Digital products have become a very effective tool for many businesses today. Essentially, what they do is they’re able to package up their skills or services into a variety of different ways making it easier for them to sell those skills and services to their prospective clients and ultimately increasing the revenue streams and bottom line as they do it.
What is a Digital Product?
It’s an intangible asset that can be sold again and again by a business without the worry that they’re going to run out of stock. It could be a piece of media or a tool. This digital product can be created a single time and that single product can be sold over and over or a digital product can be customized to every customer.
The main reason that an agency would want to sell digital products would be to increase the revenue streams and ultimately their bottom line. Most agencies have core services but the work that agencies do is quite labor-intensive, it’s very hands-on, and it’s very one-on-one whether that’s logo design or website design, or brand strategy this type of work is quite labor-intensive but digital products allow agencies to increase their revenue streams. It allows them to sell additional products to increase the average value per invoice of their customers and ultimately increase the bottom line.
There are many more benefits to offering digital products such as adding value; you get to add more value to your customer by offering these digital products, your core services will help them out with some very specific challenges but these digital products can help them out with additional challenges that they might have, ultimately helping them get towards their goal. If you do provide these types of services, it allows you to address those different challenges and help them to overcome those additional challenges as well and you’ll earn trust as you that. Digital products are also very lost cost; there is very little overhead in producing digital products whether you produce a digital product as a one-off or even if you customize those products as you go or if you use a template to do that it keeps the cost very low and that increases your profit margins as well. Let’s dive into the seven different digital product ideas that you can take into your agency.
Presentation Templates
Most businesses have a logo and most businesses do some kind of presentations whether it’s to prospective clients or business partners and what they tend to do is they tend to just grab the logo that they have available whether it’s a PNG or a JPG file and stick it on top of whatever presentation they’re putting together. They’ll grab whatever font they have had and this inconsistency does paint a bad image and whether or not they don’t think to ask the agency to put together a presentation like this or they think a job like this will be too small or they don’t want to pay whatever the reason is a lot of businesses do this. They use PowerPoint presentations or PDF presentations that don’t bring across that brand experience. If you’re able to put together a product like this and to give your prospects or your customers a tool that they can keep that brand experience consistent then that is a valuable product that you can add.
A Stationery Pack
You will find that most creative businesses will provide some kind of stationery to their client along with their brand identity product or brand identity service that they’re providing but you shouldn’t throw in any product with any other product. Your product should be clearly defined and separated. If you are offering a brand identity design then your brand identity design is the product that you’re offering. If they want stationery on top of that then you also have a stationery product. You can couple these together of course and you can add value by adding the stationery pack on top of the brand identity pack but you should separate these products and this allows you to offer products separately. It allows you to offer that stationary pack as a separate product. If you do sell that brand identity design then you can sell the stationery pack as a value add.
Graphics/Icon Pack
Again a lot of businesses will throw graphics and icons in with the brand identity designs that they are doing but if you pull this out as a separate service, if you add a price tag to it, it does enhance the value perception that your client has of this graphics and icons pack. You may well include this in the brand identity design that you’re providing them but you can use that as a value add. You can add that to the fee that you’re charging for the brand identity design. You can throw in a graphic and icon pack and if they see the value price tag to that it might be $499 as an example they’ll see that they’re getting a huge amount of additional value on top of the brand identity design that you’re providing them but again adding value and pulling this out as a separate product adds another income stream to your business.
Media Library
Today most businesses are communicating online whether it’s through their website or their social media channels and although most agencies will provide a handful of images with the brand identity designs that they provide that don’t act as a tool ongoing for a business to use within their communication. If on the other hand, you provide them with a media library whether that is customized or not they have tools then that they can use in the market, social media platform, or that they can use on their website. This could be a media library of 50 images and 10 videos and again that could keep them going for a year’s worth of communication or six months’ worth of communication and then you can follow up with that six months or twelve months down the line to offer them another pack but again another income stream added to your business.
Content Templates and Calendars
Most businesses and brands when they get out there into the market for the first time they are looking for some brand awareness. They want to get out there and engage with their audience. A style guide is not going to help a business owner to manage their brand through communication. It’s not going to help them to decide what kind of social posts to put out there but if you put together a content template and a calendar of the types of content that they should be putting out there it gives them a tool to proactively go out and engages with their audience and to start bringing in leads.
Email and Campaign Packs
Every business today communicates via email. They may be sending out a newsletter, they may have email drip sequences or they may just be communicating ad hoc through their email so you can provide professionally designed email signatures, you can provide email templates for their email drip sequences or you can provide email drip sequences in full. They can just fill in the key details through these templates or you can do it as a done-for-you service where you write the email drip sequence for them and integrate their email platform with their website depending on how hands-on you want to be with this you can provide an additional service here by helping them with their email and their campaigns to help them look more professional and keep that brand consistency going.
Lead Magnets Design
Every business today has a website and if they have a website they’re trying to generate traffic to come towards that website but once on the website they need them to take some kind of action. Nobody just buys when they come to a website today it doesn’t work like that as consumers that’s not what we do. We don’t engage with other brands like that. We want to take the time to get to know the brands that we’re potentially going to do business with and today it’s on average at least seven to eight touchpoints. You can’t expect a prospect to come back to your website seven to eight times before they buy so you need to transact with them. You need to give them some kind of value in exchange for their email address and lead magnets are one of the most effective ways that you can start that relationship off on the right foot so speak to your clients about their audience and about the challenges that they have and put together a lead magnet that can act as a lead generation tool for that business.
Every single digital product that you create is another revenue stream for your business and the more revenue streams you have as a business the more flexibility you have to sell your services and the value that you offer so take the time to think about the challenges that your audience has and what products that you can create to help them with those challenges and these can be sold individually. As individual products, they can be used as value ads or you can upsell your clients later on to increase the overall average value of your invoices. There are multiple ways that you can use digital products, you can use them as sales tactics, you can use them as standalone products but ultimately they all provide you with a flexible tool to increase your revenue as a branding business.
