If you run a SEO or marketing agency, you know your team’s job involves more than just helping clients improve their sites. You’ve also got to be able to communicate the value of your work through regular reports. Showing your clients exactly what you’ve done for them helps your team to stay accountable while building clients’ trust in your agency. And in an industry where improvement can take months or even years, trust and long-term working relationships are everything.

Reporting isn’t always a simple process for agencies, though. This is especially true if you work with business owners who aren’t experts at marketing or SEO themselves, or if you don’t have a designer in-house. Creating professional, easy-to-read reports customized for each client can be overwhelming if it’s not one of your specialties. Without a streamlined system in place, you may also find yourself losing valuable hours every month to reporting.

So what can you do to keep your clients and your team happy? White labeling for reporting is one practical solution. A white label reporting tool takes most of the work of generating reports off your hands, and your clients never have to know that you didn’t create their reports from scratch.

What Is White Labeling?

White labeling, in a nutshell, is a term for outsourcing work. When you buy white label services, your agency hands off work to another agency, a freelancer, or even specialized software. After the other party completes the work, you format the finished product to represent your own brand. Then you sell the work as your own.

White labeling is a very common practice among agencies, and many different services can be sold on a white label basis. Some agencies specialize in producing white label content for other businesses, for example. White label SEO and reporting services are also common.

Sometimes apps can be used for white labeling purposes. This is especially common when it comes to reporting. There are plenty of tools out there that will help you create and send reports with your own agency’s logo on them. You can even automate many of these tools for hands-off, worry-free reporting.

How Can White Label Reporting Help Your Agency?

For most agencies, delivering consistently great work requires focus. It’s hard to help clients effectively if you and your team are distracted or overworked. Using white label reports is one way to ensure your output remains high-quality. Outsource your reports, and everyone benefits — your agency maintains a professional and competent image, your clients are able to understand what you’re doing for them, and your team can stay focused on what they do best.

If your agency doesn’t specialize in design, or if explaining your work to non-specialists isn’t easy for you, white label reporting is an especially good way to shore up your weaknesses. Confusing your clients, as every agency owner knows, is a bad business move that erodes trust. It’s much better to purchase and use a good reporting tool than it is to send reports that your non-technical clients might find puzzling.

Purchasing white label reports can also save your agency money, contrary to what you might expect. Hiring a new employee with the design chops to create reports is an expensive proposition. So is paying for a current employee to be trained in the necessary skills. Using white label reports, on the other hand, lets you avoid both of these hassles while spending more time on the skills you’re best at, which can lead to your agency making more money overall.

Using white label reports can also help your agency maintain consistent branding in all your interactions with clients. You start by building a generic report — one that any agency could have come up with. Then you add your own logo, update the color scheme to match your brand’s colors, and customize the information included in the report. By the time you’re finished, your clients will never suspect that you didn’t design the reports from start to finish.

Should Your Agency Use White Label Services?

White label services make life easier for plenty of agency and business owners. If you’re intrigued by the idea of outsourcing some of your work, here are a couple of things to think about before you take the plunge.

First, consider how important the service you want to outsource is. Ask yourself:

  • Is the service central to your agency’s ability to function and retain clients?
  • Is the service closely tied to your goals for your agency?

For example, if your agency does marketing or SEO, reporting is a highly essential task. Without a good reporting system, you’ll have a hard time keeping clients. Other services like content creation and email marketing, on the other hand, might or might not be essential for your agency. It all depends on what your agency specializes in and how you advertise yourself to clients. Prioritize your white label purchasing accordingly — spending some money on your most important services is probably worth it.

If you want to expand the types of services that your agency offers, using white label services can also be a good way to meet your goals. However, be careful about how much and how quickly you expand. If your agency specializes in PPC, for instance, it probably wouldn’t be wise to expand into a full-service digital marketing agency overnight by outsourcing most of the work. But it’s fine to use white label services to strengthen your agency’s weakest link or to stay competitive in a particular area.

White Labeling for Reporting: The Last Word

Reporting is crucially important for any agency. Your reports are one of the main channels through which you communicate with clients, and they can make or break your professional reputation, so it’s well worth making the effort to find a reporting solution that you love. Plus, you can impress your clients without spending hours laboring over those reports yourself.

Feature Photo Credit: megalytic.com