If you’re a marketing or other business leader with marketing and strategic communications oversight, I’d bet a good sum that three to four reasons related to your agency’s activity drifted through your head when you saw this headline. And those reasons could very well be true, but the primary reason why agencies struggle goes back to a mantra I stated over and over in my two decades managing them in-house: “An agency can only be as successful as a client allows them to be.”
That’s not to say all marketing agencies are perfect; I’ve replaced enough of them in my time to know that is not true. Whether they focus on a broad swath of marketing, public relations, digital, web design, SEO, or what have you. The truth of the above mantra is still the same. While agencies have a responsibility to give you the best outcomes possible, sometimes their ability to do so is hindered by the relationship with a client company.
Here’s are some examples of common areas that, when not prioritized, can hurt everyone’s success:
- Trust: An agency team should be an extension of your team and not farmed bits and bites of information; but given the full spectrum of your marketing and go-to-market strategy so they, as the experts in their craft, can give you the strategic oversight, tailored programs, and intuitive reporting needed for you to fine-tune your activities and reach your business goals.
- Inclusion: I saw this in my early agency years in the early aughts and also saw members of my teams do this (until I stopped it): when internal owners of agency relationships put a stranglehold on such relationship and don’t allow agency personnel to interact directly with other key stakeholders, including top executives if needed, their ability to gain the insights, content, and direction needed is limited. Inclusivity becomes a win for the internal relationship owner as well as the agency; and, most importantly, the client company itself.
- Acumen: So, you’ve hired a public relations team to do, well, public relations. And that’s all well and good but we all know that coverage and share of voice (SoV) and other attributes are meaningless unless they connect in both quantifiable and quantitative ways to marketing and ultimate go-to-market revenue drivers. Today’s PR professionals, if they have not already, have to develop a marketing acumen in order to still be valuable 18-24 months from now, and the good ones already have it. Use that. Let them create stories that align to the areas where you need help in your lead lifecycles and sales enablement, and also let them make strategic suggestions as to how to use it.
- Human Element: Your agency should be treated with the same respect that your internal team is treated with: be considerate of timelines that might cause burnout or allow only the churn of low quality work, ask how folks are and if they are dealing with personal issues give them the reprieve to address them, celebrate their wins and give positive feedback (conversely, provide constructive feedback when needed so everyone can grow. Agencies will work HARD, sometimes overservicing, for client satisfaction, but in the end that can create a burden, and the client should try to help manage that burden.
- Feedback Freeze: Best laid plans. We’ve all heard the term. Often, you can come up with a tremendous idea for a PR or marketing or web campaign, and your agency contacts will go off and create the assets that you agreed to. And then, the content sits with no feedback (something I was guilty of when I was a CMO). This slows down your overall success, but it unfortunately makes the agency stuck because they can’t make the steps to give you more wins without the feedback to take the next action on the campaign. You have to keep that feedback flow going or activity will freeze–and so will revenue generation contributions.
- Collaboration: You might consider this part of trust, and it’s built out of trust, but it’s also such an important piece of the client-agency relationship that it deserves to be called out. Again, a term we’ve all heard: trust your experts. You can’t treat your agency as an order taker. You need healthy back and forth, where you listen to each other – where they consider your goals and needs and you consider their expertise and industry purview. If you aren’t tapping into or listening to their expertise and they are not considering your ultimate drivers, then you are set up for failure. If your approach is to dictate what you want and discard their input then you are missing out on a valuable partnership.
The bottom line is, you have to think about managing any outside resource as you would managing your internal team (with some small differences, of course) to achieve the best results. Without doing such, you may not get the results you want, you may not be able to justify cash burn to your board, and you may be putting the success of your own role in jeopardy. And, that all comes down to you and not your external agency.
In a couple of weeks, my colleague Christy Pittman will share her insights from a successful long-term agency career in both strategic communications and marketing. She’ll offer concrete advice on what agencies truly need to achieve success.