Adding local listing management to your agency’s services can bring in steady recurring revenue. But whether it turns a profit depends on how you price it. Charge too little, and your team’s time can cost more than the service brings in. Charge too much, and clients can easily find a cheaper option. The factors below can help you find a price that works.
Choose How to Sell Listing Management Services
The first thing to consider is exactly how the agency plans to sell listing management to clients. The options typically break down into selling listing management as a bundled service with SEO, as an add-on, or as a standalone product. While the bundled service will be included within a larger monthly retainer, agencies can still assign it a price internally. For an add-on service, the price will need to make sense for existing clients. A standalone option needs to provide value without the support of the SEO package.
Review Your Listing Management Costs, Margin and Market
Before setting the client price, agencies should establish the fulfillment cost. It’s important to also consider any discounts or wholesale pricing available for high-volume accounts. Once all costs have been factored in, agencies can decide the margin the service should produce.
Researching competitors will help this process as long as the exact offers behind the price are understood. For example, a competitor’s pricing could be affected by the number of client locations, or might only include set-up fees. This research can help agencies find a reasonable market range for the industry.
Base Listing Management Pricing on the Client Offer
Along with the agency’s underlying cost, agencies should consider the work and service the client will receive. The number of business locations is an important pricing factor, since each location has its own data and update needs. If the service includes reporting and account support, the potential value to clients also increases.
Listing management that is tied to an existing SEO relationship can carry more value because the agency can use its knowledge of the client’s locations and data. Pricing should also reflect whether the service is a one-time submission or a recurring managed service that monitors and updates data throughout the relationship.
Account for the Cost of Managing Business Listings
When it comes to fulfillment, agencies have multiple models available to them. When agency staff is responsible for manual listing updates, account checks and report preparation, then pricing will need to cover labor and training costs.
Those costs must be watched closely to avoid reducing the margins on each client. In contrast, agencies choosing white-label local listing management can maintain their client relationships and control their pricing while the provider handles infrastructure and ongoing listings work.
Show Clients the Value Behind the Monthly Business Listings Fee
What a client is willing to pay often depends on how much of the work they can see. When they can see continuous improvement to their local presence driven by listing management, a recurring fee feels justified.
The best way to show value here is through monthly reports, agency-branded dashboard access and a responsive support service. Agencies either need to build these tools themselves, or work with a white-label provider that allows them to add their own logo and branding.
Choose a Listings Pricing Model That Can Scale
It’s worth remembering that margins that look healthy with a few clients can shrink quickly as an agency adds more accounts. Without automated systems in place, manual updates and reporting take up more staff time as the client list grows.
Agencies working with a white-label local presence management service should make sure the provider can scale with them. Considering these factors early-on allows agencies to grow without steadily reducing margins.
Set the Right Listing Management Price for Your Agency
There’s no single price for listing management that works for every agency. If the final pricing model is competitive, covers the work included in the service and leaves enough room for a healthy margin, it’s a price that will hold up as the agency grows.
Access Listing Management Services for Agencies
Advice Local provides white-label listing management solutions for agencies and local marketers. We help you build a service that’s easy to sell, manage and scale. Request pricing and a demo to see how it works for your agency, or call us at (214) 310-1356.
