Many brands are starting the process of in-housing. In fact, one in five marketers have taken programmatic advertising in-house and almost 50% have started the process of doing so. But advertising spend is still there. In fact, this year in the US digital ad spend is set to hit $129.3 billion and £15 billion in the UK.
Brands simply can’t manage this in-house and still look to work with agencies as digital partners. Here are a few ways you can ensure your agency becomes a partner for your clients.
Advertising is all about engaging with the right customers that will make the biggest impact in terms of eventual sales for that business.
Long-term brand building and short-term performance campaigns will need to work in harmony to ensure customers convert and that the brand retains its signalling and message. Both will have an impact on sales and revenue.
But to secure success from both, it’s essential for the brand to know exactly who their customer is.
In too many cases the customer profiles the brand is currently working to will be outdated and based on too many presumptions rather than facts. As an agency if you can go beyond campaign performance in your reporting and provide insight on the metrics that matter you will ensure your client has a deeper understanding of the audiences that are of the most value to their business.
For example, by going beyond clicks and impressions you should be reporting on the following:
You have the data to detail how types of deal, offers or creative resonate with key audiences enabling you to make strategic decisions for your client on where their future spend should be allocated. Upcoming digital campaigns will be much more tailored.
Crucially you will also have the audience insight to impact your client’s campaigns across all of their channels.
By touching on all areas of their digital advertising strategy, you’ll place yourself as a digital partner for your clients.
A lot of brands get frustrated with their agencies. In the race to secure all-important client budget, agencies begin to increase their services. Media agencies, PR agencies and creative agencies may all compete for content marketing budget for example.
But they do so without one key ingredient. Too often they neglect to consider what the client actually needs and when it comes to cross-selling or upselling this focuses purely on what the agency offers as opposed to what will most benefit the client.
As an agency if you can step away from this, understand your client’s challenges and solve them through the tech and services you provide you will become their digital partner.
A client that struggles to manually keep their ads up to date will immediately benefit from the automation provided by feed ads. Clients that might be performing well digitally but are facing issues with keeping their bricks and mortar stores going could improve performance by attracting a local audience through geo fencing. Those with a need to engage a local demographic but without the budget for large scale brand awareness campaigns may require geotargeting.
Every client is different; listen to their business issues and tailor your solutions to solve their problems.
There are a number of reasons why many brands are considering in-housing. Transparency, efficiency and cost-effectiveness are chief amongst them. In too many cases, agencies can be expensive, inefficient and a little secretive.
Digital partners on the other hand will tackle these issues head on and improve their clients’ businesses for the better.
By providing your clients with a quick, simple and straightforward ways to build their digital display ads you’ll ensure that none of their budget will be wasted on expensive ad creative and can go towards acquiring more media.
If your client has in-housed creative and is building ads themselves, it’s likely that this small team simply won’t have time to tweak and reformat ads over and over again. They’ll want to be spending their time working on the bigger more creative projects. As a trusted digital partner you can solve this challenge by enabling the build of ad creative to be outsourced to you ensuring the internal team has the time and energy for other tasks.
That’s cost and efficiency covered. Just remember to always be transparent on your reporting and campaign execution. That’s how a digital partnership should work.
At Fluid Ads we work with a range of media agencies to ensure they can provide products and services to their clients that will always make a difference to their individual businesses.
Get in touch today to take the first step to becoming a digital partner for your clients.