A couple of years ago, Ford ended a 75-year partnership with WPP as its sole advertising partner. Instead, Ford named BBDO its leading advertising agency. Along with BBDO, Ford also named Wieden + Kennedy as an “innovation partner”. It also brought in more than 100 internal marketing specialists to reassign some key functions within the company.
In other words, customers now want limited experience, not extensive knowledge. As with most of the changes of the 21st century, the Internet can also be blamed for this. A small business isn't limited to the five agencies located in its hometown; it can reach millions of agencies around the world for specific skills. The increasing complexity and competitiveness of digital marketing don't help either. Two decades ago, adding a handful of meta tags and writing 500 words of content was enough to improve your SEO.
Now you need half a dozen team members and a six-figure budget to get the same results. Clients don't want a partner agency that can do everything; they want partners that can do one thing really well. In an ultra-competitive environment, limited experience gives them confidence that the agency can truly carry out bold, results-generating campaigns. Take a look at the Forbes survey on what agencies and clients consider important.
Clients give high priority to media strategy, while for agencies they only represent 10% of the pie. Being “strategic” is not sound advice. If you're doing creative work for a client, it's also difficult to go from writing texts to planning their 3-year media campaigns. Now you can get answers to these questions, and many more, instantly, anonymously and securely by joining this unique reference group on best practices and performance for marketing agencies.
In fact, 81% say that a marketing strategy was critical to the success of their business during COVID-19, and 71% say they wouldn't have survived the last 18 months without a marketing strategy. If you're a customer-facing marketing specialist and your agency lacks any of the above traits, consider starting a conversation or reevaluating the partnership. In the following interview, Jacob Resnick, marketing director of Viking Masek Packaging Technologies, and Garry Wicka, vice president of global strategic marketing at Sealed Air, shared their views on innovative strategies and what can be learned from the packaging. Having regular conversations with marketing leaders not only helps us keep abreast of each industry, but it also reveals the common trends and challenges faced by all marketers.
94% want to hire external agencies to help them improve their marketing initiatives as the restrictions imposed by the pandemic are lifted, and 96% of those companies say they are willing to pay their agencies more. This approach doesn't work, as most agencies recognize that there's a gap in their self-marketing efforts, often due to a lack of dedicated staff to manage their marketing. Advertising and marketing consist and have always consisted of adapting and making flexible, to changing market conditions, to the changing needs of customers and to changes in the sources and supplies of resources. Angela Voss, executive director of Marketing Architects, shares her human-centered values, details Marketing Architect's “all-inclusive” television offering, offers advice for marketing professionals who want to advance their careers and much more in this article for partners.
The group's goal is to help agencies understand and improve their own marketing strategies by comparing their organic and paid performance with that of their peers. Agencies don't usually track the ROI of their marketing efforts, making it difficult to prioritize where to focus.
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