4 Reasons Why Digital Marketing Agencies Need To Be Growth Partners

I conducted a digital marketing survey of entrepreneurs across a number of industries. Their responses regarding marketing agencies were more or less unified. With liberalisation of the internet & the access to education it has given to billions, many entrepreneurs & SME owners have a sense of what digital marketing is about. In fact, for a small business owner to run his/her business effectively they not only have to understand their product and sales, they have to be be keenly aware of marketing & its impact (or lack thereof).

So what was the consensus?

1. Agencies generally over-charge & under-deliver

Mainstream marketing agencies faced with the democratization of the interweb are trying their best to repair their fractured business model by overcharging & underdelivering. They’ll cost creative at 50X the price while paying an intern a small fraction of the billing to maintain margins that fund their bourgeois office addresses & the staff in the fee proposal. If you’re unaware, CEOs bill for managing the intern.

The client sees & understands this.

2. They have zero buy-in into the client’s business

If billing more & more is the modus operandi, then empathy is relegated to the back of the bus. Copy-paste strategies, ho-hum creative, lack of discovery & zero desire to understand the client’s pain points is the way to go. To do the opposite would mean reducing margins.

3. They feel they’re doing the clients a favour

Jeff Bezos is known for saying that at Amazon, every day is day one. Meaning, Bezos (at least when he was CEO) viewed Amazon –– even when making billions of dollars –– as a startup. Agency hubris is the opposite of this. I remember being in a meeting where the client told me they had just fired a big-boy agency. Why? The agency was condescending & patronizing, lambasting this company’s marketing head for not filling briefs in “time” & in the correct format.

For any normal person, this was more than laughable. Obviously though, as hilarious as this may seem, the client was not amused.

4. Consequently, there’s no ROI

Because of the above, the feeling is that there is no value for money. How sad. But I do understand where they’re coming from & you should too. The reason being is that everyone wants to feel like they have gotten a deal. Warren Buffet is known for saying that, “Prices is what you pay. Value is what you get.” For someone to buy something & feel good about it, they need to feel that they’re the smartest person in the world for discovering such a good offer.

Which is to say, the conversation, the execution & the delivery has to be a practical & measurable win-win.

That’s why performance-based billing is what we do at Pied Piper. We don’t get paid until our clients do or until pre-determined targets (conversions etc) are achieved. We are growth partners. We believe that tangible success for our clients is success for us.

#digitalmarketing

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