marketing, business-plan, business-model, advertising, lean-startupI’ve been running my online ad agency for a year now. There’s only me as a full time employee, and one part time employee in the company. Most of my clients are small shops that are on Facebook and Instagram. I help them do Google SEM, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube Ads, and analyze the ad’s result for better campaign development. I am also writing marketing content twice a month and share it with my customers (not getting money from that, and not many of them read it).
I also give consultant work for people who got banned from Facebook by breaking the policies. I help them to make their ads and posts right. (Also, not getting money from that either since their Facebook page is banned.)
But now I want to grow my business with a new product line, for example, Ready Portal Website, but I don’t have much budget to hire a dev to do this. Besides, there are so many products like that in my country with a huge price war. Customers only look for the one that’s free. But still interesting if the investment is not too high and easy to manage. (I only hired dev from freelancer to do stuff.)
For me, I think I’d like to do something that my customers can use to improve their marketing campaign. For example, SurveyMonkey that helps businesses do surveys. But I can’t think of some other ideas.
Or if any one has different ideas that he would like to share and give examples, I’d be happy to listen.
Thank you very much.
From my experience in the online world, building sites and doing marketing for customers who don’t really understand the value of the service, the most important aspect is to refine your value proposition.
It sounds to me that you are under charging for your services to compete on price. That will be a race to the bottom, just don’t do it. There are many ideas for what you could add on but I want to suggest an alternative. What if there was a way to increase your revenue without adding an extra offering?
Why not optimise your delivery process and build on your pipeline and move your temp into a permanent position with the additional revenue? That will free up your time to play with additional offerings?
The best way to find out what your customers need is to ask them, find out what problems they are experiencing and see if you can profit by providing a solution.
Rather than writing your own website creation platform you could sell implementation services that use existing platforms. Develop a quick start package that is repeatable like “setup 4 main pages with your selection from one of a dozen templates.” Although, that starts to drift from ad agency to general digital agency.
You ever think about creating training products? Such as e-books, video courses related to online advertising? You can then link them to your offered services.
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