Keeping agencies relevant in the age of multi-tasking

The marketing funnel is much shorter today; the interactions between customers and the brand aren’t moving towards a transaction but driving a transaction at every possible step. With one eye continuously focused on ROI, companies are in the midst of restructuring their marketing departments to manage the scale of operations and optimize the marketing spend. With marketing not being a separate department anymore, and every department pitching in right from product development to sales, the stakeholders involved are more than ever. 

As firms seek to have complete control over their marketing operations, one of the major questions we often hear is - whether or not to work with agencies? From an ecosystem’s standpoint - will marketing agencies continue to thrive? The apprehension to partner with an agency is less about having control and more about clarity on what to expect from the synergy. Over the last few years, there has been propagation of several meaningless key performance indicators (KPIs) such as likes, shares, and more. What do these soft metrics even mean? How will they impact the bottom line? Is it valuable to my customers? Once we are in sync with our goals and have clarity on who our prospects and customers are, it becomes easy to chalk out where they hang out and why. It then becomes easier for you to choose the media to reach out to them. 

As we navigate media such as traditional, social and digital, one can see that each medium needs a different set of skills. During one of our workshops for a tech company, a gentleman shared, “We were hired when the company was in its early days; we built the brand from scratch with the help of traditional marketing media that existed then. With the rise of digital and social, we started working with agencies, thus quickly assembling the talent we didn’t have inhouse.” But, it’s not just about being able to build inhouse talent. 

As surprising as it may sound, corporates that are well-equipped with all the required resources are consciously choosing to outsource some of their key marketing programs to agencies, to seek an outsiders perspective. It takes you away from the “This is how things have been” phenomenon, especially when you are experimenting with something new. Being too close to the problem might not lead you towards a solution and this is where agencies can be really handy. When you hire an agency, they tend to focus on one problem at a time and assist in effecting major changes, allowing internal marketing teams to focus on daily needs. 

The debates around building inhouse capabilities vs. hiring agencies aren’t relevant anymore because they have to coexist. I believe agencies will evolve themselves from a services provider mode to a strategic advisor and partner, accelerating the ability of in-house teams with the perfect marketing mix thus helping brands stay relevant with their customers and community. As a step towards coexisting in the ecosystem, agencies may want to position themselves in a way that they plug into any gaps that exist within the in-house teams and help them experiment with newer channels and test new waters.