Marketing Retainers Are Cubes

Grow your agency’s retainers by visualizing your deliverables as a cube. Wait, what?

For a marketing agency, having customers on retainers (vs. say, a number of one-off projects) can be a game-changer.

A twelve-month commitment from a customer means you aren’t placing all of your efforts into prospecting and selling new projects each month. With longer client commitments, your revenue now becomes more predictable and easier to forecast. We aren’t living “in-month, biting our nails pushing for a “Closed Won”. You also now get to spend more time, and show more value, to your customers. You can move from vendor to partner.

Okay, so yes. The intrinsic value — and argument for — marketing retainers is clear. But they aren’t going to appear out of thin air. And while creating the appropriate retainer model is a project within itself (tip: begin by applying a percentage mark-up on top of your effective hourly operating costs), a number of agencies struggle with how to properly and appropriately scale out bundled options made available to customers.

Cold Stone Creamery has “Like It, Love It, Gotta Have It”. Starbucks has “Tall, Grande, Venti”. Slack has “Free, Standard, Plus”. So how do you create a tiered set of options for right-sizing customers instead of just “Not Enough Value, Our Sweet Spot, and the Overpriced One”?

Get cubical.

In geometric terms, a cube is a symmetrical, three-dimensional, shape. It has six square, identically sized faces. Or you know — it’s a 3D square.

But how does this relate to marketing retainers and your agency’s current menu of services. In your standard service pack (or menu of services, or list of deliverables), each package should be visualized as a cube; essentially, every retainer has a width, a length, and a depth.

[For the following examples, let us operate under the hypothetical “Bronze, Silver and Gold” labels to your tiered marketing offering.]

WIDTH: Expand your services “horizontally” and add more options to the menu as needed. By scaling up in packages, more items can now be a part of the retainer. Going from Bronze to Silver, maybe now blogging becomes a deliverable where it hadn’t been in the previous tier. Or PPC management. Or creative services. Or lead nurturing.

(i.e. HubSpot, when moving from Basic to Professional editions, adds marketing automation into the software.)

HEIGHT: In services that appear in multiple retainer levels, scale up by increasing the frequency and/or the delivery cadence of these services “vertically”. For example, Bronze may have 2x blogs published a month, but Silver has 2x published blogs a week. Move from 4x Facebook posts a month to 12x organic posts a month.

(i.e. Slack’s Free version allows for up to 10 app integrations. A move to Standard uncaps that amount for unlimited integration options.)

DEPTH: By growing in “depth”, increase the technical aspect and approach to a particular service. Be more hands on with an integration or manage the sync between two platforms. By moving to Gold, add boosted posts or advertisements to the social management service. Include a defined A/B testing schedule on top of your landing page development service.

(i.e. Dropbox Business, when moving from Standard to Advanced, introduces SSO integration for logging in vs. requiring users to manually log ins to Dropbox itself.)

So what are we talking about here? Every retainer option and every bundled package should demonstrate a clear value. Services should be organized for both 1) profit margin goals and 2) an ideal customer fit.

Scaling out retainer options shouldn’t be an arbitrarily wrapped set of services. The idea here is to be able to right-size net new customers while also creating explicit upgrade pathways for our current customers.

Via HubSpot, 51% of agencies do NOT have a plan in place for upselling and retaining clients. By having an easily perceivable menu of retainer options, each with a defined purpose and value, the opportunity is to now create that plan.

Cold Stone Creamery doesn’t advertise “Gotta Have It” as having a slightly bigger cherry. Customers see a substantial size increase (horizontal upgrade), more room for more toppings (vertical upgrade), and a tip gets you a thank you song (depth upgrade).

Time to get cubical.