Considerations When Selling an Online Advertising or Marketing Agency

Online marketing and advertising agencies are vastly different from the traditional marketing and advertising agencies of yesteryear. Think of the advertisers of the 1960’s on Madison Avenue (as in the television series Mad Men), today, online advertisers have a whole host of other issues to wrestle with including website content management, PPC management, SEM and SEO development, monitoring website tools, developing email campaigns, product feed management and many other matters.

Selling advertising and marketing agencies is even different from selling websites of the usual nature like eCommerce and Amazon sites. For one, advertising and marketing sites can bring about huge profits for the seller if the correct eCommerce business broker is chosen to facilitate the deal.

The first consideration when selling websites in the advertising or marketing category involves the type of connection the owner has with the company. If the owner has a long standing relationship with the company’s merchants and service providers, this could prove to be of major concern to the company’s buyer because that close relationship would, obviously, be lost.

For this reason alone, it’s imperative that if a marketing or advertising agency owner is looking to sell their business that they reach out only to the most qualified and most experienced eCommerce business broker that they can find. The right eCommerce business broker can help them determine the best time to put the company up for sale, and how best to lead them in that direction so as not to disrupt the quality, profitable relationships they have built with their merchants and service providers, in an effort to ease the mind of the future buyer.

Other considerations for selling websites in the marketing and advertising sector include:

 •  Does the business have a niche it caters to? A niche makes it stand out from the crowd
 •  Cash flow should be strong, and ideally, growing every month
 •  The client list: Do any clients have a particular relationship with the seller, do any of  them represent over 10% of sales, can recurring revenue be prepared into  the acquisition business plan?

To the benefit of the seller, a profitable marketing or advertising agency has a tendency to fetch higher prices than ordinary websites; in fact, they tend to be three to six multiple of the seller’s discretionary earnings. To truly realize the best profit margins available for a marketing or advertising agency website, choose an eCommerce business broker that has decades of experience owning, running and selling websites in their own portfolio.