Marketers’ relationships with agencies can go a number of ways. They can be arrangements of convenience, wherein the agency is just a line item on the web marketing budget that’s there to perform a specific duty. Or, the roles can become almost interwoven, in which the marketers begin to see the agency as an extension of their own businesses. A recent study from Domus asked 155 people in marketing decision-making roles what makes these relationships work and how they can improve to become more productive on both ends.
For marketers, reporting and measuring are areas for improvement
Despite technological advancements, 43 percent of marketers still feel like they have unmet needs in measuring and reporting campaign ROI. This is crucial to creative teams’ success because it’s how they demonstrate the value of their efforts to executives. Without accurate numbers about traffic, lead generation, engagement and conversions, marketers have to find abstract methods for proving the value of their programs when they need hard figures.
43 percent of marketers still feel like they have unmet needs in measuring and reporting campaign ROI
This is a common problem for companies – 37 percent said they struggle with content analytics – and it’s why strategic partnerships make sense for a lot of brands. The Content Marketing Institute reports 72 percent of large companies and 33 percent of small businesses outsource some of their content-related efforts.
Content marketing and SEO agencies have the analytics backgrounds needed to evaluate campaigns’ performances across channels and provide marketers with actionable insights, which is where the second-greatest need comes into play. One-third said they currently have gaps in identifying new revenue streams.
For agencies, it’s all about learning the business objectives
While marketers are concerned about their own ability to measure and report campaign success, they’re uncertain 
about agencies’ capacity to understand their business objectives. Domus found 71 percent of marketing decision-
makers said it’s extremely important that an agency understands their business objectives, and 49 percent cited
being aligned with those objectives as extremely important.
Survey respondents asserted that a strong understanding of objectives took precedence over being top-of-mind all the time, perhaps because it’s the first step before relationships deepen. Once an agency fully grasps the marketers’ goals and programs, it can offer a higher-level of consultancy that breeds further success down the line.
- Find out just how valuable it is to have a content marketing strategist tracking analytics data all the time in this success story.
