#48 4 Ways To Add Digital Products To Your Service Business
Let me tell you why I think service-business owners have all the advantage in the world to build education products in their business.
You actually have the boots on the ground experience doing the work not once, but many times over. You have a real track record.
There are a lot of course creators teaching other people how to create courses out there because they launched a successful course once. Or social media gurus that have only grown their own account.
I'd rather learn from someone that has helped a portfolio of clients... wouldn't you?
Emily Hirsh says she only feels confident teaching people how to do marketing and advertising in their business because her agency has the track record to do so with $125M in ad revenue generated with an average 3.8x ROAs.
But before we talk about adding digital products, we have to talk about step one which is community building.
Let's get into it –
I find myself saying this phrase a lot lately...
If you're building an online business, you need to be building community.
Serving a community and understanding their journey allows you to build a long-term sustainable business.
As you build meaningful relationships, your business grows.
Is there anything better?
And this goes for service businesses, too – especially in 2024.
You've probably seen this circulating in a lot of "predictions" copy in the past two weeks – the new B2B or B2C is H2H. Human to Human.
Of course as a service business owner you prioritize your client experience. But what we're digging into here is going to go deeper than that – beyond your current paying client roster.
In order to significantly scale your service-business productivity (# of clients / projects) you need incredibly tight processes, systems, and a team.
But the problem is that scaling services can have tight margins, and maybe building a team or scaling an agency isn't really what you desire.
Justin Welsh, solopreneur selling digital products (courses) and consulting, boasted 90% margins in 2023 with $2.317M revenue. That margin is nearly impossible with a (traditional) service-business.
Increase your revenue, margins, and build a sustainable business by adding digital products to your service business.
Here are the 4 different ways you can add digital products to your service business:
01 DIY Method (Templates)
Whatever service you do in your business, you provide the tools, templates and/or process so that your customer can do it themselves at a (very small) fraction of the price.
Examples:
Lumina Creative builds brands and websites for creators. But they offer a template shop so that you can get a website designed for conversion for a small fraction of the cost of their custom packages.
My client Anita Siek is the CEO & Founder of Wordfetti, a brand strategy and copywriting house. But they also offer a membership, The Wordfetti Club, that allows members to get monthly content templates for social and email.
02 Teach Your Expertise To Your Clients
Teach the methodology that you offer to your clients so that they can do it themselves.
This might feel scary as you don't want to give away all your secret-sauce for free, but the reality is that not everyone wants or has time to learn and DIY it. People will still pay for your expertise.
Examples:
Hirsh Marketing offers 3 tiers of service packages ranging from "done WITH you" to completely done for you (VIP). But for those that can't afford to engage with Hirsh, Emily has programs that teach consumers how to do their own marketing ranging from $197 - $997.
This is what I'm doing too – I work with my clients to develop their community journey map and product strategy which starts at $3k. But I'm teaching this live in a small group program for $499.
03 Teach Your Method To Other Service Providers
Teach people with your same skill set how to build a business like you have. This works great when you have a ton of people reaching out asking how you do what you do – you can really foster community here – they want a business like yours.
Examples:
Becca Luna has built a beast of an education business teaching web designers how to make 6+ figures by becoming experts in ShowIt. She teaches the method that she uses in her own web design business to offer "website in a day" services for $9k+
My friend Jessica Shirra is an incredibly successful Fractional CMO having worked with brands like Jenna Kutcher and Lululemon, and now she is launching Fractional CMO School to teach other marketers how to build a fractional marketing business they love too.
04 Build Software (SaaS)
This one is the hardest, most rare to tackle, and riskiest ... but it can have the greatest reward.
Put simply – Develop software based on what you notice as inefficiencies in your service-based business offering.
Examples:
Brennan Dunn is an expert in email marketing and has a marketing agency Slice & Dice that helps clients with personalized marketing. He has used what he recognized as a gap in the market to develop segmentation and personalization software, RightMessage, to deliver personalized experiences across both your email and website.
Amy Sangster built custom Wordpress memberships for clients (like bossbabe) until she realized there had to be a better way to bring together content, courses, and community. That led her to Co-Found MemberUp (affiliate).
Megan Duong, former agency owner, founded Plot Workspace, a project management software for Creatives after being frustrated that she spent 80% of her time on project management and not enough time on creative work.
Your Advantage
Where other business owners start with 0 data, you already have an advantage. You have been serving your clients, understand their pain points, and know when they decide in their journey to book your services.
The majority of your audience isn't ready to buy a service yet (or ever), and that means you have a huge opportunity to serve them with other products.
Leverage everything you know about your ideal community member by analyzing your service projects.
Connect with your customers and foster community by building 1:1 relationships, and many:many relationships (ie. connecting them to one another).
In order to decide what product to build, I recommend developing a community journey map from the data you've collected. This is going to show you what digital products connect to your services.
Charlotte Crowther has a service business helping thought leaders develop their visual mental models. She has worked with people like Tiago Forte on Build a Second Brain, and Ali Abdaal on his Part-Time Youtuber Academy. Her work is stellar.
Here's what Charlotte said about developing her community journey –
“From Becky’s customer journey mapping method I realized I needed to split my services into two different offers, and I now see clear opportunities for the mini-courses I’m going to develop as a result. It has influenced my visual mental model, and therefore my entire business and revenue structure… like holy sh*t.”
If you want to develop your community journey map with me, we kick off Journey Makers Live on January 18th.