Why More Than Half of Marketing Agencies Are Missing Out
Social media, marketing automation tools, customer relationship management…today’s technological advancements have provided marketing agencies with fascinating opportunities and insights. On average, 49% of companies are using Marketing automation in 2016, and by 2025 CMO’s are likely to be spending $120 billion per year on marketing technology.
But, this still means that more than half of marketing agencies missed the boat; they’re stuck juggling the complicated interactions between buyers, marketers, and salespeople that are in a constant state of flux and neigh impossible to manage alone.
Digital Strategy Overload
For marketers, there are a myriad of options available when it comes to generating business leads for their own agency. You could bet the farm on a digital strategy, putting time and effort into generating compelling content that draws prospects towards a state-of-the-art website that does an amazing job of converting site visitors. If you have deep expertise and referenceable customers in your niche area, you may prefer a more personal route, speaking at industry events and hosting seminars and webinars. Or maybe you are building on first-class customer satisfaction by incentivising your employees to generate referrals? Maybe it’s a combination of all the above.
Whatever the strategy, the currency of success is the relationships resulting from these activities – and the sales outcomes they generate. If you have captured contact details via your website, how good are you at leading them through the sales funnel? If your people are at events, how many of these contacts convert to customers? And what proportion of referrals actually result in any business?
New Business Struggles
Converting contacts to customers takes more than a magic wand: statistics show that a staggering 90% of sales require four or more individual contacts with the prospect. That means that a successful new business strategy will require your teams to: flag up the opportunity, capture all the contact details and customer needs they might have unearthed, then engage the right resources elsewhere in the company to discuss those needs – and they will have to manage that relationship over five, ten or more separate interactions and over a period of months or even a year, Manually.
Time to Re-Think Your Agencies Approach?
If you’re in the 51% that missed the boat, it’s likely that you’re tackling the problems above with either an off-the-shelf database or, more probably, a spreadsheet: these ‘solutions’ are clunky, inefficient and difficult to work with – and are probably tied to the desktop.
Your team should be able to access data anytime, anywhere, and on any device, with mobile accessibility. Your system should be passively and automatically tracking all your email and phone communication against prospect and client records, so you never miss a conversation. Your entire agency should have full visibility into all accounts and contacts, to take the confusion out of generating new business and figuring out what content and create will resonate best.
A top-of-the-range marketing CRM should be able to do all this.
Why not join the other 49% of marketing agencies and implement a solution? The Digital Kitchen Agency did, and found it was a “defining moment” in how they manage “projects, clients, and suppliers”.
– Shane Shehade, The Digital Kitchen Agency.