Perceptint Musings

The advantage of being a digital marketing advocate versus a digital marketing strategist is the luxury it provides for you to step inside a client’s world like never before. Being a strategist, I would need to be tied to a particular agency to provide the agency’s strategic road-map for the client. Being an advocate, I’m inside the clients world looking out at the agency’s who are doing the work and providing feedback on the relationship, services, and quality of work being delivered.

In this model, I can help steer the strategic road-map without being limited to one agency’s set of services. I’ve touched before on the limitations that working with a single agency can cause. My belief is based on experience and feedback from many clients.

So how does an advocate maintain relationships with agencies and clients without being seen as interfering in their relationships? Here are a few ideas for how it is done.

Reach out to the agencies
Agencies working for their clients need to know when an advocate is working with their client’s team. Getting to know the agencies, their teams personalities, their goals and objectives, and understanding how they work best are all critical components to making the relationship work for the advocate. I’ve got to understand if I can treat the agency as an equal partner or if I need to enhance the communication strategy of my client to see if we can get an agency on the same page with us.

Having worked for agencies, I know the personality types that are drawn into this type of work. The value I bring to my clients is helping them understand those personalities and how to work best for them. My ultimate goal is to make sure my client is getting the most out of their agency, both the relationship and services.

Insist on quarterly or bi-annual agency report cards 
Agency report cards are critical to maintaining long-term positive relationships. These report cards should cover all of the major service lines, report on any incidents and resolutions during the quarter. It should also offer the agency a place to make its voice heard and express its ideas for improving the overall relationship.

If an agency isn’t willing to be graded on their work, why should a client be willing to spend millions of dollars with them? The trick is making sure the exercise is equitable to all parties and offers honest and actionable feedback that can be tracked over time.

Praise the agency when they deserve it
Enough agencies do great work that they deserve to be patted on the back for it. Being on the agency side, this isn’t always something you would expect from your clients. But when it happens, it can take all of the behind the scenes struggles of a project and really revitalize an agency team. As an advocate, I have to know when to dish out the praise and when to dish out the tough love. If more teams felt the praise from their clients, you’d have less agency teams end up at that point of “I’m working on an account I just don’t care about”.

Do some of the agencies work for them
Information gathering, presentation of new concepts, and sometimes just plain pioneering are the things that a client expects an agency to magically deliver. The problem is its tougher for an agency to do all of these things because they do sit outside of the fenced-in backyard. They don’t always know the current political environment, the marketing environment, etc.

If agencies were brought in to situations where clear objectives had already been established, the client already understood the scope of the request they were going to make, and the potential channels had already been brainstormed, they’d have a lot more to work on and deliver against than just having the client fill out a creative brief. The advocate has to serve that critical information role for the client. They can help their client establish a base-line understanding of a situation or new channels and then look to agencies to see how they are addressing those channels in practice with their customers.

The ultimate goal for all of these ideas is to create smarter buyers of agency services. I can’t supplant what a fully staffed agency can deliver. But I can sniff out a rotten egg when I smell one and provide my client a better understanding of how to maximize their existing relationships.

What do you think? Are there other things the advocate should focus on to ensure they’re not seen as a threat by agencies? As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.