For years, the practice of agency management has been viewed purely as an operational function by the C-suite. Instead, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) should view agency management as an important strategic muscle they can flex to meet their broader set of organizational objectives. The right agency management competencies enable marketers to accomplish more with their agencies and improve agency performance.
Marketing is key to fuel growth. To lead their organizations to success, CMOs wear more hats than ever before, from being a brand steward to driving innovation. In their leadership role, they take on these important responsibilities:
- Customer journey coordinator: they ensure the coordination of the marketing mix and integrated marketing communication touch points throughout the customer journey.
- Data & ROI analyzer: they encourage their organization to gather customer and performance data to enable timely analysis and more informed decision-making.
- Growth accelerator: they focus all their resources on developing and implementing marketing initiatives that support the company’s revenue and client growth objectives.
- Brand protector: as brand stewards, they have the ultimate responsibility to build a strong, lasting brand. They look to their agencies to prompt the consistent use of brand guidelines.
- Budget optimizer: they must operate within certain set budget parameters, insisting on the effective, fiscally responsible use of budgets and company resources.
- Talent assembler: they carefully assemble teams of talented individuals, internally and externally (with agencies). They eagerly look for opportunities to attract and keep top talent.
- Innovation driver: they encourage their team and agency partners to push the envelope, think outside of the box, and innovate.
It’s no surprise that CMOs are then turning to their team and agency partners to bring their marketing vision to life and support these many expanded responsibilities with the resources available. The effective set up and use of these agency partnerships requires strong management competencies. For example, the above responsibilities require better agency planning and guidance, so expectations between clients and agencies are aligned. They require improved output quality to improve work performance. They require clients to be agency-ready and agencies to be client-ready, driving mutual accountability. They require more effective use of their limited internal and external resources. They require reduced budget waste and improved operational efficiencies. They require internal and external resources to work together well and collaborate.
The vast nature of these requirements can be a daunting task for any organization to take on. Traditional ways of working with clients and agencies have been overly manual and time-consuming. Brand advertisers must increasingly rely on new toolsets and capabilities, reducing labor-intensive and/or low-value tasks and focusing instead on better ways to extract value and ROI. Here are four tips on how to build this agency management muscle internally and get most value from it:
The discipline of Agency Management is an important marketing muscle most CMOs are learning to build and flex. It leads to strategic decisions about talent, team collaboration, budgets, process optimization, and work performance. The ability to turn well-managed agency partnerships into growth accelerators, brand protectors, innovation drivers, and more is priceless, even if the agency played only a support role at times. This is why CMOs increasingly care about doing this well.