Third Party Costs

Here’s a list of some of the third party suppliers we use, and why they’re critical to our, and your, success.

Why we use third party software

At SERV. Agency, it’s our mission to help hospitality businesses become more profitable through the supply of marketing services. We understand that every dollar is critical, particularly in hospitality where margins are thin, and marketing is expected to work miracles. We get it.

To get the absolutely best value from a client’s marketing budget, we’re always looking for ways to do more of the value-accretive work, in less time. We specifically choose software that enables us to work quickly, minimising admin, which means more of a client’s budget is spent on tasks that drive revenue.

We charge for some third party software and not others

This depends on whether the cost is fixed or incremental. For flat fee third party costs, eg Canva or Adobe Creative Cloud, we simply absorb this cost as a general operating expense. For other costs, which increase with each client, eg Sked Social, the social scheduling software, we generally charge a small surcharge to partially cover the cost (around 50%).

Sked Social

Sked is the software we use to create, schedule and post social media content. Not only does it save us a heap of time, it has all the features we need, including the ability to create accounts for clients, allowing staff to login, check and approve content ahead of publication.

It’s the best software we’ve used, and whilst the cost to us is a lot more, we charge a Sked fee of $9 / month.

MOZ

MOZ is an all in one SEO tracking and implementation tool. We use MOZ to identify keyword opportunities, improve website content, optimise websites and track and report on progress. It’s fundamental to our SEO success.

It’s the best software we’ve used, and whilst the cost to us is a lot more, we charge a MOZ fee of $9 / month for clients who engage us for SEO.

Squarespace Hosting

We build our restaurant websites on Squarespace. Not only do we believe this platform is perfectly suited to hospitality, with awesome native features like menus and events diaries, it’s extremely easy to use for our clients (meaning less fees paid to developers in the future).

The software, which our developers and marketers are trained on, means we can create content and optimise for SEO far more efficiently than on other platforms. This means less time on admin, and more time getting results.

When building a website using Squarespace, it’s compulsory to ‘host’ with Squarespace with a cost of $300 / year. Website hosting is always at a cost to the client.