People like to do business with people that they like, and maintaining good client/agency relationships will almost always guarantee better results. But why? It’s not simply a case of “we like you so we’ll work harder for you” (although, when push comes to shove on competing priorities, decisions are made…). Rather, it’s an understanding that great results are not driven by an individual campaign or singular execution. It takes a party; it takes a village; it takes a team.
While most agencies won’t admit that they have favourites – they definitely do. And this can be the difference between a good campaign and a great campaign. So stick around! I’m going to teach you how to elevate your agency engagement(s), become (one of) our favourite clients, and ultimately, improve your results!
The V Word 🙅
Don’t call us a vendor! We’re not selling printer paper here. For your campaigns to really rock, you need more than a vendor – you need a strategic partner that understands your business and has your back. Great partnerships are built over time and, in turn, transcend into top results for you and your stakeholders. At the end of the day, we all want the same thing – to drive the business forward. However, this type of growth and objective isn’t achieved through a single campaign, nor is it realized in a single year engagement. It’s a multi-year process that intentionally builds on learnings from the past, while making moves that anticipate the future. This all begins with the R word…
The R Word 🤜🤛
People are far more likely to go over and above if you have a good relationship with them, which is true both in business and in life. I honestly consider all of my clients, partners, and teammates to be my friends, and treating them in this way has helped me build meaningful relationships that extend far beyond the click. While our main focus and mantra at Vovia is performance, we have a conscious commitment to relationships as well (both internally and externally), which has helped us establish many multi-year client partnerships; all resulting in significant business growth. Looking at my own portfolio, I am so grateful to have multiple partnerships that have passed the 10 year mark, and several more between 5-10. The track record is not an accident, and I definitely did not do it alone. It is a direct result of the T words…
The T Word(s) ✨
Transparency and trust! We are here for you, but we can only help in areas that are shared with us and/or that we understand are happening. What are you up against this week? What does your boss care about? What keeps you up at night? What is the next concept the creative team is planning? What tradeshows will you be at this quarter?
You might be surprised at how helpful we can be when we’re brought into these conversations. Whether through preparing data, presenting insights to extended teams, or even just helping you connect your investment to results; we have the skills and in order to make that connection and set the partnership up for success – we need to take a deep dive into the D word.
The D Word 🕵️
There is no substitute for a detailed discovery document (aka the brief). It is, by far, the most important process in maintaining alignment with your agency or client partners, and indeed, with your immediate account and/or extended teams. While this might feel a bit of a tedious process, it’s the kind of initial investment that pays dividends in perpetuity when it comes to your marketing and advertising.
I think it’s really important to enter each of these discovery or briefing meetings with a ‘beginner’s mindset’ on both sides of the brief, which essentially means listening without bias. It requires you to actually listen and engage in the conversation before jumping to the solution, which is easier said than done (especially for repeating annual plans or campaigns). If we can keep an open mind and an open heart, it improves our ability to see the big picture. If we can dig into what really matters to the campaign, the audience, the executives, and the business, we are far more likely to generate success. And this type of knowledge and deep understanding can only come through close collaboration.
In “The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking’, which I highly recommend btw, I found some serious wisdom which I try to keep close to my chest when entering new campaigns or new fiscal cycles. To paraphrase:
“We must make sure we are asking the right questions, and we must question our own answers to make sure they are still the right ones.” ~ Burger, Starbird
Spend the time here, dig in, find out what matters (like what really matters), build your solution and metrics around that idea, then create checkpoints and milestones to stay on top of that success criteria as the campaign rolls on. And as that campaign rolls on, make sure to pay attention to the C word…
The C word(s) 🙀
Clear and concise feedback and communication are the lock and key to better agency engagement. It’s also ok to push back (on both sides) if something doesn’t make sense. If you feel the strategy is departing from the main goals and success metrics identified in discovery, let’s flag and talk about it.
We can’t hit the mark if we are not crystal clear on what that looks like, which is what makes the S word so important…
The S Word 🤔
Be specific! When someone says website traffic is the goal, cool – I get that. But I’ll bet website sessions don’t show up on the balance sheet. So what really matters? If you expect that website traffic will turn into business, awesome, that gets us closer. If you let us know that roughly 20% of that traffic converts into SQL, which is why your stakeholders are focused on filling the top of the funnel – that is fantastic, specific, and gives us a benchmark to measure against when designing/executing strategies. A few more quick tips related to specificity here:
- Help Us Understand Your Business: knowing and sharing your margins/profitability and/or what you’re willing to pay for a lead is critically important information to help us understand how hard to push on the campaigns and channels, and what goals or weights to set within our advanced optimization. If you’re not sure how to get here, just ask! Our Marketing Intelligence team lives for this type of stuff.
- Set Thresholds: I’m here to tell you that “as many leads for low a cost/lead as possible’ is not specific enough to be useful. We’re always going to try to achieve this, but volume and efficiency are often counterbalanced; thereby giving up one in exchange for the other. Back to understanding your business tip, having a clear CPA threshold or ROAS target here will help us achieve that goal efficiently and effectively. If you have different thresholds for different products or lines of business, definitely let us know! All of this can and should be taken into account when planning and executing your media.
- Prioritize Competing Objectives: If there are multiple goals or priorities, rank them so we know how to attack it. If success criteria looks different to different stakeholders, make that clear. Especially in digital, we can design the campaigns to push towards particular goals, but we do need to choose the objectives (ie: maximizing conversions or traffic or impressions or ROAS, etc.).
- Be Flexible: It’s important to be open-minded enough to pivot from the original plan if needed, but equally important to give enough time to the plan for the strategies to activate and work. Adopt this mindset in your briefing/discovery meetings and documentation, and everyone will be better aligned. Just make sure you don’t overlook the P word…
The P Word ⭐
Patience – one of the most important yet challenging components of marketing! It’s normal and natural to have expectations of your marketing investment. After all, why would we invest if we can’t drive the ROI? That said, we also need to provide enough runway for the program to ramp up and work. While this has always been true in marketing, it has been intensified by digital media and ‘real time’ analytic data. On the results side, it’s easier to see what is working or not working more quickly (according to platform metrics), so naturally we should be able to make changes more frequently, right? Well, kind of…
Yes, we get data back more quickly, but modern digital has also introduced a new element called the ‘learning period’. My pal Renu talks about this at length in her post about AI and Ad Platforms, but for today, it’s important to understand that every time we make a change to digital campaigns (such as swapping creative/ad copy, adding new audiences, changing the geo target, and even making large changes to budget or spend pacing), the ad platform can and will reenter the ‘learning period’, which makes the campaigns less efficient until that period has passed. In some cases, this means the campaign or ads won’t spend the daily budget settings. Other times it will spend, but will not spend efficiently (giving subpar results until that period has passed). It’s important to keep all of this in mind when making changes to the campaigns or ads after they have launched, as we want to be responsive and make optimizations, but also want to be careful to work with the algorithm, and not against it.
One thing that we can do to help mitigate against this issue is to start with a super solid and well-thought-out campaign framework and paying attention to the A words…
The A Word(s) 🤖
With Google and Meta and other platforms going all in on AI, it’s important to know how to play the AI game (intelligently) so that we’re not left behind. One of my favorite quotes in this space is from Ted Nelson who said:
“The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.”
I love this quote in the modern context of AI assisted campaigns because, by nature, they are going to look for the lowest cost per result possible. At first blush, this sounds great, until we realize that the AIs will do this by ignoring all other quality factors that we would normally observe as humans (such as lead quality and other linked business metrics).
That’s not to say that AI assisted campaigns don’t drive great results – they definitely can! However, you need to feed it the right inputs in order for you to get the right outputs. This means checking all the boxes in terms of assets (copies, creatives, variations, etc.), but also giving strong and well-thought-out audience signals to push it in the right direction. My friend Jeremy spoke about the importance of first party data in his trends post from last year (and the notable benefits!), and leveraging first-party data continues to be more important than ever.
Even with strong and strategic governance of AI assisted formats and a banger of a setup, the campaigns are only going to be successful if they drive the business forward. And so, the next tip here is to connect your media and business results, which is why we need the B word…
The B Word 📈
There’s an old adage in marketing that goes something like: “I know half of my advertising is working for me, I’m just not sure which half”. We thought we solved this once digital trackability and analytics came out, but as the years progressed, we found ourselves in a cyclical return to the same problem after Universal Analytics (UA) was discontinued in 2023. And thus, we must return to the idea of blended marketing metrics to help the media and business results band together.
Vovia restructured our analytics after the sun set on UA, and we bravely ventured into a more classic connection – blending media and business results. The beauty of a blended CPL or blended ROAS is that it helps to normalize all of the factors that may be at play at any given time, and also doesn’t have a bias to last click channels like Search or to mass awareness channels like broadcast TV. All spends are treated equally in the analysis and attribution models are dismissed, thereby making it easier to tie performance to business results for any given period. Plainly put, if you can start mapping your marketing investment and tactics against your business results, you’ll almost always have a clearer ROI story to tell. At the very least, you’ll enjoy a line of sight into the ebbs and flows that are driven by your spends, campaigns, and tactics over time..
This method, of course, requires more data sharing than you might be used to with your agency (back to the T words!). However, this transparency and linking/blending will help your agency help you with the ROI statement.
The Last Word 💥
No matter how advanced we get or how small the world becomes, we all have our tribes that we trust. Our “go tos”. Our playmakers, confidants, and consortiums. If you want your agency to work harder for you, treat them like a partner, not a vendor. Give them the tools they need to do a great job, and collaboratively challenge the status quo to achieve a sum that is greater than its parts. Just remember, it’s easy to put faith and trust in your agency partner in the good times, but it’s the hard times that truly put that relationship to the test. This is a two-way street, takes a leap of faith, and a willingness to band together. But when the music starts to play, you’ll always be better off if you sing the songs together.
