The strength of an agency's partner network is a key factor to its ability to sustain and grow.
Creative agencies tend to miss or lose new business opportunities when they can't service accounts looking for creative and media in one place. And agencies with limited offerings have limited ability to grow organically. Lastly, agencies only offering creative services are vulnerable to losing an existing account to an agency offering a full-service approach.
Banking and insurance companies have found the key to growth is to offer multiple services that make it hard for customers to leave. Geico insurance offers a wide range of services like car, boat, and renter’s insurance. They have a large partner network to offer all of these services. According to Harvard Business Review, Li & Fung, an apparel trading company, leveraged partnerships to help double their revenue to $3.2 billion over five years. The same strategy can apply for agencies.
For the past 11 years, Effective Marketing, an innovative, data-driven media agency, has developed partnerships with creative agencies to elevate their offerings and grow business together. Read on to learn about our unique approach and what is in it for your agency.
What does an agency partnership with Effective Marketing look like?
A Powerful Partnership - How Creative Agencies Win:
Grow revenue with new services
We partner with agencies to generate revenue by winning new businesses, selling in media services to existing clients. We operate in both white label and named-partner scenarios. Let’s compare our prospect lists and see what business we can co-develop together.
Increase retention
We help agencies increase client retention through the addition of media planning and buying services. Effective charges 0% commission on media spend and has low project-based rates that agencies can mark-up.
Increase revenue with incremental creative production
Our media recommendations provide rationale for larger creative productions which yield more fees for creative development and production.
Our performance reports often yield the need for new creative versions, allowing fees to grow for creative agencies.
We help creative agencies measure the bottom line results of creative. This enables agencies to charge appropriately for their work, instead of racing to the bottom on price.
Our Partnership Capabilities:
New business
We help you win new business in pitches requiring paid media planning and buying.
Organic growth
We help manage media services for existing clients you may be supporting in a small or substandard way (maybe you are managing Facebook ads for a client, but not other aspects of the media plan).
Staff augmentation
We "pinch-hit" for open positions or help out when workload spikes.
Tech stack development, process improvement.
We conduct audits of existing partners, approaches and workflows. And we help agencies to not just get up to speed on media capabilities, but take giant steps forward to becoming an agency of the future.
Training and capability development
We provide standard and customized training to build in-house capabilities and help creative teams understand opportunities and challenges of digital and traditional ad placements. For example, creative teams are often unaware that the majority of paid social ads will be viewed without sound. And many benefit from reminders on using 5 words or less on highway outdoor boards.
Creative performance improvement
We know what works. And we help teams produce effective creative that drives results. For example, we know that motion = engagement. We work closely with creative teams to craft effective videos and convert still images into powerful videos and animations. And we advise on the use of influencers. We see higher engagement and conversion rates when we use influencer handles instead of brand handles. This is because 1. Consumers prefer content from people vs brands and 2. Social media algorithms treat paid posts from people differently than paid posts from brands.
Our Experience:
We have 11 years of supporting agencies with:
New business pitches
Supporting new and existing client needs
Training creative teams on opportunities and limitations to consider when developing creative
Development of tech stacks and data partnerships
Encouraging creative agencies to use ad servers - When creative agencies send files instead of tags, they cut themselves out of direct line of sight to creative performance!
Development of work flow process
Defining job descriptions and hiring for media positions
We have graduate level teaching experience
Our founder and president Sam Karow https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-karow-39044b5/ was an adjunct professor at Loyola University’s Quinlan School of Business. We offer standard and custom training in media planning and buying social media, direct and database marketing. From virtual “lunch and learns” to full-day sessions, we can develop a program best-suited to your needs and budget.
We have supported and helped stand up media practices for the following agencies: Anthem/SGK, CommonGround, Hyde Park Group, Marketing Werks, Match Marketing Group, Omobono, Reilly Connect, smallgood, Spool Marketing, Tom, Dick and Harry, Trisect, underthink, Upshot and several others.
Proven Success:
While "pinch-hitting" for an open digital marketing director position at Marketing Werks, we invented a process for amplifying experiential marketing programs. We coined the phrase "Programmatic Experiential" that Marketing Werks patented and leveraged to boost their own presence at an event marketing conference. The process uses geo-fencing to passively capture device IDs allowing brand ambassadors more time to be ambassadors and less time trying to get consumers to complete contact forms on ipads.
Tim Nelson from Match Marketing Group said “Effective was a god-send to our agency.”
Mardie Bays of Anthem said: "They are not only experts in media, but also have a sensitivity for making creative work." Her full review can be found here: https://clutch.co/profile/effective-marketing#reviews
Let’s grow business together. Reach out to discuss a partnership with Effective Marketing! https://www.effectivemc.com/contact
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