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Agency selection, choosing vendors whose vision aligns with your own, but importantly also has the right capabilities to drive growth will positively affect the return on your marketing investment.
This guide will articulate how making the right agency selection, proactive management, and performance-based contracts can unlock significant value to your marketing.
Establishing a consistent and efficient process for agency selection should be a top priority for high-performing Procurement teams.
Flawed Agency Selection Carry a Heavy Cost
Procurement plays a crucial role in agency selection, but too often, the process becomes an operational box-checking exercise rather than a strategic decision.
Called in at the wrong point of the process and pressure to deliver contracts quickly can replace diligent agency selection. The time and resources may not be available, but the ramifications of not making the right decision can undermine marketing efforts for years to come.
Common selection flaws like ignoring data-driven scoring models, letting cost savings outweigh expertise and not benchmarking agency fees carry lasting consequences. Marketing investment can fail to perform; campaigns can fall short of targets and the business can suffer due to the wrong agency partners.
Agency Selection: Define Needs & Apply Data Precision
The first step to making meticulous agency selections is tightly defining the business needs and expectations. It may seem obvious, but you must understand which agencies you need to work on each project.
Templates and established workflows can help you determine the precise functional expertise, technical capabilities, company culture fit and collaborative tendencies needed to support growth and meet your objectives.
Incorporating unbiased, data-led processes for agency selection to match the right agencies to your requirements accurately. It’s essential to consider agency credentials and previous work to ensure they are qualified for the job, but you should also consider other attributes – looking at their communications, working relationship, vision and values. It can prove challenging to change or adapt these down the line.
Marketing success depends on agency selection that fit predefined needs and deliverables. Disciplined selection and time invested upfront can ensure successful partnerships.
Agency Selection: Set Transparent Expectations & Review Rigorously
Ongoing success requires setting clear expectations in the negotiation process and contractual terms. Continuous agency reviews throughout the partnership or project period ensures expectations and agreed KPIs are met.
We recommend:
- Investing time to document precise timelines, services, fees, team commitments, deliverables, performance metrics and management processes in detail within service level agreements (SLAs).
- Establishing procurement processes to frequently measure marketing agency efficacy through a data-driven approach, including benchmarking, tracking and evaluations.
- Instilling an open line of communication – transparency works both ways. Give your agency regular feedback and correct the course collaboratively when metrics lag or relations fray.
- Applying transparent management frameworks to encourage better alignment, which in turn leads to more value from your agency spend.
Agency Selection: Using Data for Growth
Even the best agencies can struggle to achieve targets when there is a lack of transparency and collaboration. It can be easy to spread agency contracts broadly, without consideration to performance and the value they are delivering – particularly without a data-driven approach to your Marketing Procurement.
Data is the cornerstone for growth, allowing you to measure the impact of your agencies and how they have performed against your marketing spend. Using the right tools, such as RightSpend, to establish your procurement benchmarks and then evaluating and reviewing against these metrics ensures you can highlight opportunities for potential savings and efficiencies.
Using Marketing Procurement data to negotiate confidently as part of your agency selection can improve potential for growth and increased ROI. Reinvesting any savings you make back into more campaigns and more opportunity for marketing success.
Find out more about Agency selection with a data-driven approach and how it can deliver you an advanced ROI – Book a call with the RightSpend team today.