Archives for 2019

Is your marketing dashboard great or just average?

Agencies are required to report regularly to clients. It can’t be escaped. But what makes the marketing dashboard great rather than just average? It can’t be the quantity of charts.

It’s not hard to bundle some charts and tables together and call it a dashboard. But what justifies a chart its place in the dashboard submitted by a marketing agency to its client. I want to suggest 7 criteria.

Is the information really actionable?

If the information simply generates a “that’s nice” then it has missed the mark. Going back to the basics – the reason for using agency was to create a particular result.

The stakeholder receiving a dashboard is answerable for the value received. They should be able to take action using the dashboard as justification.
So every part of a marketing dashboard should be answering

what are we getting value as a result of spending X? ( in time or money)
could we spend less and get the same results?
could we get greater results for the same or more money?
are there better options?
Why? How can we believe that?

Is your marketing dashboard winning new friends?

If the dashboard doesn’t influence more people as time goes by; then the agency is almost certainly missing out.

Many marketing agencies can safely be ignored by most within their client’s company. The agency is only visible to 2 or 3 within the immediate marketing “department” of the corporate.
Why not create dashboards that actively generate interest in what the agency is doing? Why not stimulate positive questions at board level. That provoke discussion of options.
One way to do this is to ask a series of what if questions:

what if the conversion rate increased or decreased?
which roles would it affect?
what new opportunities would exist as a result?
These will suggest people to whom the reports would matter if the trends were positive.

Does your dashboard enhance relationships?

The Dashboard should work for existing stakeholders. Do they read the reports regularly? If they don’t – why not? Are they boring? Does the dashboard empower the user to ask ever more demanding questions as time goes on. So a good question for every dashboard ingredient is:

Is this chart/table/element providing greater insights than last month?
Who does this help?
Does it provoke or lead to the next piece of work?

Does the dashboard support upselling and cross-selling?

Selling more to existing clients ought to be much less effort than getting new clients. The marketing dashboard can do a number of jobs to support this.

Provide the evidence that opportunities to do more exist.
Alert your client to these possibilities.
Publicise these opportunities.
Show how good your agency has been with the existing scope.
Provide the foundation justifying more work.

Does your marketing dashboard provide an Audit Trail?

What if the client people your agency deals with all left? Without warning? What would confirm the “rumour” that your agency did anything for that client?

OK – so there is a contract.

But what did you actually deliver?

Now for obvious reasons this scenario is rare. But is it wise to rely on your contacts alone to publicise how great your agency you agency is? Isn’t a plan B a wise precaution?
The reporting cycle and marketing dashboard provide the audit trail. They prove that not only did you have a contract and get paid – you also did something. Affected something. Helped your client in some specific ways.

Does the dashboard protect you against re-tendering?

Procurement departments are under relentless pressure to get more for less. Periodic demands to re-justify purchase contracts are inevitable. But it isn’t obvious that your contacts need to find alternative options easy.

Evidence that your agency dashboard is hard to replace could really help.

Help directly, because other agencies could be forced to offer similar or better. Because agencies who did this would feel the need to charge more – and the ease with which they could undercut the incumbent would lessen.

Help indirectly, because change isn’t valued. Any significant group of people from within your client arguing against change (even quietly) could help push the actual re-tendering process further into the future.

Are too many of the wrong views in the marketing dashboard?

All too often marketing dashboards have one overall view with segments. But if these segments don’t align with the responsibilities of the dashboard “consumers” then they aren’t going to really hit home. The reader isn’t going feel the hard work your agency does is relevant to them.

Using segments like this isn’t ideal either. It’s tedious to have to apply “your ideal segment” every time you open a report. Technology ought to do that – remember which segment you prefer. Or relate your profile to your ideal segments.

Conclusion

Creating a marketing dashboard that works effectively is not about drag and drop. It requires deep thinking about what the reader wants, needs and how your agency can benefit. So why not go for a walk and think?

The subversive approach to growing your digital agency

**Why Not Adopt Strategies Your Competitors Don’t Expect**?

You have to grow your digital agency. You’ve learnt the hard way that without this focus you’ll slip back. You’ll fail to hold you own against others determined to take your piece of the action.

Yet the standard ways — more schmoozing, more proposals, more chasing don’t excite. They’re inefficient. They’re what everyone else is doing.
So what if you could find a way to grow that set your agency apart from the crowd?

That’s what a subversive approach is all about. Doing the unexpected. Rigging the rules so you win. So let’s get started.

1) Don’t be afraid to adopt different approaches.

Do you see more clients as the route to growing your marketing agency? That’s what most people do. But growing the agency isn’t all about client numbers.

You can increase the value delivered by each service. Sometimes this will involve “real” effort. But as a subversive operator you work to increase the “perceived value”.

If the client believes you’ve done better then that’s real. Sometimes it’s about making sure more client people know your agency exists? Do you know how few that is at present?

2) Growing the digital agency but avoiding overload

The “me-too” approach concentrates on more proposals. This is expensive even with a reasonable win rate. But every extra client generates “client management” overhead. So growing without dramatically increasing the numbers of clients is much more manageable.

So is it bigger clients? A bigger client will have bigger budgets. And your potential revenue is a fraction of that. But bigger clients can mean more time dealing with procurement.

A subversive approach is to look for clients who will buy more services from your digital agency. Seeking partners might help. Find new proprietary services to sell. And make sure your services are difficult to compare against potential competitors.

3) Avoiding the greasy slope so your digital agency doesn’t slip back

Losing clients is bad. You lose all that effort in pitching and setting up the account. But the revenue loss isn’t an abstract concept. Most agencies are manpower intensive. So client loss creates real risks to the ongoing staffing budget.

So clear client expectations should be set. This should start before winning the business. The technical hurdles mustn’t derail all the expectations.

But expectations don’t stay fixed. New stakeholders can appear and push their expectations. So your contacts can get caught between the original agreement; and kow-towing to the new boss. So the subversive operator needs to stop those expectations mutating as if by magic.

4) Sharing the responsibility instead of dumping on Sales

The traditional approach is to think that Sales activity generates all revenue. And if claiming credit for it was proof, then many salespeople would have you believe it’s true.

But the truth is more complex. Many people contribute. Operations, your experts, creative people can play a significant part. They created the track record that means clients pick your agency! So leveraging the normal work to create “demonstrable track record” is smart.

Enabling experts to contribute their insights to the reporting you do is key. It’s the audit trail that exists after the phone chats have long since faded from memories. And reports survive after participants have departed.

5) Increasing the numbers of services your client purchases

Try growing the number of services you sell to each client? The cost of the first sale is usually the highest. Often by a long way. Following sales are cheaper and easier. So the selling overhead per sale reduces as you sell more services .

The easiest wins come from selling more services to contacts you already work with. After all, they already know like and trust you. But you still have to create the opportunities.

You already know the regular meetings are an opportunity. The real challenge is to shift gear. Stop talking about what has happened. You want to talk about “what we do next”.

6) Using advanced techniques to increase overall client value

Digital agencies often get trapped by the marketing contacts and the current contract. So if your contact looks after EMEA marketing for product group B you concentrate on that. And discard any help for other regions or product groups.

Think about the invasion of Europe in 1944. The Allies started with 6 beaches and formed a bridgehead. The Battle of Normandy was all about breaking out. Shouldn’t your agency approach marketing for a big corporate looking to “breakout” in the same way?

So the subversive approach whilst doing the marketing for a particular “silo” is to find ways to break out. We want you to escape the confines of the current contract. To sell new services to new contacts. Developing new business in the real sense “inside” existing clients.

7) Realising the key is how you tell the stories to support these tactics.

Reporting is the key to these subversive approaches. But not providing some standard “audit trail” of what got done last month. Tell a rich story instead. Complete it with trends, experiments, opportunities and setbacks. Use it to build relationships. Make it playable on demand. For ever.

Now this doesn’t fit with the silent movie approach of most online marketing dashboards. Nor on a verbatim sound track from the monthly meeting. But these aren’t limitations of todays rich media web are they?

A subversive operation will use tools that are effective for the methods you have in mind.

Sticking with old tactics doesn’t make sense for a digital agency

So there are numbers of subversive strategies you can deploy to grow your digital agency. Once you add them to your existing practices you skew the rules in your favour. You can coach clients so they:

Find it hard to treat your agency like a “discardable” commodity.
Welcome new services and opportunities that can benefit both of you.
Will see the value delivered and benefits they’ve gained.
Allow you to become a long term embedded partner.

This puts your agency on an even better foundation. To discover more head book an opportunity to have a chat. I’d love to hear your perspective..

5 Marketing Reporting Secrets for successful Digital Agency Reporting

Making sure your agency reporting contains compelling stories that engage your client, and build relationships is vital. It’ll help you upsell the next project. The following ideas are designed to help you do this.

1) Map the reporting onto the clients organisation.

Any global corporate has a complex structure. There are many regions, and product or service groups. Some of these will have come from past mergers and acquisitions.

So the individuals within the corporate have very different responsibilities and perspectives. And the reporting should reflect that.

Matching reports to responsibilities

Readers ignore reports that don’t help them deal with their own responsibilities. The challenge for an agency is to provide reports that every reader values highly.

Restricting the reporting to a small number of individuals is the wrong answer here. It deprives your agency of one of the most powerful marketing and sales aids it has (see below).

Each report should help specific roles within the corporate. It should answer their particular questions. This is far from simple. It is hard to discover all the people and roles who should consume information from reports. These roles should not just lie in marketing. They should extend into sales, support, finance and elsewhere.

This role identification then permits the design of meaningful reports. These reports should answer the key questions that confront each role.
You will guess the total programme here isn’t trivial or short. It is likely to stretch over months. Benefits will grow as the reporting gets more advanced and serves more roles.

This programme can transform the relationship between agency and client. It has the potential to improve the quality of decision making across the corporate. Why not configure the Google Analytics views so reports match the organisational structure?

A trivial example would be to configure the views within Google Analytics as follows.

The modern global corporate has a complex structure. And will have many product groups. This structure forms the basis of the roles – and the formal hierarchy. The websites will recognise this structure, even if poorly. So there are opportunities to customise the analytics package, creating custom reports.

But beyond this example lies huge opportunity. One can customise Google Analytics to reflect opportunities that your client’s business faces.

2) Simulate to improve the quality and mitigate the risks of reporting failure.

Agencies often recommend a new website or radical changes to the existing site. Perhaps the data gathering isn’t working well and requires radical change.

Testing the data gathering before go live dramatically reduces the risks. Marketing often push for Go Live to hit a seasonal opportunity and time campaigns to suit. If the reporting on a shopping cart fails then the business could be flying blind for a period. The business would be unable to judge what’s working or what’s failing. Simple errors in the data gathering and measurement infrastructure can lead to this. So tests before the crucial period can be invaluable.

There’s no reason to avoid testing the measurement infrastructure. The usability and facilities of the website would be before “go live”. But we need to simulate visitors because it isn’t economic to do this with human (live) visitors.

But beyond the risk of technical failure lie even more important considerations.

Dealing with the political risk

The proponent of radical change takes a considerable political risk. Particularly when it involves the data collection and analytics for a big corporate.
The customer inside the corporate must weigh the personal risk to their career. Often they will feel the risks to reputation or prospects are just too high. Many people within the corporate may have quietly accepted the existing situation. Many will accept the “reporting just doesn’t help”. These people may want a quiet life and want to avoid any change. Whilst others who like the current analytics setup could be seriously upset.

The roles adopted are like that of the prophet and an unwilling prospective follower. “If only the follower would accept the prophets’ message”. If they did this “the world would become a happier place”. But the cautious “follower” is torn between the sales message and fear. What if it all goes wrong? Fear of adverse consequences in a corporate scenario is a powerful motivator.

Simulation is the answer.

The best answer to help everyone is a well developed simulation. We use a “robot army” of visitors to prove in the safe “sandbox” that the proposed reporting system works. The simulation can prove the case for change at minimal risk. Adjustments can be made to deal with challenges or objections. The simulation doesn’t affect the live infrastructure or reporting regime.

The sceptical client can see that the change works for them and any stakeholders. And the client also can judge that the reporting improvements are worth any disruption. Any disruption can be explored and steps put in place to mitigate this.

3) Create reports that use the full richness of the web, not just a virtual billboard

Dramatic advances in technology haven’t really affected the common online “dashboard”. It’s still stuck in a timewarp. It often shows:

Graphics only.
A single set of pictures to all consumers.
There is no way for consumers to comment or otherwise engage with the “broadcaster”.

This is a bit weird . There isn’t any audio, or video, and even text is rare. This strangles rich online communication amongst agency experts and client staff at birth.

The sticking plaster is the regular client meeting. Now this certainly allows the client to provide all sorts of feedback. But this has serious disadvantages.

Explaining what is being shown takes time.
Those who can’t make the meeting can’t hear the explanation or contribute.
Follow up doesn’t happen “in context”. It typically relies on email. Follow up can get lost amongst a mass of other messages. The link between the follow up and the original information on the reports is weak. And those who aren’t included on the email don’t see it.

Now there are some conspiratorial reasons for restricting the reporting to this limited set of features – but that’s covered in my book (see elsewhere for details)….

4) Use a distribution system to build and enhance relationships

The typical agency and client relationship relies on a small number contacts. Your agency will prosper if many client personnel want to engage with your agency. You can stimulate this urge.

Many corporate staff have little or no information to help predict forward workload. The marketing agency has information that could make a serious difference here. By providing this you can shatter perceptions about the value of marketing. This would help both the agency and its marketing contacts.

The value of marketing that only sees its responsibility as gaining leads is much less to a client.

But if marketing tries to improve the entire customer journey. If a marketing agency works to increase client revenue and profit. If the agency works to provide real value to the client; the scope is huge.

Marketing often facilities the website(s), customer communication and support systems. Post sale support staff could use data about usage of these systems. These aren’t the traditional contents of a marketing report pack. But they can be really valuable.

5) Weaponise reporting to differentiate your agency and repel potential competitors

The Business Marketing Club’s B2B Barometer 2018 survey was interesting. 67% of the larger B2B agencies wanted to improve the marketing of their agency.

Reporting is normally a contractual obligation. The agency has to do it. But why should your agency accept a tickbox approach? Why adopt a hurdle criterion of just “making sure the reporting is adequate”? Should your agency limit its ambition in that way? What about considering how reporting provides a means to differentiate your agency.

Your agency could expand the scope of its reporting for mutual benefit.
Your agency could expand the type of reporting. It could provide more expert insight and build closer relationships.

This could frustrate anyone suggesting your agency is like all the others.

Why Digital Marketing Agencies struggle to retain Corporate Clients

Marketing struggles to get the C Suite to see them as important. They can struggle to get budget and approval for the next campaign. This puts the focus quite rightly on the history of wins.
Digital Marketing agencies supply reporting. This is a key part of this history. So clear reporting really helps the Chief Marketing Office (CMO). It helps them win friends and carry the boardroom.

Buyers like retendering to cut costs.

Does your agency have an good defensive strategy?

How do you differentiate?
How do you make the pain of disconnection real?
Are you making it almost impossible to compare your agency with others?
Are you building networks across your clients.
Do clients value the relationships with your agency experts
Do clients value the reporting?

Relationships are fragile. Corporate marketing staff certainly leave and move regularly. A large robust network of influencers is crucial. Report distribution make it easier to do this.
Creating these networks within your key accounts is a useful insurance policy. It’ll help retain clients long term.

But adopting the tactics and strategies that most agencies adopt doesn’t help. You need to be different.

Why SaaS is hurts digital marketing agencies

Self service helps SaaS vendors grow quickly. Some side effects of SaaS are subtle and nasty. Particularly when the service is marketing reporting.
Someone still has to create the reports that the SaaS vendor dodged. If your agency takes this on then you battle with:

a workforce that isn’t excited by another drag and drop editor. Nor by another series of repetitive tasks.
Features that are constrained by the need to be self service. Why? A flexible data processing system is pretty abstract. Marketing users may be poor at using an abstract model of this kind. Data analysts and programmers are much better.
A vendor who acts like a truant. The vendors are remote from end customers. That severely limits the learning vendors gain. The devil is in the detail of the data. It’s hard to produce good marketing reports.

Other side effects of SaaS

Poor incentives. Product innovation tends to be dominated by technical capability push. And the influence of market pull is minimised. The product features aren’t informed by the end user of the marketing reports. So new features are created “because we can”. They are not created “because the end user wanted or valued it”.

Often systems simply re-display the data available from online systems. There is little or no transformation. This makes creating high value information much harder. Sometimes it’s impossible. This means persuasive stories are hard to tell.

Formal requirements documentation is rare. Monthly subscription services have discouraged it. When systems cost many £10,000s formal requirements were essential. Consultancy support was also a natural part. The buying organisation would ensure the purchased facilities were “fit for purpose”. Both in the medium and longer term.

Long term flexibility to deal with your evolving customer needs isn’t assured.

Standard distribution tactics won’t differentiate your digital marketing agency.

Why not create a situation where procurement finds it difficult to swap your agency out?

A subversive approach for agencies

Why not use marketing dashboards to build relationships across the client.

But not just any kind of standard dashboard. If senior management view the dashboard high quality reporting is required. And the skill with which you “tailor” the message to suit each recipient has to be good.
The dashboard should quickly show “what they should care about and why”. There is a premium on quick access and clarity. Everyone wants information to be easily assimilated.

The prize ought to be obvious. Any agency wants relationships built and value appreciated. Most importantly by the movers and shakers across their corporate client. This moves your digital agency far away from being a “swappable commodity”.

It becomes harder for procurement to cast your agency aside. Particularly if the only gain is a small reduction in cost.

What kind of reporting do you need?

You’ll need a reporting system that:

Uses organisational context to select the report variant to show.
Enables controlled distribution to differing roles across the corporate client.
Shares compelling stories.
Uses any of the rich media that the web allows.

So what should Digital Marketing Agencies do?

Digital marketing agencies ought to look at solutions that are far from “minimal”. And a long way from the excel plus email mindset.

So a disciplined approach should see the reporting system as a strategic asset. And build on this investment in the long term.

A manufactured product would be introduced via :

Proving trials.
Smaller scale usage.
Expanded usage – driven by benefit and organisational fit.
Modular expansion.
A long term programme that started small. And then expanded to realise major benefits to all concerned.

Clients would support this investment as they realised the advantages from higher quality reporting.

This is a radical approach. It would transform the relationship between marketing agencies and their clients.