“Should I trust my business with a large, typical conglomerate or a smaller, accessible agency?”

It’s an age-old dilemma that plagues every business owner: should I go with a single agency or multiple agencies for all my marketing initiatives? The former indicates an archetypically stronger, more time-tested hold on the market, whereas the latter indicates agility and freedom to experiment.

However, things aren’t so binary nowadays.

As Sir Martin Sorrell famously announced in his last annual WPP shareholder meeting in 2017, the marketing pendulum has swung from a single creative agency to a consortium of specialized agencies, back to a single agency. The reasons for this are twofold and complementary – the current market is constantly in flux, and new tech is always being introduced.

To keep up with such a diverse market, conglomerates are forced to acquire specialized agencies, and brands are struggling to interface with multiple points of contact for a single campaign.

Enter, the single agency. Not only because of the advantage it poses in the above scenario, but because of the growing autonomy it enjoys, to impact a business, the single agency is emerging as a clear favorite in these agency wars.

How A Single Agency Can Impact and Grow Your Business

• They can look at all managed activities from a macro lens. Today’s buyer’s journey envelopes a plethora of touchpoints before a resulting conversion translating to that many more touchpoints at which a brand can communicate positively with a consumer. A single agency has the power to look at all marketing spends on an aggregate level, and can use multi-touch attribution tools to make timely decisions optimizing on-the-go and prioritizing decisions affecting the bottom line.
• Reduce spending, increase ROI. Thanks to timely intervention and tools that can help to identify what’s working and what’s not. Tools ultimately save your brand a ton of money that would otherwise be stuck in stagnant, fragmented marketing activities being managed by multiple stakeholders.
• First mover advantage. Just like brands must compete to be first in the market for their product, they must also have the first-mover advantage in marketing! Markets are nothing but a reflection of your consumer’s preferences, and those are always changing. You must constantly be on top of those changes and adapt to the dynamic market landscape to have a competitive advantage!

Marketing Tech – How to Make It Work for You

Marketing Tech (or ‘MarTech’ in short) is specific software that marketers leverage to plan, execute, and then measure their marketing campaigns.

1. The Foundations of MarTech

A MarTech strategy uses a few core tools, ranging from essential to complex, depending on the company using them. It can be understood best in the context of four technology layers –

• Marketing Technology Platforms: Includes components like digital asset management, social media and web content management, and marketing automation
• Enterprise Data Foundation: Which consists of analytics, consumer and product data and business intelligence
• Marketing and Sales Services: These rely on the underlying layers to streamline the execution of e-commerce management, content delivery networks, and online video streaming platforms (which all require content in some form)
• Major Channels: The topmost layer, that includes the touchpoints themselves through which marketers distribute their strategies to the audience, like email, social, television, mobile, print, and websites.

When picking a MarTech stack, you want to make sure it addresses all stages of the marketing cycle – beginning with attracting, engaging, converting, managing, and ultimately understanding your target audience.

2. Tech Has Disrupted the Marketing Landscape

Emerging tech and the rise of social media has forced agencies and brands alike, to investigate more innovative ways to engage with their users. The convergence of ad tech and mar tech is proving to be revolutionary, and so, too, is the personalization of data.

Brand marketers realize that it’s essential to have access to both, client data and overarching consumer information, to effectively build digital strategies that really work. It’s causing big changes in the agency – brand relationship.

In fact, 74% of marketers want to work with ad agencies who know how to make use of ad tech. However, ad agencies are still grappling to figure out what exactly it is and how to make it work for them.

3. An Agency Partner Who Knows the How’s and Why’s of Tech

It’s not enough to make a pitch and throw in fancy buzzwords like ‘competitive mapping,’ ‘omnichannel solutions,’ and ‘attribution modeling.’ In today’s marketplace, an agency has to walk the talk.

Brand marketers now expect access to real-time data and key analytics of their campaigns – it’s no longer a ‘nice to have.’ Why would it be? If you’re spending hard-earned money, you deserve the appropriate results. Your ideal agency should provide you with timely, rich insights that leverage a host of information to drive your business goals.

Understanding emerging tech and its uses, along with your business prerogatives – is key to hitting that sweet spot.

Trust Your Brand’s Success with A Single Agency

Simply put, the single marketing agency is almost like your personal banking assistant.

It knows you, it understands your background, your current status, your dreams, and ambitions – and is in the unique position to help you grow and achieve it. Also, since it is so minutely invested in the partnership, your growth equals their growth.

Growth translates to not only higher revenue, but satisfaction and trust, on both sides.

Now, who wouldn’t want that?