Some agencies build their own software and offer it alongside the marketing. Most resell third-party tools and mark them up. Below: how each model works, what changes for you, and when each one fits.
Most marketing agencies run your campaigns and then point you to third-party software for the parts campaigns do not cover: reviews, reporting, chat, call answering. A few agencies build that software themselves. The marketing work can look identical either way, but who built your tools and how you pay for them is where the two models split.
We are in the second camp. We run the marketing and build our own software stack, and the tools come with the retainer instead of being resold at a markup. Here is the full comparison, including when a reseller agency is the better call.
A reseller agency runs your marketing and points you to third-party software like Podium for reviews or AgencyAnalytics for reporting, usually at a markup. An agency that builds in-house includes its own equivalent tools in the work, so you are not paying a middleman margin on someone else's software.
No. Enterprise clients with 200+ employees who need deep integrations with an existing software stack are often better served by a traditional reseller agency. Smaller businesses usually come out ahead adding a few in-house tools instead of juggling separate SaaS subscriptions.
Ask: do you build any of your own tools, or do you only resell? If they only resell, you are paying the markup on every SaaS subscription. Ask to see the agency running its own dashboard on its own business. If they cannot show you, they are not using what they sell.
Not on a retainer. Chat, reviews, reporting, voice, and the inbox come with it. On their own, without a retainer, they run $49 to $249 a month per tool, and custom builds are quoted per project. That is different from a reseller bundling markups you cannot see.
