A successful online marketing campaign is like producing a great dish in a restaurant. It takes great ingredients, collaboration and experience to create a winning dish.
When it comes to marketing, most CMOs stick with 1-2 agencies in the race for accountability. This is usually closely followed by changing agencies every year or two to try and improve or change things that were not working well.
The reality is that each agency specialises in a small number of activities that they do well but the majority of their activities are not their specialty. Because clients only want to deal with a handful of entities the agencies are then “forced” into diversifying to keep their clients happy and so they end up doing creative, online and offline media buying, trafficking and ad placement, reporting, sending eDM’s and Direct Snail Mail, Outdoor Advertising and the list goes on.
Clearly an agency cannot specialise in such a wide range of activities that require very different skills sets. So what is the solution for marketers? More importantly what is the solution for agencies ?
Collaboration!
Until the 1990s airlines were all competing with each other and stretching themselves to serve as many airports as they could but this was devastating for the industry as many went bankrupt trying to grow and going well beyond their means given the high capital cost required. In 1997 five leading airlines including United, Thai Airways and Lufthansa formed Star Alliance. By pooling resources and dividing up the sky through collaboration they managed to significantly lower their costs and increase market share. It is no wonder that two years later their competitors formed One World and another group formed Sky Team.
With the recent explosive growth in digital marketing, many of the traditional agencies which focus on ‘old world’ mass media such as TV, Radio, Print and Outdoor are realising that their sources of revenue are declining and are seeing their clients increasingly invest in online. The majority of these agencies lack the technical know-how and expertise to compete in sophisticated online marketing.
Many of these agencies are also concerned about changing focus and investing significant capital in ad servers, online analytics, reporting and tracking tools.
The logical step then, to allow these agencies to satisfy their clients, is to collaborate with partners by continuing to manage the client relationship and allowing a third party to manage, track and optimise these campaigns. Benchmarketing’s white label product suite gives agencies the access to highly sophisticated ad optimisation technology including: Real-time bidding across 22 networks, live analytics dashboard with deep campaign insights, landing page templates, retargeting engine and brand safe media.
With the Benchmarketing platform, agencies are able to offer their clients a suite of robust and intelligent tools to increase marketing ROI and accountability, and serve highly targeted ads that are built for conversions.
