Owning an agency has been both rewarding and challenging. At the root of all we achieve for our clients, we still love helping move customers through the marketing maturity model. It enables us to work with both startups and enterprise clients alike, strategically growing their awareness and revenue online.
What I didn’t realize was how much change we, as an agency, would need to do to stay ahead of the curves and remain competitive in our industry. It’s not just the changes in purchase behavior, creative trends, or technological changes. It’s that businesses’ perceptions of agencies and how they’re served by them continue to change. If our previous clients from a few years ago returned today, they’d find an entirely new sales process, reporting tools, and resources.
Agencies continue to have advantages over hiring because they can balance the costs of expertise and tools across their clients. A consultant or agency just needs to attack the problem, not all the other issues surrounding the customer’s business. Companies are finding working with agencies to be a much better return on investment than attempting to hire every expert internally.
Our survey of more than 70 CMOs and 1:1 interviews with brand leaders from The CMO Club uncovered what marketers are really looking for in their partnerships. MediaMath, Evolving Your Agency Partnership Model to Drive Programmatic Success.
What CMOs Value Most from Agencies
In which areas has your agency been most helpful in educating your brand?
- Best Practices – Audience insights and optimization
- Data – Ownership and activation
- Partners – Bringing best-of-breed partners to the table
Rank in order of importance what excellent agency support looks like for you:
- Transparency – A relationship that is based on complete transparency
- Alignment – between campaign goals and business goals
- Ideation – A push and pull relationship that allows for new ideas, constructive feedback, and open conversation
- Vendor Selection – Partnering to find and utilize the best advertising and marketing technology based on my needs
- Management – of all technology platforms and collaboration
- Discovery – Introducing best-of-breed technology platforms to the table for collective strategy and/or execution
Of course, leading the pack on any characteristic is great communication! We spend as much time, if not more, communicating with our clients today than we often do implementing and executing the actual strategies.
The full report focuses and includes the impact of programmatic marketing. Here’s an overview infographic: