Resell digital marketing to survive the recession

Successfully weathering the ebbs and flows of the economy is a challenge for most businesses, and those selling digital solutions are not exempt from the effects of a downturn. Budgets are tightened, SMBs can disappear, and competition for the best-paying clients increases. Could you resell digital marketing to overcome these challenges?

Read "How to survive a recession: The agency playbook" and gain the actionable strategies, tactics, and checklist your agency needs to adapt in tough economic times.

Every recession presents new opportunities. The recession we’re experiencing today comes hot on the heels of a pandemic that led many industries to seriously refocus their attention toward succeeding online. This means that if you resell digital marketing, you’re in a position not only to survive the recession but to thrive by meaningfully growing your business.

Let’s get into the key reasons why digital marketing needs to be on your radar as a software reseller.

The silver lining

While history may not repeat itself, it does rhyme: past recessions have proven that businesses that invest in advertising through economic downturns vastly outperform those which cautiously cut back their spending. This played out in the mid-seventies, the early eighties, and again in the 2008 recession, by which point digital marketing was already an important component of many businesses’ overall marketing strategies.

When competitors reduce their spending on advertising and marketing, they effectively leave market share open to the businesses that continue to promote themselves. By positioning your digital marketing products and services to clients as a powerful tool that can help them survive the recession and come out stronger than their competition on the other end, you can reframe the recession as a digital marketing opportunity.

The result? You can resell digital marketing services to more clients, helping you grow your business even during this downturn.

Resell digital marketing: The low-risk way to provide marketing services

You may be able to sell more digital marketing services by understanding how to frame them as a recession must-have, but delivering those services can get costly if you’re using an in-house team. Hiring and onboarding are both time-consuming and expensive, especially as an inflationary environment puts upward pressure on wages.

That’s why reselling these services is a much better—and financially savvier—approach. When you resell digital marketing, you don’t incur any costs for your business until you’ve actually secured a sale. Only once you land a new digital marketing client do you pay for the SaaS or white-label team required to deliver the services. In other words, the costs aren’t upfront. They only come once you know you’ve made a sale, so you never have to be in the red.

In a recession environment, choosing to resell digital marketing products and services rather than fulfill them in house is a low-risk (not to mention low-stress) approach.

Expand your portfolio of services

Even if there wasn’t a recession to worry about, diversifying your portfolio of services available to your clients is an excellent way to differentiate yourself from the competition, entrench yourself as an important partner to your clients, and boost your revenue.

Competition in the digital solutions space is nothing to scoff at, with new MSPs, digital agencies, and media companies entering the industry regularly. To build lasting relationships with existing clients, and more easily land new ones, having more services to offer them as a one-stop shop is increasingly important.

If you don’t already resell digital marketing, it should absolutely be a part of your portfolio.

Why? Because no matter who your client base is, they can benefit from digital marketing. Whether they’re a small local mom-and-pop operation that could use a local SEO boost or an ambitious ecommerce business angling for wider reach, digital marketing services will play a key part in helping them meet their goals.

With additional services in your arsenal, you can reach new audiences and upsell your existing clients, increasing their lifetime value to your business.

Generate recurring revenue

The only thing better than an injection of revenue from selling a new service or landing a new client is securing recurring revenue for your business.

Especially during a recession, being able to forecast a portion of your revenue accurately is critical. You can ensure that you can reliably count on it coming in month after month. This can give you peace of mind through a tricky economic period.

If you resell digital marketing, you can offer services that lend themselves particularly well to long-term, recurring revenue. For example, both SEO and PPC campaigns require long-term, steady investment to be as successful as possible. Reselling these digital marketing solutions can help you secure recurring revenue from your clients.

Offer something for every budget

We’ve already mentioned that one of the key challenges of a recession is that purse strings tend to tighten. It’s only natural to expect that, as uncertainty looms in the economy, SMBs will tend to be more cautious with their spending.

However, you can easily resell digital marketing services for a range of budgets, offering solutions for those who want to be more conservative with their budgets as well as those who have the room to spend more on marketing.

Digital marketing can encompass a wide range of projects, from one-off technical SEO and periodic content creation to major SEO and PPC campaigns. Consider creating several packages at different pricing tiers in order to have an offering for every budget in your client base.

Digital marketing solutions you can resell

There are reseller partner programs for a variety of digital marketing services, making it easy to create packages that meet your clients’ needs. Here are some reseller programs to consider:

• SEO products – Resell SEO, such as link building and SEO platforms, or resell local SEO, such as review and listing management.
• Advertising – From PPC ads to custom videos, you can deliver a variety of advertising solutions as a SaaS reseller.
• Social media management – An essential but time-consuming component of digital marketing, you can take this task off your clients’ plates with reseller programs.

As a white-label software reseller, you can truly put the delivery of your services on autopilot with reliable, experienced experts working for your clients on your behalf to help you survive a recession.

Don’t lose market share

If you don’t resell digital marketing, you’re setting yourself up for a more challenging recession period. Marketing solutions are needed by your clients regardless of the economic climate, and during a recession, they can actually provide an important hedge against losing market share.

As a SaaS reseller, offering digital marketing services can provide you with recurring revenue that will make navigating the recession much less painful than it needs to be.