For some clients of marketing agencies, progress doesn’t look like the number of bags of chips sold or price per unit. Progress means advancing ideas. Helping people. Meaningful change in communities.
It’s well-trod territory to talk about how marketing has evolved. More channels. Content explosion. Audiences are more in control than ever. But what’s interesting to see is how many agencies haven’t changed how they interact with clients. Here, we detail warning signs that an agency isn’t offering you what you should expect.
What to watch for:
Focus on awareness, not action. It’s pretty easy to measure awareness. It’s also pretty easy to move the needle on awareness. So, when marketing agencies overemphasize that as their sole metric, it’s a red flag. Awareness that’s not paired with action isn’t going to generate the progress you’re looking for.
Lack of transparency. There’s no excuse not to know where your dollars are going. With the data we have at our fingertips, it’s not too much to ask for a 24/7 dashboard that showcases progress to goals and what your investment is doing. So ask.
Inability to balance short- and long-term wins. We live in a world of instant gratification. Unfortunately, moving people to action doesn’t typically happen in a moment. It’s a journey. Even still, your agency should be able to demonstrate quick progress while setting expectations for what will be delivered over time. Look for an agency that thinks beyond basic marketing to embrace strategies honed from advocacy, studies of human behavior, comms and marketing ultimately to understand audiences and develop relationships that last.
Overemphasis on one strategy. Lots of agencies specialize. And, while we certainly have seen clients who prefer to have a number of agencies each bringing its specific brand of success, often clients don’t have the budgets or the resources to manage all of them. Choose an agency with a range of skills that can be deployed quickly and can pivot based on what the data says.
The idea of understanding audiences is just words. All marketing agencies say they are audience-centric, but are they really? What technology are they using to understand who you need to reach? What are they going to do to identify their wants and needs and create strategies just for them? Audience strategy should be more than lip service.
They don’t ask the right questions. And they lack the ability to get answers in the right way. By using modern research strategies to answer tough questions about your organization, you start your work with knowledge, not guesswork.
Order takers, not strategic partners. Clients are the experts on their business. But they often don’t have the resources or time to look outside themselves. The best client-agency relationships are built on mutual trust. Yes, the agency should be another set of hands to get things done, but it also has honed through experience across sectors and can bring best — and next — practices to bear for your business. True partnership yields quicker results, and it’s just a lot more fun to go to work every day with people you genuinely like and respect.
Simply put, expect better. Our specialty is applying a marketing approach to life-improving challenges. We’re not status quo. And we bet you aren’t either.
