From the course: Hiring a Marketing Agency

What digital marketing agencies do

From the course: Hiring a Marketing Agency

Start my 1-month free trial

What digital marketing agencies do

- If you've never worked inside an agency or with an external agency partner, you might not feel like you really understand what an agency does. Why do they exist? What motivates agencies and the people who work there? And most importantly, how can an agency help you build your brand and business? An agency is a team that works in partnership with their client to augment and compliment the client's internal capabilities and resources. So basically an agency partner fills your internal gaps and helps you build your brand and improve your marketing. Agencies have insight, expertise, experience, and resources that you don't have inside your company. They know how to plan, measure, and optimize digital efforts across all the brands, marketing touch points. And for those of you who may not know touch points or your brand's points of customer contact from start to finish. A touchpoint is any time a prospect or customer comes in contact with your brand before, during or after they purchase something from you. So for example, this could be a website, social media, search, mobile or email. For example, let's say you've launched a new product and you're ready to expand, but aren't really sure how. Hiring an external agency will help you launch into new markets and grow your business. You might think that an agency will work with just any client to get the business and income, but that's really not true. Here's what motivates an agency to want to work with a client. First, they need fair and reasonable compensation. Sure, they want to earn money just like many of your businesses there are for profit business and need to earn income. But, agencies know that if the compensation is too high, the relationship may be short lived because the client won't be able to maintain that budget, or if the agency is under compensated, they won't be able to sustain the relationship. Second, the ability to do great work. What's great work? Well, that's marketing that builds the client's brand and business and wins awards and receives great industry press. Great work makes current clients want to give their agency more work and it also attracts new clients by building a great reputation and having successful case studies. Third, agencies love working with clients who motivate the agency's employees. The agency business, it's a service business. They're made up of people, not machines. So you really want to keep agency people engage with your brand and view you as a great client. What's a great client? Well, that's someone who wants to do world-class marketing and work in partnership with the agency versus treating them like a vendor or transaction. Studies show that great clients sometimes called clients of choice, have the best agency town actually fighting to work on their business, and they receive additional discretionary services that they don't pay for because the agency invests to build that relationship. In many cases, the client-agency relationship can be short lived. And this is really unfortunate because it creates an inconsistent brand and user experience for customers and prospects. It's also expensive and time consuming to always be searching, evaluating, hiring, and onboarding new agencies. The good news is that there are also some terrific longterm client agency relationships. For example, BBDO a top global agency has worked in partnership with clients like Mars, GE, and FedEx for decades to build their brands and drive in market results. The right agency, isn't just a vendor or supplier, they're committed to your success. And as history has shown, understand that growing your business will also grow their business.

Contents