Every digital marketing agency has its particular passions and strengths. Some are especially skilled at on-page SEO, or content marketing, or Google Business Profile management, but few have an equal degree of expertise across all possible areas of client services. Seeking new profit streams typically comes down to:
- Developing new services in-house, which can be a powerful option, but carries a serious risk of overstretching limited internal resources and becoming a “jack of all trades but master of none.”
- Earning a referral fee by sending your clients to other providers for specific services, which can bring in a little cash, but carries the real threat of client roaming; once you’ve sent a customer to a digital marketing competitor, their salesforce may poach the client with their own expanding offerings.
- Offering managed client services via partnerships with trusted brands, which lets your agency increase profits by acting as the reseller of the best products on the market while minimizing resource drains and runaway clients.
Managed client services require educating existing customers about the benefits of a new offering. Some very good products carry the liability of being difficult to explain to the local business owners you serve. Failure to demonstrate value can limit adoption and resultant profits.
Fortunately, when it comes to reputation management services, you’re reselling in an environment with tangible touchstones. Most clients already know or will quickly intuit how metrics like average star rating, review count, review velocity, and review recency must be impacting leads, conversions, clicks, and sales for their local businesses. Real-world outcomes are easily communicated.
And, a new proprietary study by Promethean Research and GatherUp finds that reselling managed reputation management services to clients provides a high-margin, recurring revenue stream with minimal operational lift.
Today, I’d like to share just a handful of statistics from this new report in hopes of sparking conversation at your agency about what a 37% profit increase via reselling could mean to your team in the new year.
A data-based path to increased digital marketing agency profits
In their 2025 Digital Agency Industry Report, Promethean Research found that the average agency has fewer than 10 full-time employees and that 88% of agencies have less than 50
employees. In Promethean’s new survey of 90+ agencies for GatherUp, the median agency reported serving an average of 30–40 clients at any given time. Micro-agencies may have under 10 clients, while large brands may have hundreds, but the norm is for most agencies to be caring for a few dozen clients.
These modest figures hint at why the baseline revenue growth for a “steady-state” agency is often low. Promethean finds that the average agency grew less than 5% in 2024, with “new clients slightly more than offsetting churn”. Promethean’s baseline assumes that a typical agency’s current service menu and pricing is yielding a standard net profit margin of ~14% before adding on any new managed services. Keep this benchmark in mind for understanding the following figures from Promethean’s research:
- Realizing high-margin recurring revenue
If your agency adds managed reputation services to its menu via a partnership with a SaaS brand like GatherUp, this will typically create a new recurring revenue stream with gross margins around 73–82%, because you will generally charge clients more than what you are paying for the software. Promethean finds that this upsell can immediately increase an agency’s annual revenue by 37% in an average scenario, with upside for higher adoption rates.
- Setting the right resell price for your specific clients
Depending on client scope and size, most agencies charge a ballpark fee between $100-$500 per month for reputation management services, though some niche agencies charge far more. Delivery and perceived value can affect pricing. For example, different fees may be assigned to fully managed vs. automated services. Meanwhile, a large dental practice may be well-circumstanced to invest a figure like $200 per month to improve their reputation management metrics, but a sole-proprietor of a coffee stand may only be able to allocate $50 a month to reputation growth. Promethean’s research found that $200 per month is the average rate being billed by agencies for managed reputation services.
For the purposes of their survey, Promethean set an average vendor cost of around $20-$30 per client for a scaled reputation management solution. This is in line with GatherUp’s own pricing model. Thus, if an agency charges $200 for a service it is investing $30 in per month, the gross margin is $170 per client per month, or 85%. Even if your agency only charges a client $100 per month at a $20 investment cost, this yields an 80% gross margin.
Reviewing these industry averages in the context of the pricing you know your client markets can bear should help you establish managed services costs that yield a strong gross return in the first year of adoption.
- Enjoying strong net profit impact by year 3
Promethean finds that by the third year of upselling an agency-managed reputation program, the agency’s net income will typically increase by an estimated 88% or more relative to the beginning baseline. Even where circumstances result in a below-average implementation of the new services, the program tends to more than pay for itself. Meanwhile, in a high-adoption scenario, your net profits can nearly triple versus the status quo. As Promethean summarizes, “The financial upside is significant, whereas the risks and costs are modest and controllable.”
By year three, your leadership should be looking at where to invest this dependable new source of income. Perhaps you will hire new staff to facilitate the acquisition of a larger client stable. Perhaps you will have new resources for proprietary research, A/B testing of digital assets, or new forms of advertising.
Attach rate: your most powerful lever
So many ventures in digital marketing are like wild horses. Riding them requires risk-taking without the promise of reward. As you’ve seen from the above figures, investing in managed client services for reputation solutions is about as far as you can get from a runaway horse in the marketing arena. However, your agency has a major part to play when it comes to maximizing achievable growth and profits.
Promethean finds that client attach rate is likely to be your single most important lever. If your agency can weave reputation management services into every client contract, ROI should improve by leaps and bounds, but not even the best SaaS can deliver agency growth if your team fails to communicate value. To help you educate existing and incoming clients on the critical role reputation management plays in real-world business outcomes, please make use of GatherUp’s original data from our annual survey on the impact of reviews on consumer behavior.
Nearly all consumers understand the traditional 5-star rating scale, but the nuances of reputation management won’t be obvious to most local business owners. Sharing a statistic which reveals that 98% of modern consumers are consulting local business reviews before choosing a nearby brand for a transaction can help your agency communicate the power of your new menu offering and seal deals.
Data provides the best building blocks for the strongest storytelling. To get the full picture of Promethean’s findings on the profit potentials of upsold client reputation management services, download our free, full report.
