Does your agency specialize in a few things, and deliver them exceptionally well? Or do your projects span various sizes, budgets, and technologies?
If your average project sounds more like the latter, where you take on multiple projects in different technologies with different budgets, your work is more unpredictable and stressful than it needs to be. Switching gears for every project is complex, making finding new clients much harder than before.
It’s normal for a new agency to take on any project it can handle. You have to pay the bills and don’t have an audience who knows you for what you do best. You may not even know what you do best yet.
As you start to recognize the work you can execute more efficiently, effectively, and at a lower cost than other developers, you’re embarking on the path to productizing your services. This not only streamlines your work but also paves the way for substantial business growth, fueling your ambition to reach higher.
To help you identify your niche web development services, we will explain the process of establishing these productized services. However, before we do so, we would like to walk you through the basics of productized services.
Without waiting much, let’s get started.
What Are Productized Services?
When you sell productized services, you essentially sell a bundle of services that go together. At the same time, you are limiting your services specifically to that particular bundle. You are telling your customers exactly what they will get from your services.
This is very different from what most service providers offer. Instead of saying, “Customers can hire my services for x dollars per hour,” you are saying, “It usually takes me x hours to complete this set of tasks. Customers can hire me to complete these tasks for the corresponding price.”
This approach allows web developers to work on simpler, less stressful projects. You have already communicated the scope of your work, making your projects far more resilient against scope creep.
At the same time, productizing your services transforms your workday into a set of repeatable processes. This not only brings efficiency but also empowers you to handle more projects. It opens the door to automation, allowing for scalable growth. The better you perform your small set of productized services, the less it costs to complete each project overall, giving you a sense of confidence in your capabilities.
Why Productized Web Development Services Make Sense?
A generic work-for-hire web developer can easily find themselves working many different jobs. One customer may need a highly customized eCommerce web development solution, while another asks for a well-organized digital asset management system.
You will have to adopt an entirely different approach to solve each of these customers’ problems. You will face unexpected challenges. You may have to learn how to work with new software, development frameworks, or programming languages.
Solving each of those problems will take time, energy, and resources. They will cut your profits, and if you’re not careful, you may miss important deadlines.
However, as a specialized web developer, you can turn eCommerce customization into a productized service. That way, the time, energy, and resources you spend solving problems retain value over time. The issue remains solved for future customers who purchase the same productized service.
6-Step Process to Productize Your Web Development Services
Here is the streamlined process that you should follow for productizing all the services that you are going to deliver to the businesses.
1. Define Your Service Offerings
The first and foremost thing you should focus on when productizing web development services is deciding your service offerings. What type of services will you cater to? It could be website development, eCommerce development, or custom web apps.
Here is the catch: the best way to define your niche web development services is to know your target audience and their pain points.
Besides this, if you want to go even deeper, you can decide the technology you will leverage for building websites or web apps.
For instance, various agencies worldwide offer website design, development, and maintenance services only on WordPress. UnlimtedWP offers WordPress productized services for digital, design, and web agencies.
It would help if you also decided whether to provide pre-defined packages or custom solutions.
-> Pre-defined packages
In the case of pre-defined packages, you will provide a fixed scope, timeline, and deliverables.
For instance, you can offer different packages, such as basic, pro, and advanced, at a fixed monthly cost.
This removes the decision fatigue from the client’s end and enables you to offer high-quality work consistently.
-> Custom Solutions
On the other hand, in the case of custom solutions, you would have more flexibility and customization to provide services according to the client’s requirements.
2. Standardize Your Processes
After clearly defining the service offerings, it’s time to standardize your web development processes to accomplish those tasks.
It all starts with workflow documentation. Here, you need to outline each step involved in the project, from initial consultation to website development to maintenance. With clear documentation, you can work on tasks consistently and ensure new team members can understand and participate efficiently.
To go one step further, you should create various templates, checklists, and guidelines that everyone has to follow who is involved in the project. To streamline the communication and management of the project, you can choose from some pre-defined tools, such as Trello, Asana, Google Chat, etc.
Proper documentation regarding the workflow, templates, tools, etc., will help you efficiently train employees about the standardized processes you follow in the organization. It will also help you delegate tasks to the right people, minimizing all the errors and miscommunications that could occur in the project.
3. Packaging Your Service
Packaging of your services is the most essential aspect of offering productized web development services. It ensures long-term success for your business. Here, you should bundle services that fulfill the needs of different types of clients.
Moreover, packaging your services enables clients to understand the services and choose the best one easily.
Start by listing all the service offerings. It could be website design, development, maintenance, SEO, etc. Furthermore, create multiple packages to cater to clients with different budgets and requirements.
For instance, you can include website design, development, and basic SEO in the starter plan. In the pro plan, you can provide more things related to SEO and maintenance.
You can even offer a standalone SEO plan that only covers SEO-related tasks. For instance, at UnlimitedWP, we offer white label SEO services, making an agency’s client site on-page compliant and maintaining it monthly.
While designing web development service packages, you should outline all the benefits that users get from them. This will make their decision-making process super smooth.
4. Setting Pricing and Terms
Pricing is the most crucial factor to consider when offering productized services. The fixed-price model works well for your services. The fixed price can be hourly or monthly, depending on your requirements and goals.
When setting the pricing of your packages, you need to ensure that they are profitable and affordable. The question is, how do you set the pricing?
For the same, you need to conduct a thorough analysis and research of the pricing of the competitors. Now, compare what value you are offering and decide the pricing accordingly.
Here, you need to ensure that the pricing you set is not too low or too high. It should value the type of services you offer.
For reference, check out UnlimitedWP’s WordPress development pricing. Moreover, it would be best if you upgraded the pricing based on your expertise and the value you deliver.
When defining the pricing, you should also ensure transparency. Here, you should set clear-cut pricing and terms upfront. Also, you should list the deliverables, timelines, and all the other conditions for the packages.
Lastly, you should have made extensive contracts and agreements. These should specify the scope, timeline, payment terms, and more of the productized web development services you offer.
5. Marketing and Selling of Productized Services
As soon as you have defined the services and their prices, it’s time to market them well to reach the target audience.
It all starts with developing compelling marketing materials. These include a website, brochures, blogs, whitepapers, etc., to showcase the benefits and value of your productized services.
Now, you should define the target audience and create buyer personas around it. This will help you understand the audience’s needs and pain points, and you can tailor your marketing campaigns around them.
You can even research where your audience is coming from, such as email, social media, Google Ads, etc. Based on the audience and your business goals, you can define a marketing strategy.
When doing marketing, you should also ensure that the sales process is simple yet effective. The client should be able to understand all the packages and make a purchase decision promptly. Moreover, you can place a call to action at the right place to urge the client to buy the service and make their onboarding process efficient.
Lastly, implementing a marketing strategy does not end your work. You should check the performance of marketing strategies or campaigns on different platforms. Based on this analysis, you should make adjustments to reach more clients and achieve your business goals.
6. Managing and Scaling Productized Services
After starting and marketing your productized services for your niche, you need to ensure that you are delivering quality work continuously and able to scale them.
The first and foremost thing you should consider is streamlining your operations. But how? You can achieve that by automating repetitive tasks, integrating various project management tools, and hiring a team of specialists to help you move your business forward.
Along with simplifying operations, you should prioritize client onboarding and maintaining a healthy relationship with them. How can you achieve that? By integrating a customer relationship management system in your organization. This will help you understand the needs of the clients and serve them accordingly. You can also send them a friendly email or two.
To scale your productized services, you need to emphasize two important things. Firstly, introducing new services in your organization. Secondly, training your employees about the new age technologies and tools. How does this help?
By introducing new services, you will be able to reach new clients and grow your business. On the other side, by learning new technologies and tools, employees will be able to serve the organization better.
After you understand how to start productized services in web development, we will walk you through a simple example to help you get the gist of it.
Example: Magecart Security Patching for eCommerce
If you have extensive experience creating eCommerce websites using Magento, you will know more about solving problems specific to the platform. You can categorize some of your most popular customization requests as productized services.
When cybercriminals start targeting Magento users with malicious JavaScript executables, your customers will come to you asking for help securing their solutions. Now, you have a dozen different versions of the same basic problem – formjacking vulnerabilities specific to a single eCommerce platform.
If you already have experience deploying a client-side protection service, you will be able to offer it as a product to your customers. In practice, you will repeat the same deployment service for all your customers in a predictable, automated way.
This example relies on you limiting your clients to the Magento platform, and marketing yourself as a Magento expert. When customers ask about competing platforms like WooCommerce or PrestaShop, gently direct them to an agency that specializes in those things (or outsource the project to one that does!)
Otherwise, you may end up deploying client-side protection solutions on several different platforms.
Your Magento customers will need a Magento-specific solution, your WooCommerce customers will need a different one, and your PrestaShop users will need something entirely different. Each approach will come with different challenges and obstacles that you will need to solve.
All of your customers will be fighting each other for your attention, and you will be completely overwhelmed. In the meantime, one of your customers may suffer a formjacking data breach and blame you for not acting fast enough. Not good!
Productized services eliminate these risks by narrowing down the services and technologies you use. If you simply sell an “e-commerce security product” that is compatible with the systems you are already familiar with, you can bypass all of these problems and reinforce the value of your brand simultaneously.
The more you sell this e-commerce security product to your customers, the better you will understand the intricacies of using the specific tools you choose to work with. You will identify ever-better ways to deploy client-side protection to Magento, and gradually develop a reputation for niche expertise in that particular field.
The Goal: Standardized Processes and Automated Fulfillment
Productized services allow web developers to standardize processes and deliver consistent, uniform results. This generates long-lasting value that becomes part of their brand identity and is one of the main reasons customers come to them.
At the same time, productized services are incredibly automation-friendly. Once you start performing a strictly defined series of steps to produce value for customers, you can begin to engineer new, faster ways to achieve those steps. Since you are no longer stuck performing dozens of unrelated tasks for customers, you can focus on the few things you do exceptionally well.
Standardizing your processes and reducing customer fulfillment costs allow you to leverage competitive advantage in your niche. Whatever you specialize in, you can do it faster, better, and cheaper than almost anyone else – and your customers know it.
UnlimitedWP is a leading white label WordPress development agency that combines market-specific skills with a client-centric approach. Schedule a call right now.
