How to get your agencies working together

Turning your partnership ecosystem into a killing machine

If you’re a marketing leader operating in a complex operating model with multiple technologies, teams, and demands on your time, one of the challenges is how to get the best out of your agency partnerships to support your growth, when often it can feel everything is operating in silos.

Take your average marketing activity: how often do you really feel like all your cogs are meshing together across paid media, email, on-site and other channels?

To give you a couple of real-world examples we’ve seen…

1. A multinational company ran a campaign where the paid media agency had delivered a bucketload of users to the website, but nobody had told the CRO team to optimise the ongoing sales funnel, resulting in tens of thousands of wasted ad spend.
   

2. A redesign project was undertaken on a key product page, but the SEO agency had been completely excluded from the design process. Traffic dropped off a cliff when the page went live, and took months to recover with $100k+ in lost revenue.

To look at these examples on paper it seems obvious where it went wrong, but when teams are tied up in the day-to-day and lack a clear process and governance model, these mistakes happen every day.

Having a synchronised agency approach is so important to reduce wastage, increase marketing-driven revenue, and enable your team to become superstars.

But let’s address the elephant in the room: trying to get agencies to work together can be like herding cats. They focus on what they do best, and are naturally territorial in maintaining their authority with their clients.

Furthermore, when things go wrong and agencies aren’t working in an integrated model, the tendency is for fingers to start pointing rather than trying to work out how to do things better.

Yet if everyone pulled in the same direction, the result should be that everyone grows together, project outcomes are more successful, and the client would have a high performing integrated marketing/agency team.

At Agency Squad we help clients work with underperforming agency ecosystems to turn them into killing machines, giving your digital performance a kick up the behind, and creating enduring partnerships that support your growth by looking at your operating model from the ground up.

We’re also not stingy, and we’ve developed a framework for significantly improving the strength of your agency partnerships, so here are some things to think about when you’re considering how your agency model could be optimised:

• Do you have comprehensive shared KPIs across your team and agencies, and how are they measured?

  
  

• How are you facilitating collaboration between your agencies?

  
  

• How integrated are your agencies into your team’s day-to-day activities?

  
  

• Is your briefing process robust and inclusive, speaking language that your agencies understand?

  
  

• Have you fostered a culture where your agencies can approach you with ideas and challenge the briefs they’re given?

  
  

• How are you collectively learning from projects and incrementally improving as both a client and agency partnership?

If you’d like to know more about how we help businesses work effectively with their agency teams, get in touch to see if we’d be a good fit.