices.
Vendasta’s partners typically price DIY packages at $99–$199 per month and aim to capture a profit margin of about 50 percent.
“This is affordable for the business owner and doesn’t require any extra work such as responding to reviews or crafting social posts,” Rattanavong says.
Package #2: Do-it-with-me (DIWM)
In DIWM, an agency handles some of the actual workload for the restaurant. This may include:
Because someone from the agency is required to handle these tasks, the price needs to be higher. Typically, Vendasta’s partners charge at minimum $499 per month for DIWM and aim for a margin of over 50 percent.
“The advantage of DIWM is that it’s not that much more labor intensive, but it can add to revenue and margin for the agency because they’re doing some of the work themselves,” Rattanavong says.
Package #3: Do-it-for-me (DIFM)
DIFM are the highest-return, highest-effort digital marketing packages as they entail handling every digital marketing task for the restaurant.
This offering could include complex tasks such as:
“While DIFM offers the highest earnings potential, an agency needs to carefully think through whether they have the time and capability to deliver this level of service to one client,” Rattanavong says.
“Do you have the ability to fulfill the work? Do you have content creators? Can you hire them or outsource that work to someone reliable? Do you have the time to proactively engage the client on their marketing strategy?”
The bottom line: if you offer it, make sure you can fulfill it.
3 Tips for selling digital marketing packages to restaurants
The restaurant industry is an attractive niche to target for agencies because there are many restaurants, cafes, and pubs out there, and business owners often don’t have the time to manage their own digital marketing.
In that regard, Rattanavong offers the following tips to help your agency build its reputation and scale its customer base around the food industry (and not take that juicy recurring revenue for granted).
One of the easiest ways to sell digital marketing packages to restaurant clients is to hire sales teams who have worked in the food industry and understand its challenges.
“If you decide to become vertical-specific, get specialists for those accounts who know how restaurants operate and can empathize with business owners during those sales conversations,” he says.
“If you have staff who know the industry and customers from the same industry, you can scale your sales messaging and how you position and calibrate tasks like review responses and social posts to be similar. That helps you become more efficient in managing those clients,” he continues.
Tip #2: Regularly communicate and provide performance updates
Restaurants, like gardens, need constant care and watering.
Don’t be that agency that sells digital marketing packages, charges money, and then does nothing after, even if you sell something as simple as a DIY package.
“Show them the work you’re doing for them. If you provided a DIWM or DIFM package, show them that you responded to 500 reviews, published 50 social posts and listed their restaurant across 10 new websites.”
Importantly, tools like Executive Report can be automated to be sent monthly to clients to provide proof-of-performance reporting around improvements to their online presence, ratings, quantity of reviews, and more.
Tip #3: Be prepared to upsell
If you’re doing a good job for your clients, being proactive with digital marketing packages and ideas, and regularly proving the return on investment of your work, it’s only natural that your clients will want to deepen their relationship with you (and refer you to others).
“You always want to be one step ahead of your clients and think about what they need in the future. That’s how you cement your position as the trusted local expert they can turn to for those additional services,” Rattanavong says.
Leave a Reply