Top 4 Priorities for Marketing & Advertising Agencies’ Business Growth

The way brands market to their customers is evolving at a rapid pace. Five-year digital transformation goals are now immediate needs. Brands are turning to their agencies to help them reach, engage, and connect with their customer base in new and innovative ways. As an agency, you need to keep pace with your clients and digitally transform alongside them in ways that improve operational efficiencies, maximize profitability, and nurture growth.

How can your agency do this? And what should you be focusing on? We’ve identified four priorities.

Priority 1 – Evolve into a strategic partner for your clients

Sixty percent of agency executives are in search of a more profitable business strategy¹.

The “Big Agencies” have dominated the industry through acquisition-led growth, becoming a one-stop-shop for their clients. With that comes massive operational complexity and internal competition. Brands are not interested in navigating this complexity and are instead adopting a hybrid approach, building a roster of agencies alongside in-house resources to help them tap into digital channels and new approaches to marketing and advertising. In this respect, brands are looking for agencies to become strategic partners.

As a strategic partner, an agency must be flexible, able to build collaborative relationships with other agencies (who would otherwise be competitors), and able to do this profitably.

Priority 2 – Capture the full picture of the agency’s profitability

Today, agencies use from 12 to 31 different tools to manage campaigns and project data.² This doesn’t include the mosaic of internal software for operational and administrative activities, such as billing and time tracking. Sprawled and siloed data is the result.

Without the full picture, agencies are unable to identify risks and make strategic decisions to improve operations, find new business, and maximize profitability. Full data visibility allows an agency to make real-time and forward-facing changes that improve the bottom line.

Priority 3 – Improve utilization of creative talent

Talent is the heart of a creative agency, but also the greatest cost. Effective utilization of talent maximizes project profitability. The alternative puts an agencies’ projects and business at risk. A one percent increase in utilization can have a $1M profit earning potential.³

Beyond improving profitability, effective use of resources helps to improve employee experience, reduce burnout, and provide insight for critical business decisions.

Priority 4 – Identify good fit clients

New business and renewed business are all good news, right? Not necessarily. Some clients may be costing an agency money. Overservicing is an industry-wide issue. Forty-nine percent of agencies have had a profit loss of 11% or more due to overservicing⁴. The ability to identify profitable clients and move on from “bad-fit” clients is necessary. Better data access and visibility makes this possible and empowers business leaders to take decisive action, pursue profitable opportunities, and compose more competitive bids.

Turn priorities into business growth with data visibility

The common success factor across all four priorities is data visibility. Attaining this full-picture business view requires a connected technology experience. Adding another tool to the collection of systems and applications won’t do the trick.

So, what should your agency do?

Evaluate how a cloud-based single-platform solution can support your agency from bidding to billing and beyond.

We’ve gone into detail in our eBook. You’ll learn how the strategic use of the right solutions and applications can help your agency address operational inefficiencies, utilization rates, profitability, and much more. You’ll also be introduced to evergreen + empower, a single-platform solution for Advertising and Marketing agencies built on Microsoft Dynamics 365

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