The beauty of marketing agencies is relationship building. Your agency brings in industry-specific knowledge, ad campaign and marketing automation deployment strategies to advise your clients how to promote and scale their businesses. As an agency owner, everything will be within your reach and realm of control. All you’ve got to do is sell marketing software solutions to help other businesses market their product and service offerings. The sales process is straight forward and scalable. This is the so-called automated growth-hacking business.

Growth-hacking Automation Business

This isn’t really something new. In this millennium, the core idea of a marketing business is all about promoting and selling software as a service (SaaS) to business end-users. Now that marketing automation software has been around for 10+ years, this technology has reached a maturity stage. The talent pool for hiring digital marketers is growing at an unprecedented rate. We have a glut of graduates that are brimming with enthusiasm to enter the workforce as a Digital MarTech Professionals; be it with agencies on a project basis or working with in-house management. Many Fortune 500 companies are locked into high value marketing SaaS contracts such as Eloqua, Salesforce Pardot, and Marketo. But it’s not too late to enter the market as a niche player and be one of the few players in the market selling open source marketing automation consulting services.

As of January 10, 2020, Mautic released an alpha version of Mautic 3.0 with upgrades on the back-end security components (ie: PHP Symfony, jQuery, and MYSQL). Once and for all, Mautic provides opportunity for martech agencies and consultants to shine! It’s time to think about monetizing the world’s first open source marketing automation, and get your agency’s marketing team hands on with Mautic partner reseller program. The sooner you start the more you earn.

Here’s why you should consider open source as a revenue generator

Being a non-Mautic software vendor is a pain! It’s actually not to the business owners’ and affiliate partners’ benefit to stick around with proprietary marketing software. Whether you are an end-user or a re-seller, the outcome may be sub-optimal or at best just break-even on labour cost and time. Here are six main reasons why proprietary software may not be suitable for a business.

1. Proprietary software vendors have a revenue model of software licensing, users’ mandate is to pay the right to use and distribute software to other end-users in their organization
2. Users are obligated to sign a contract committed to pay on a monthly basis or a lumpsum payment for an annual subscription
3. Users are not allowed to make modifications to the back-end code base of the software. If they wanted a new app or a plugin integration feature with the proprietary software, they have to just wait and see. Depending on the software company’s priorities, their interest may not be aligned with the end-users. They may or may not release the functionalities the users want.
4. Support cost can be high with the proprietary software. Whether or not the users wanted to receive direct support from the SaaS vendor, it’s a common practice to embed the monthly support cost in the subscription bundle.
5. Subscription price tiers escalates once users have exceeded the limits of certain features in the lower level basic tiers. This makes the recurring cost of proprietary software higher than users’ initial expectations.
6. Consultants that specialize in proprietary software tend to be skewed towards up-selling services to the business end-users. Or they upsell cookie-cutter solutions that are generic and not tailored to the real needs of the SMB owners.

Why will you have more business sovereignty running an Open Source Martech business?

On another note, open source software gives your business the freedom and autonomy to build your own software and revenue stream. It’s a win-win situation.

Under the open source philosophy, users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. “Free software” means liberty, not price. Think of free as free speech and individual autonomy. When users don’t control the software program, it’s deemed as “non-free” or “proprietary” software. The proprietary software controls the users and the developers control the program, which causes stipulations for users to operate the software within its limitations. There are four degrees of freedom in open source software.

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom ascribed to all open source community members are important values that end-users and businesses should know. Being a Mautic reseller partner empowers you to break free from proprietary licenses and not be beholden into proprietary SaaS subscriptions. This is a marvel to entrepreneurs and digital marketers; where Mautic becomes a revolutionary Martech solution in this generation.

What makes Mautic a powerful player?

Mautic, the first Open Marketing Cloud, was acquired by Acquia in May 8, 2019. There are two versions of Mautic available in the market: i) Mautic Community Edition ii) Mautic Cloud

Mautic community edition is an open source version that allows users to add new apps/ integrations for resale to end-users.

Mautic Cloud is an enterprise edition created by the Mautic-Acquia development team.

Both Mautic community edition and Mautic Cloud are Cloud Marketing Solutions. Whether you sell open source or the proprietary Mautic Cloud (a de facto SaaS), your business have joined the market force selling Cloud Solutions as a B2B Cloud Marketing Consultancy. This is something that you should be proud of.

Get a slice of the cloud market

In fact, Gartner projected a bullish outlook for the B2B SaaS solutions with an ever-growing demand in business solutions in the Cloudware ecosystem. The robust annual revenue growth in Gartner’s report reinforces the comparative advantage of developing business processes that hires skilled tech workers and integrates with multiple software solutions. This is an emerging trend that marketing agencies should take advantage by transforming their business model into cloud-based software and integrations sales and marketing.

So what are you waiting for? Hop on the trending demand growth in cloud solutions to benefit from unlimited opportunities in the Cloud Market.