Website SEO services agency increases annual revenue by $23K in first year with Vendasta
The Challenge:
With a background in print ad sales, Joshua Wagoner, owner of Thrive Marketing, recognized he needed to make a career adjustment. Wagoner saw that his clients were falling behind their competition. They needed to be ushered into the digital age. This is when Wagoner made the decision to pivot and become a digital agency owner. In this new role, and with access to a white label software marketplace, Wagoner could provide solutions like website SEO services and digital advertising that his clients desperately needed.
Thrive Marketing scaled with website SEO services while expanding their client offering through Marketplace
$23K
Gross annual
Marketplace revenue
93%
Account
retention rate
16
Total paying
accounts
Background
His love of serving local businesses drove Wagoner to leap into the digital agency space. “I had a customer base of several local clients who were familiar with me, and I brought them over to the digital side,” says Wagoner. He had the encouragement of a mentor who founded Thrive Marketing and brought Wagoner into the business.
When Wagoner stepped in, Thrive Marketing was already working with Vendasta. His new challenge was to decide how to move the agency forward. “I didn’t want to just go do something completely different,” says Wagoner. “I like working with local businesses, and sales comes naturally to me. I saw the need to do something different, and Vendasta was the right solution to stick with.”
Objectives
Through a continued partnership with Vendasta, Thrive Marketing owner Joshua Wagoner hoped to:
- Improve sales and marketing processes with a platform that includes prospecting and reporting tools like Snapshot Report and Executive Report.
- Accelerate business growth by outsourcing to Vendasta’s white-label digital marketing agency.
- Provide clients with tailored solutions through an online marketplace that will help them grow.
The approach
Using prospecting tools to show rather than tell
Wagoner relies on the Snapshot Report as his prospecting tool of choice. This sales enablement tool gathers a prospect’s online “health” in areas like SEO, advertising, and social, and scores it in a report.
“Many people have no idea how their business would stack up in any one of these reports, and they’re surprised when I show them their online performance is nowhere near what it could be. The Snapshot Report really opens up the conversation to discuss website SEO services and products like SEO Network and Reputation Management,” says Wagoner.
Becoming the local digital solutions expert with Marketplace
His ambition to succeed pushed Wagoner to learn the ins and outs of Vendasta’s Marketplace and how to best leverage resellable products and services to not only generate more revenue but to help his clients succeed.
“When I started in this business with Vendasta, I was overwhelmed by Marketplace. But I’ve learned some big lessons through this, like understanding what’s really important and how to prioritize. It’s been a journey of learning,” says Wagoner.
“Once you familiarize yourself with Marketplace, you can start to pick and choose the products each individual client needs. With a little bit of research, I can find almost any solution for my clients and tailor products and services to their needs.”
Joshua Wagoner
Owner, Thrive Marketing
Execution
Outsource website SEO services to grow at scale
Thrive Marketing relies on outsourced white-label web design services to accelerate their growth. This saves both time and money for a small agency that’s aiming high with the goal of increasing annual revenue to over six figures.
“We lean on Vendasta’s website SEO services, and I love to have that as a selling point for my clients. I get to tell them we’ll not only build you a website, but it comes with 12 months of free site maintenance. So, just tell us what you need, and we’ll get it done,” says Wagoner.
Closing more deals with Vendasta’s team
“It’s like having an insider on your team,” says Wagoner.
The account management team at Vendasta is assigned to partners to help ease them into the functionality of the platform, tools, and Marketplace. Thrive Marketing leans on account managers whenever they need to better understand a new feature, learn how to better use the platform, or determine how other agencies use Vendasta.
Increasing client retention with built-in reporting tools
“With Executive Report, my clients can see where things are working out and where there’s room for improvement,” says Wagoner.
Thrive Marketing also leverages this tool to assess upselling opportunities while also providing their clients with the best solutions to suit their needs.
Thrive Marketing’s best-selling products
Wordpress Hosting
Build fast, secure, and beautiful WordPress websites for your clients’ businesses.
Citation Builder
Harness the power of major data aggregators networks to amplify local visibility.
Listing Sync Pro
Instantly enhance the accuracy of local business listings, protect from 3rd-party changes, and suppress duplicate listings with Listing Sync Pro.
The result
$23K
Gross annual
Marketplace revenue
93%
Account
retention rate
16
Total paying
accounts
Conclusion
Wagoner is enthusiastic to add more clients to his sales funnel and grow his business. “I’ve seen substantial growth since I’ve started in this business and am looking forward to hitting that next level.” He’ll be increasing his cold outreach efforts to achieve this.
His advice to other agencies new to Vendasta: “Stick it out. Embrace the learning curve and the journey, and realize that it is set up for you to succeed,” says Wagoner. “You do have to do the work, but it’s worth it. Especially when you see how happy your clients are with the work you’re doing.”
This is what partnering with Vendasta feels like
195 Reviews
4.4 out of 5
191 Reviews
4.8 out of 5
120 Reviews
4.4 out of 5
“Vendasta makes it easy to provide full-service solutions to clients. The best feature is the breadth and quality of providers that they have attracted to the Vendasta Marketplace. You can build a business confident that you’re offering ‘best of breed’ solutions to your clients. Plus, the Vendasta platform allows you to pull it all together and present an impressive single dashboard presentation. In addition, Vendasta provides partner support to help you continually grow and innovate.”
Bill B.
Principal
“Vendasta is an amazing company and the platform is better than any other on the market. They provide world leading training and support. Their lead generation tools are very intelligent and work to get signups for your agency. This is a company that you can trust and create a truly unique and powerful marketing agency in partnership with. The support is second to none and they do what they do with passion, focus and expertise to ensure that you succeed.”
David R.
“What I appreciate most about the platform is the broad choice of tools and customization. But in truth, it’s the people. SaaS is trash. Add great people to a solid platform and it turns into a solution. Vendasta account team, product specialist and executives [are] all here to support their agency clients, makes it my go-to choice.”
Mathew
CEO in the US
“I love Vendasta because the entire software system is so streamlined. Everything is incorporated into one platform that helps agencies grow and scale. Their software platform gives your clients a portal to manage everything related to their business marketing online.”
Mitchel T.
Principle Consultant
“The Vendasta platform helps me grow my digital marketing agency by providing everything I need to succeed, including a Partner Center, Task Manager, Vendor Center and built-in CRM.
Their online marketplace has over 200 digital solutions, allowing me to provide all of the digital tools and services that my clients will ever need. It also allows me to add my own products and services to my online store, enabling me to include up-sells and additional value-added services to my clients.”
Michael K.
Owner
“Having a product offering that is well-rounded and possibly unique from my local competitors definitely gives me an edge. Having more tools also helps me become more confident. Highly recommend.”
Justin
CEO in the US
“I highly recommend Vendasta to anyone operating a digital marketing agency. They help you focus on growing your business by taking over the heavy lifting of doing the detail work for you. You can stay focus on the big picture and not get bogged down in the trenches. Without them, I would never have been able to scale my business, we stayed lean but expanded our offerings.”
Scott K.
“Vendasta’s agency tools have allowed us to provide our clients the tools and services they need to stay on top of their online reputation and social media. We’ve gained market share from our competitors, provided our clients with the latest technology to be successful online and increased our retention of clients to over 97% after their initial contract terms.”
Terry B.
CEO
“The main benefit is that I can run a business without a bunch of employees. Even when I am big enough to need a few employees I will still need far less than if I were to run the business without Vendasta.”
Thomas F.
Agency Owner
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