It’s one thing when agencies recognize their shortcomings and try to address them…but it’s a completely different story when marketers see the holes for the agencies. It’s what seems to be happening today.
We recently released our latest survey report: The 2014 Agency-Marketer Business Report. The survey was completed by 110 senior level marketers and 220 marketing agency executives during August, 2014.
In the report, Marketers reveal their biggest concerns about marketing agencies today: Their lack of focus on meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) and their lack of foundation in analytics.
40% of marketers surveyed said “Lack of Foundation in Analytics” and 38% said “Lack of Focus on Meaningful KPIs” were the biggest deficiencies of marketing agencies today.
With marketers under ever increasing pressure to know how effective their dollars are being spent and prove out the return on their marketing investments, marketing agencies that don’t take the time to beef up their ability to measure and track performance will likely go the way of the dinosaurs.
We see this all the time with marketers that come to us looking for a new agency. Their current agency isn’t helping them stay ahead of the digital and analytics curve and they feel like they’re losing ground.
Back in the day when digital firms first came to market, being creative was good enough. As the space got more competitive and marketers quickly realized that digital was just “another platform” that needed to be integrated with all the other platforms they used, the pressures on digital-only firms grew.
Today, being a smart digital firm means a whole lot more.
It’s important that firms aren’t just measuring “likes” and “follows” – but rather measuring things that are more actionable relative to sales. And while it’s nice that an agency can buy digital media, it’s more important in today’s world that agencies understand the value of things like programmatic marketing and re-targeting in order to stay steps ahead of a marketer’s competitive set.
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