The “Demonstrate Value Delivered” Factor

Marketing agencies that demonstrate value as delivered to their clients will see significantly more growth than those that simply execute campaigns.

Want to hear a pretty frightening statistic? Less than five-percent of some of the marketing entities we have made contact with are in a position to track true marketing ROI (Return on Investment) for their own clients – in other words, the return on each incremental dollar spent in marketing “vehicle A” versus “B” versus “C.” If you represent a marketing entity and are reading this, you first need to ask yourself how you define “value”: Is it something you believe can be measured? What are your clients’ products and services actually worth to their customers? Remarkably, very few suppliers in business markets are able to answer those questions and yet the ability to pinpoint the value of a product or service for one’s customer has never been more important.

But demonstrating value can be a challenge for agencies for a multitude of reasons: Marketing companies take advantage of many different online tools, and pulling reports from each tool and compiling results is a painstakingly time-consuming process. Further, using disparate online tools means they don’t communicate with one another, and so it ultimately becomes tough to paint a clear picture of overall campaign results; a good example of this would be an agency that’s promoting a new product using social media, email campaigns, video marketing and more, and studying which advertising mediums are paving the way toward leads, conversions and sales.

Demonstrating value is also a challenge to marketing agencies because such agencies typically report once a month due to the labor involved in creating the reports; reporting in real-time with weekly and/or monthly summaries significantly strengthens the agency’s relationship with the client.

Now that we understand the challenges, what is the solution? Integrated marketing automation platforms – such as the type offered by ActiveDEMAND – can automate reporting, but more significantly will calculate the return on marketing campaigns based on the goals an agency sets. These goals can be anything from new introductions or the number of White Paper downloads to the number of event registrations, purchases or coupon downloads.

Still, the point of this particular article isn’t to sell the merits of using an integrated marketing automation platform – we want to express the importance of demonstrating value as delivered to clients. The bottom line is that agencies that want to grow their existing retainer business with less effort need to start demonstrating value delivered, not just execute a campaign.