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Marketing Procurement offers the integrated expertise that builds a bridge between Marketing and agencies
Marketing is constantly balancing the need for reach and engagement with shrinking budgets and increasingly demanding return on investment (ROI) expectations. Marketing teams need agencies capable of helping them navigate the rapidly changing landscape while gripping tightly to customer attention and loyalty.
It’s a tightrope walk for Marketing as they balance cost, value, stickiness, growth and resources against demand, expectations, budgets and stakeholders.
They also need to find the perfect agencies to suit their markets and expectations.
Marketing & Procurement: A symbiotic relationship
Marketing Procurement plays an invaluable role helping Marketing find agency partners that align with expectations and can deliver creative magic, whilst proving the metrics and data adds up. Marketing Procurement wants to prove the ROI is also adding value to the business.
Combined, the shared expertise of both Marketing Procurement and Marketing can empower agencies to deliver its best work.
When Marketing Procurement and Marketing collaborate with one another, sharing insights and ensuring consistent visibility into processes and planning, it changes the dynamic of the relationship. Moving to symbiosis where each offer the other insights that can strengthen their decision-making and, as a result, their relationship with agencies.
There are several ways in which this symbiosis can be felt:
Marketing Procurement – Flexibility
Marketing is an ever-evolving art form. It’s shaped by trends, market demand, budgets and customer expectations. This makes it challenging to establish long-term contracts with agencies as metrics and expectations can change rapidly.
Marketing Procurement can help Marketing by developing contracts that are flexible by design, agile enough to adapt to changing factors such as deliverables or timelines, without compromising on relationships or expectations.
Marketing Procurement – Performance
Marketing Procurement also offers Marketing with visibility into agency performance and contract deliverables through consistent re-evaluation of service level agreements (SLAs) and contract structures. Procurement teams can assess whether or not an agency is meeting its SLAs, if the SLAs need to be revaluated to support the agency and its performance, or if contracts need to be revised to be more in tune with existing demands or markets.
When Marketing Procurement has visibility into how Marketing is using an agency or an agency’s performance, they can collaborate with Marketing to accommodate changes in scope or to address any inconsistencies. This level of shared insight and consistent analysis also increases the chance of catching any bottlenecks or agency performance issues early on, reducing risks and unnecessary costs.
Marketing Procurement – Benchmarking
While there will always be layers to every agency-brand relationship, one of the most invaluable for everyone – Marketing, Agency, Marketing Procurement – is benchmarking. It’s much easier to build success on a foundation of shared expectations and comprehensive visibility. Benchmarking tools, such as those provided by RightSpend, allow for Marketing to make informed decisions about their agencies and campaigns using hard data pulled from multiple markets, countries, agencies, industries and campaigns.
What does a successful agency look like? How does an agency perform in relation to its competition? What are the cost implications across different agencies in the same market? Are the costs outlined by an agency in line with fair market standards? These are just some of the critical questions benchmarking offers Marketing, and they come from the deep critical and strategic thinking of Marketing Procurement.
Marketing Procurement – Strategy
Marketing Procurement is Marketing’s strategic advisor. With their understanding of data, costs, budgets and business expectations, Marketing Procurement can help Marketing maintain a competitive edge. Marketing will always relish a big budget that can achieve the remarkable, and Marketing Procurement will always relish the opportunity to optimise those budgets so there is, for lack of a better cliché, far more bang for the buck.
At first glance, these look like opposing views, but when both sides collaborate, Marketing Procurement can make Marketing more money. For example, when using RightSpend to take a data-driven approach to Marketing, Marketing Procurement can get $120 million of marketing activity from a budget of $100 million. How? By using benchmark data from across 75 global markets that assesses more than $10 billion in marketing spend annually across multiple agency disciplines. Imagine how much more Marketing can do when every dollar is optimised thanks to Marketing Procurement?
The value of Marketing & Procurement relationships
Marketing Procurement and Marketing should have a strong relationship as this will ensure the brand can build even stronger relationships with agencies. Using Marketing’s creative savvy combined with Marketing Procurement’s cost efficiencies and data-driven insights, both teams can quickly identify and deliver ROI without compromising on agency collaboration or engagement.
Discover how RightSpend with RightData can set your teams on the right road to optimising Marketing spend and agency relationships.
