Agency Pain Points – Where Do You Want to Spend Your Time: Server Management or Client Management?

As anyone who has their own business knows, running a business is tough. But running a digital marketing business is tough – squared! There’s always something to do. Keeping up with the needs of your staff, the marketplace, and the fast-paced digital landscape keeps you busy all the time. 

Digital business is constantly in flux — if it isn’t a new Google algorithm or a data protection update, then it’s a trending platform or a new cloud library. As much as we love to support our clients, writing content for their websites or choosing the best server to host it on can push our 110% day into overload mode.

Don’t Make Your Agency’s Problems Your Client’s. You Need Partners

We’re good — but we’re not gods, right? We need partners. Functionality, design, hosting, content – it doesn’t matter. If you’re running WordPress websites, you need the best partner to deliver the best experience for your clients and their customers.

Hosting and server management isn’t normally something that causes your clients to sit up and say “wow” though. As an agency owner, increased server speed and performance may raise your eyebrows and get your pulse moving faster, but clients might not share your backend passion. Yet.

They will, however, appreciate the fact that you’re able to spend more time with them solving problems that are important to them. You can only do that if you aren’t in the server room cooling it down with a portable fan while adding extra RAM. (We exaggerate but remember those days?)

Hardware, Software, People, Time – What Are Your Agency Pain Points?

Digital agencies are always juggling. That’s what makes them so great – flexibility. But sometimes, you bend too far over and “knack!” you’ve hit your pain point. Hopefully, you can still make that pitch this afternoon, Bob! Poor guy. 

• We need to stand out from the crowd
• New business acquisition & sales quotas
• Is our range of services adequate?
• We need to prove ROI
• We have more silos than Iowa
• Our software is out of date
• Our hardware is out of date
• Our partners are bottlenecking us
• Bob has this afternoon’s pitch on his laptop, and we don’t know his password!

So, what’s your pain point? Are your tech issues becoming your client’s tech issues? Do clients simply not see the added benefit your decisions are bringing? Or do you simply need more hours in the day?

We can’t help you reach Bob, but it might just be worth setting up a call with the rest!

About half of digital marketing agency professionals worldwide said their average customer lifespan was less than 36 months in this recent research, meaning a huge number of clients aren’t seeing value for their money.

Forbes.com

Your Clients Don’t Care About Your Server Solutions Until They Become Their Server Problems.

“If your clients don’t understand the value of your work, then it’s your job to help them do so.”

We’ve heard this sentiment before. So on top of holding our client’s hands, we have to carry them, too? Let’s rephrase the sentiment:

“If your clients didn’t understand the value of your work, your job wouldn’t be helping them.”

This doesn’t perhaps sound like it’s worth chiseling onto the wall, but bear with us. Pull up one of your client’s monthly service reports. Go ahead. We’ll wait. 

Create a new section with two headings: “Time Spent in Maintenance” and “Time Spent Adding Value.” Be bold, too. Categorize the time as being “time spent with previous hosting partner” and “with present hosting partner.” 

Your example since using an external hosting company for the website:

Server Maintenance 4 Quarter 2021 (in-house solution)
Hours spent on (just) customizations and service: 30 hours – $4500
Hours available for a new marketing campaign: 0 hours

Server Maintenance 1 Quarter 2022 (external solution)
Hours spent with external provider: 3 hours – $ 450
Cost of top-tier external hosting for a quarter – $1,200
Hours spent on new marketing campaign: 15 hours – $2,250
Savings over last quarter – $600

There are Only 24 Hours in Your Day. A Good Partner Can Leverage Those for You.

Five and a half hours seem like a lot. It is a lot if we’re sitting in a traffic jam, but very little if we have a new website to launch and it’s already noon Friday. We’ve all been there. Time is like money. It’s yours until someone else is involved — and then it’s theirs, too. And it just disappears faster. Time and money are flexible like that.

According to the American Time Use Survey, each workday, you’ll spend: 7.6 hours sleeping, 8.8 hours working, 1.1 hours eating, and 1.1 hours doing chores around the house, leaving you with about 5.5 hours left over for doing what you want to do.

LifeHack.org

When to know you can partner to leverage services for your clients:

• You have access to a range of abilities (you have a small team of specialized developers focusing on personalized apps, and we have an on-call network of 150 developers covering everything from games to WordPress sites).
• Your services align but don’t compete (we’re a hosting company, and you build websites).
• You offer a different scope of work but for similar clients (you offer $1,000 entry-level websites for nonprofits, and we build $25,000 campus gear eCommerce site for universities).
• Your services offer added value (we specialize in WordPress website design, and you specialize in WooCommerce).

We never have enough time, and it’s not something we can get more of. That’s why software is crucial to our digital world — it helps automate and speed up processes so we can spend our limited time on other things. Speed wins. If you can do something faster and better than your competitor, you have a better chance to succeed. And you have a bit more of a profit margin.

Focus on those leveraged activities that bring value to what you do. Don’t turn them into a special event either. Standardize those solutions. Normalize the excellence you bring to your service.

Now, are you going to leverage your time in server management or managing your clients? Actually, one hand holds the other. A good partner means you can spend more time with your clients. Great software running those servers wins you that time you so desperately need.

So, What Should You Consider ‘Standard’ When Selecting Your WordPress Hosting provider?

Show of hands? You in the back — did you say “Speed” or “Price?” Okay. Good. Quick tally.

So we have basically four things people look for when selecting a WordPress hosting provider. Actually, these considerations probably fit most products and services. My grill, for instance.

• Speed
• Reliability, a few people said “Uptime” 
• Service
• Flexibility  

No one said price. That’s good. Price is nice, but fast and good are probably better to have than fast and cheap or good and cheap. “Good-n-Cheap Hosting Ltd.” doesn’t sound like the best choice for my client’s website.

We asked ourselves the same question, and we want you to as well. Speed is important, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of everything else. Tesla has a fast car, but if the seats aren’t comfortable and the brakes don’t work, then speed isn’t a feature; it’s a bug.

Apart from being considerably cheaper, standard shared WordPress hosting comes short in comparison to its managed counterpart – that is, unless you enjoy tackling the technical stuff.

techradar.com

You Should Consider Your Client’s Customers ‘Standard’ When Selecting Your Hosting Provider

A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of globally distributed proxy servers and data centers. As content is delivered through a particular server, it is cached. That allows it to be delivered more quickly, no matter from where your website is accessed. Fast content solves people’s problems faster. That’s why we want fast websites.

CDNs power websites, and customers power your clients. You probably don’t consider customers a feature, so you shouldn’t see a CDN as one either. What powers your websites and solves customers’ problems is really a “need to have.” 

In fact, let’s call it “standard.” Why? Content Delivery Networks, like Cloudflare Enterprise’s CDN that powers Rocket.net deliver each of those four items you said are important to your WordPress website: speed, reliability, service, and flexibility. Those are the standards. That’s not what I want; it’s what I need.

With Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, you eliminate the need for unwieldy and sometimes costly plugins in your website’s CMS. Instant speed optimization via off-server optimizations compress, load, and perform image resizing that boosts performance without any additional expense too.

Rocket.net’s WordPress servers are strategically placed in various locations worldwide through our partnership with Cloudflare. Our network is greater than 275 Edge locations strong, giving your site faster speed and enhanced security and enabling access to your website by customers regardless of their location.

Speed. Reliability. Service. Flexibility.

At the end of the day, WordPress is a CMS that ultimately spits out HTML/CSS/JS/Images to construct a website. Each and every asset is cacheable in some form… While there are dynamic needs as well, static content will still be delivered as close as possible to the visitor, allowing dynamic requests to route exactly where they need to go.

Rocket.net

Talk Is Cheap. Let Rocket Show You What The Fastest WordPress Hosting REALLY Means!

Unhappy with the speed of your WordPress website? Let’s talk about how we can migrate your site to Rocket.net, the fastest WordPress hosting available anywhere.