How White Label Marketing Creates Better Business Models: Fresh Insights
Is it time the world forgets about traditional business development scenarios? In the near future perspective, it may be very likely. The past decade brought new AI, ML, and big data-based integrative technologies and systems, that gradually transformed business models in ad tech and martech ecosystems.
Are you planning to build your own ad tech solution in 2020? If so, we have two pieces of news for you. They are both inspiring and challenging at the same time. Like any technology-heavy business, AdTech or MarTech project requires the involvement of highly-skilled development professionals, designers, Q/A testers, tech support, and integration specialists. Furthermore, when such business matures, you will most certainly need to streamline and organiSe client workflow by commissioning it to the account managers.
Even if you have already assembled or outsourced the team and developed a step-by-step implementation roadmap, there’s still the possibility that it runs counter to your expectations and delays the official market launch.
Lighten up; precisely, for this reason, the market has recently developed an innovative collaboration mechanism, that enables rapid deployment of ad tech and martech solutions that easily measure up with already positioned and competitive ones.
White label: outsourcing results instead of people
White label is a cooperation model that typically works like this: some big ad tech or martech provider has already developed a technological platform and has a large pool of customers. At some point, this company decides to go B2B and sell its technology to other businesses as a product, sure thing without a label.
Such sharing is beneficial for everyone; while the company obtains an additional source of revenue, the smaller brands can build the product of their own based on tested and tried time-proven tech core. The model can be applied to numerous industries, including ad tech and mar tech niches: SEO, SMM, email marketing, programmatic advertising.
But why exactly do ad tech startups and entrepreneurs chose this model? There are several reasons for this. For starters, unlike self-development, white-label provides already built, designed, tested, and licensed technology ready for quick customisation retouch and launching.
Sure, there’s also an option to outsource professionals for platform building, but then again, white-label will always mean stable work and good quality of the product, which can’t be guaranteed in case you build it from scratch.
Big brands can also afford to buy entire tech platforms from other companies, just as Google did when it acquired YouTube back in 2006, or Intuit that bought Mint.com in 2009, and so many others. Still, this is not an option for smaller companies since already positioned solutions are more expensive (cost of marketing, branding, reputation raising).
White label is also flexible in terms of establishing the payment model, terms and conditions, modifying which on positioned platform entails risks of customer dissatisfaction as well as migration.
With white-label, the company can enter the market with a freshly-baked solution in weeks and scale it any moment a business requires it. The ability to meet transformation is the reason why 17% of companies decided to outsource their business building efforts in 2019, while the others selected such a model for higher capacity 47% and quality 32%.
White label in programmatic advertising
Even though programmatic media-trading allows advertisers and publishers to simplify and automate media-purchasing as much as possible, some brands are striving for greater transparency and measurability of internal processes. In an IAB Europe Attitudes to Programmatic Advertising Report 2019, it was revealed that 50% of advertisers go in-house to increase operational control, reduce media costs 42%, and gain greater transparency on where campaigns run 33%.
The easiest way to do this seems to be acquiring a well-performing white-label programmatic technology. A big ad tech provider resells the core tech platform to the enterprise that self-brands it and resells services directly to advertisers (demand-side platform) or publishers (supply-side platform). In case you plan to start an ad network, white-label will also enable the integration of demand and supply partners of your choice - the ones you trust most and the ones that are safe and authorised (traffic sellers, resellers, and their inventory).
White label in SMM
Social media will not lose significance in 2020. Even if you have a fully-functioning website, this channel of communication can be much closer to your customers, especially if you connect with them using highly-relevant and engaging content. For your customers, it can be the only channel where they can communicate with your brand directly via comments and personal messages.
Small brands actively create their corporate pages on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook (over 50 million pages in 2019). Small and medium brands mostly use SMM to boost traffic (up to 25.6%) and gain more leads. Still, with limited human resources, meaningful and timely SMM communication is not always possible.
Tech providers that develop SMM platforms equip them with posts automation, scheduling, an in-built analysis, which simplifies the management of numerous social networks in one interface. Some of the most advantageous platforms provide real-time writing suggestions based on smart phrase broadening, which means they can be used even by SMM newbies.
White label in email marketing
281 billion letters - that’s how many times people sent and received emails per day last year. During the next year, this number will grow and reach 333 billion according to estimations. This testifies to the fact that email marketing is not going anywhere soon and becomes a reason why 52% of companies purchase email automation technologies. Companies that bought email automation software took part in the survey, and the takeaway of it was: 45.9% of questioned apply automation because of overall service improvement, better deliverability, and better lead generation 34.9%.
Before purchasing a white-labeled email platform, think of the purposes you want to achieve. An enormous number of email automation services work on a subscription or even free basis - Hubspot, MailChimp, Zoho, or Drip are great examples.
However, if you need more clarity considering customer accounts, usage stats, reports, and schedules, or you require additional integration and features, a white-label email platform might appear to be your single option.
To sum up
Creating your own martech or ad tech solution and launching it on the market within a month or less would have been impossible just 5-10 years ago. Today, even if you have very little capital and absolutely no employees, it is possible to start your very own digital project and rapidly capitalise on it. If you’ve found the unexplored ad tech or martech niche, know how to position your product effectively, or simply need a technology that works on your own terms, white label can be your chance to step on the path of an entrepreneur without risks.