Mastering the Digital Marketing Agency Profit Margin: Tips for Agencies

Running an agency is tough. Be it for software development, design, or marketing, the demand is ever increasing—as is the competition.

To put things into perspective, between 2022 and 2023, there has been an almost 20% increase in the number of digital advertising agencies in the US alone (IBISWorld).

Between meeting client expectations and balancing hiring and sustainable growth, the last thing you need to worry about is eroding profit margins, or worse: not having a clear picture of where your agency stands in terms of project profitability.

That’s why we respond to some of your most vital questions: how do you calculate your digital marketing agency profit margin? And, even more importantly, how do you increase it?

Digital agency profit margin is generally calculated by looking at your company’s profit (client revenue minus all your operating costs) divided by revenue (commissions, fees, incentives, and other remuneration). Having a high profit margin means that your marketing agency has the space to expand its activities by hiring new staff and investing in new business strategies and technologies, driving further revenue and increase in profit.

So, how can you break into this enchanted circle and start scaling your marketing agency?

Let’s begin with calculating your agency’s profit margin.

As an agency, you’re constantly battling with unforeseen costs and changing budgets, so calculating your profit margins can be extremely difficult.

Remember that client that earned your agency $1000 profit at a 25% margin? Add in an extra few unprecedented revision requests from that same client and your profit drops to $500.

To be able to make informed strategic (and tactical) decisions, first you need to know your agency’s actual profit margins.

In BenchPress 2021, a survey conducted by The Wow Company, only 80% of UK agencies said that they made a profit in 2020, while 14% made a loss and 6% broke even. According to the Wow Company’s survey, average gross profit margins are 44%, while agencies should aim for a gross profit of 50% or more.
 
In the same survey, what was interesting to find was that over 61% of agencies received funding in the same year. These numbers indicate that it’s key to improve how you manage your agency profit margins.

Source: BenchPress 2021

To get an idea of what your profit margins should be, you need to enter all your expenses into your agency management tool: people expenses, overhead costs, and any additional expenses your agency generates. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Entering your employee costs into Productive is one of the first and most important steps towards getting a clear picture of your profitability. Adding in their number of working hours per week and monthly salary will give you their estimated hourly cost.  

When your agency lands a new deal and you don’t have enough in-house resources to deliver the work, you reach out to your freelancers. Add them into Productive as out-of-pocket expenses within the budget of each project.

Overhead costs are not only your fixed and variable company expenses. In an agency’s case, overhead expenses are all your agency’s non-billable costs, too. These can be:

Hiring seasonal support or organizing a PR event as your own promotional activities can be seen as additional expenses. 

Once you’ve got all your costs saved in your agency management system, you need to consider what your utilization rates are and how to form prices that will not only cover your expenses, but increase your agency profit margins. 

Let’s take a look at an example of how John Smith used to manage his profitability in spreadsheets and why you shouldn’t calculate agency profit margins in Excel. 

First, John had all his project budgets and people costs in Excel:

He thought he was handling things well and that he had a clear overview of his profitability. 

Soon, some additional, unforeseen bills started coming in per each project, and as they came, he kept adding them to his expenses:

One day, John realized that he should add in all his agency’s overhead expenses, so he did that, too. But a few months later, what seemed like a project that would earn a 40% margin, turned out to be 18%. Why? 

John dug deeper into his expenses and team’s utilization and realized a few crucial things:

All this led to an even lower profit margin of 9% on this particular project. 

And so John decided: I need to be able to monitor my profitability per client and project in a system that will factor in all my expenses, overheads, and additional costs and generate real-time reports that will tell me what to decide next.

Read Quintica’s journey with Productive here.

To figure out how much you should charge, you’ll want to answer the following question: what are your agency’s actual utilization rates?

Maybe you’re already using a few tools to combine data and figure out your utilization rates. Maybe you don’t have utilization data available at all. 

There’s no unified way of measuring your utilization rates, but one thing is for sure: it’s necessary for employees to track their time for both billable and non-billable work in a tool that will then show you how well they’re being utilized.

Generally, employees in agencies tend to work an average of 120 hours per month, which is around 1,440 hours per year (including vacation, sick leave, training, etc.). By looking into the utilization of your employees, you can see how well they’re performing and whether they’re allocated to the right types of services. If your actual utilization per employee is around 75% on a yearly basis, that’s a pretty good result.

Find out more about the most important metric for your agency business.

Once you have a clear picture of your utilization rates and all your expenses, it’s time to use a simple, yet proven formula to calculate how much you should charge for your agency services.

Basically, what you need to do first is take an employee’s gross monthly salary, multiply it by 12 months, and multiply that number by three. Like this:

What you have now is the gross annual salary of an employee multiplied by three.

Then, divide each employee’s gross annual salary by effective working hours per year. Let’s say the number of effective working hours is 1,440 on average for a 40-hour workweek. When you divide the gross annual salary by hours worked, you’ll end up with the hourly rate you need to charge so your agency can make a profit.

Having a single point of trust for all your financial data, leads, budgets, and project communication helps you increase agency profit margins by reducing the amount of time that typically gets wasted on:

Profitability reports in Productive include your overhead, employee cost rates, and any additional expenses, which give you real-time margins. Continue reading to see how Productive manages all of the above with a single platform for all your agency management needs.

Although there is no surefire road to success, that doesn’t mean that certain steps can make healthy profit margins just a little easier to reach. In the following section, we’ll give you some advice on how you can utilize software to increase your agency profitability and make running your marketing agency easier, with first-hand testimonials from agency professionals and practical use cases.

As a digital marketing agency, you’ll likely have some type of time tracking process implemented. The question is: are you getting the most out of your time management? Using a separate tool or Excel spreadsheet might get the task done, but it won’t get you the same benefits that using an integrated time tracking platform will. For example, Productive can help you connect your resource planning with time tracking, leave management, budgeting, and project reporting. All of this ensures that you’re getting a more accurate picture of your agency operations, including key financial data.

See also: 13 Best Agency Time Tracking Software in 2023

Workflow automation is an easy way to minimize time spent on non-billable tasks. With Productive, you can streamline manual tasks such as billing by pulling budgeting data directly into brand-friendly invoices. You can also create more than 50 agency-focused reports and populate them with platform data, or add additional reports with custom fields. By saving time on administrative tasks, you can open up your employee schedules for high-level client project tasks and improve agency utilization, which we’ve already established as one of the most important profit-tracking metrics.

In Productive, you don’t need to calculate your agency profit margins because profitability reports automatically do that for you. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of how to calculate your agency’s profitability in Productive:

1. Add all your employees and their salaries into Productive.

2. Add in all your clients and projects, including how much they pay you for your services (choose from different options: fixed monthly rates, monthly hourly rates, fixed rates).

3. Add your overhead costs if you haven’t already.

4. Once your project kicks off, your employees need to track their time on a daily basis.

5. Managers will determine whether these hours were billable or non-billable and approve them or request changes.

6. Productive automatically calculates the profitability of each project and client and tells you what the cost of overhead (fixed + variable) is, per hour. It also calculates overhead per working hour, per project, and factors it in—giving you your profit in real time.

Here’s what you should take away from this post:

Without one tool to manage your agency, it’ll be difficult to set your business up for success. Schedule a demo call with our team to learn how Productive can shape your agency’s future.

According to a report by HubSpot, digital marketing agencies have an average profit margin between 11-25%. In 2021, digital marketing services surpassed this average, as a majority of digital agencies reported revenue growth of 44% and net profit margins of 36%, a significant increase compared to data from 2020 (SoDa 2022 Report).

Some general tips for boosting your digital marketing agency’s profit margin are:

According to data, digital marketing agencies tend to fall within a middle range of valuation multiples when sold, commonly reaching prices between 2-5x their annual revenue of $2 million to $5 million (Productive). Some good practices for boosting your agency’s value are:

For a free estimation of your digital agency value based on quantitative and qualitative data, check out Productive’s Agency Valuation Calculator.

Digital marketing is a broad field with many core revenue streams, that can include social media marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, lead generation, email marketing, marketing automation, and more. Aside from these core revenue streams, there are additional ways to ensure a passive income, such as: