Aligning Communication and Marketing Agencies Across Your Company

As technology continues to improve so do our communication tools, which in turn help to improve the communication and marketing efforts in our corporate environments. Despite all the amazing technological advances, there still remains communication difficulties for certain topics.

For example, how does your company communicate which third party suppliers, freelancers, or marketing agencies to work with? Without a tool to properly communicate these topics, you can unknowingly put your marketing efforts in danger.

Refining Communication & Marketing

In reality, most businesses don’t even have a platform to bring visibility to their marketing supply chain or roster of marketing agencies. Without that visibility, it is pretty much impossible to enable cross-departmental communication or efficiencies between different parts of your company.

For many companies, the most extensive form of communicating an approved list of agencies is an outdated Excel sheet floating around. The problem with this is that it lacks any real context as to who each agency is working with, whether anyone is still working with them, and if they even do good work. This essentially means that so many companies lack the insight to make the proper decision. And, this is simply because they don’t have the right context.

The Significance

Let’s face reality, your team and employees are disconnected from one another. They don’t have the data to know which agencies in your approved roster are the best to work with.

Keep reading to see why this is a severe issue for your company.

Pervasive

The fact that many corporate environments lack cross-department communication isn’t exactly a new idea. This is such a pervasive problem and impacts your business in ways that most executives haven’t even fully realized. The fact is that corporations’ lack of organized internal communication and sharing of data across the marketing supply chain is greatly harming your marketing efforts and your wallet.

Unfortunately, this is one of those problems that will just naturally fix itself. Without a system in place this problem will continue to prevail. Therefore, without a solution in place the task of finding the perfect agency to hire will always remains a difficult process.

Distributed Need To Hire Agencies

It’s not just your marketing department working with these agencies. Sales, human resources, procurement, research, and others also communicate with and hire marketing agencies as well. Yet, despite all these different departments working with agencies, businesses don’t have a system to help them manage nor streamline communications.

And, with all these different departments hiring agencies, the lack of a systematic feedback loop creates hiring blunders. All because employees don’t know which agencies were approved.

For example, as a creative director, one of the last things you want to do is to hire an unqualified agency. Unfortunately, this happens quite often. Many businesses finds themselves wasting money and in an unhappy relationship with an agency. But exactly how does something like this happen? As a result of job changes, there can often be a weird dynamic, and an individual in higher power doesn’t always feel comfortable asking colleagues for a recommendation.

Complex

Fortune 500 companies typically have between a thousand and five thousand marketing agencies on their roster worldwide. That includes digital agencies, software development agencies, design firms, public relations firms, and research and insights agencies.

With so many agencies, you’d imagine that there would be some sort of record. However, this isn’t the case. Or if there is a record it’s just in the minds of the few who have worked with a particular agency. Someone may have written something down in a Word doc or PowerPoint, but there is no way for others across the company to easily access that information. Basically, all the context data and the value it contains is left untapped.

Meanwhile, the information the employee has about the agencies is essentially useless to the enterprise because it’s not searchable. This issue is only amplified with how often internal marketers change jobs. Whether it’s within the company or changing companies completely, when you lose those individuals your company also loses their agency roster knowledge.

One of the most dangerous problems this can create is a lack of trust between your company and vendors. Typically, you avoid working with an unqualified agency and reward agencies that have done good work in the past. However, without a system in place it is very likely to make the mistake of hiring their competitor…ruining the relationship another department in your company took the time to craft.

Without well-organized internal communication, the success of your business can face great risks.

Summary

In the end, for communication to better align with marketing there needs to be a proper channel to discuss it. When a business has multiple locations and thousands of employees some topics are lost in translation. Or cease to simply be communicated about. But, how can you go about fixing such a pervasive issue?

Step 1: Have an Agency Management Strategy

Just like with many other things, one of the most important things you can do to start on the road to change is acknowledging that there is indeed an issue. Once you’re aware of the problem, you can identify and empower team members to improve how you manage your marketing supply chain.

Step 2: Use a Tool That All Stakeholders Can Access

As highlighted throughout this article, this problem is complex and distributed beyond just the marketing departments of companies.

For this reason, it’s important to identify tools, like our Enterprise Partner Management Platform, that allow broad access, bring visibility to data that isn’t being captured or used now, and connect people and agencies. Along the way, tools that align with existing processes to help mitigate risk are an added bonus. You can now learn more about this platform and how it works to improve Agency Management at SpotSource.com.

Marketing Matters