Did you hear about the Tap Water Project by UNICEF? It came up in 2006, when Esquire challenged Droga5’s David Droga to take a magazine page and give life to a brand that could make a positive change in the society. Mind you, that was the year Droga5 kicked off operations.
In just a year, it rolled out the campaign in partnership with UNICEF. The goal was to raise funds to provide safe, clean drinking water to children world over. It began with a one-day pilot in New York City restaurants, where diners paid $1 to drink tap water, which they usually get for free. The campaign eventually spread to thousands of restaurants across the US and helped UNICEF raise enough funding to provide safe drinking water to over 5,00,000 people across the world.
This is just one example. A simple internet search for best campaigns of the decade will spout tons of articles about agencies which hit the nail on the head with top-notch ideas.
But wait, are great ideas enough to drive business? Not really. It’s like creating beautiful sculptures and waiting for a passerby to notice it and spread the word. Creativity needs to go hand-in-hand with business sense for agencies to sustain their growth.
This holds true, especially today when the advertising and marketing world is undergoing a series of disruptions.
What’s impacting the industry today?
From the brand/client perspective;
- Brands like Unilever and United Airlines are building in-house creative teams, leaving agencies to move from the long-term contract models to signing short-term project-related work.
- Brands don’t just want to work with agencies which have proven creative expertise. They want to work with niche agencies which understand their business & have deep expertise in their area of operations as well.
- Today, the customer defines what brands need to deliver and brands expect agencies to design campaigns centred on customer data (i.e. based on customer needs). This means, agencies need to become more tech-savvy and be in tune with customer trends.
From the agency perspective;
- From individual consultants to small agencies, there is a sudden boom of companies delivering advertising & marketing services to brands.
- Not only is the agency fee decreasing but employee efficiency and productivity is also taking a hit due to excessive workload.
- Within agencies, there’s higher emphasis on creating more visibility across teams by mapping entire client journey. There’s also increased focus also on measuring impact of campaigns, improving efficiency & saving time, resources.
So, while ideas can create recognition for agencies, in order for them to stay relevant, stand out in the market, and grow their business, they need to focus on three key aspects;
- Increasing employee productivity and efficiency
- Improving the quality of client relationships
- Internally, drive more process and accountability into their everyday workings
What’s the best way for agencies to achieve this? With a specialized advertising and marketing agency CRM software.
Here’s a step-wise guide into how CRM can benefit agencies immensely;
- Set context when engaging with your prospective clients
- Easily catch up where you left last
- Track everything related to your business in simple steps
- Work smart. Save time.
- Collaborate across teams
- Keep your clients engaged at all times
- Work on the go
#1 Set context when engaging with your prospective clients
Your agency may be getting leads from various sources; through your networks, through referrals, events, webinars, marketing campaigns on social media platforms, sales campaigns or in some cases, even your own website.
What do you do with all this lead data? You can simply store all lead data in a CRM and access it any time. The silver lining is, some CRM software come with a capability to automatically enrich lead data by accessing information from the lead’s social profiles and publicly available information. Even better, a good CRM software even comes equipped with a web or app tracking feature which can give you behavioral insights on the pages your website visitors visited, research reports they downloaded, any webinars they viewed, blogs they visited or more. This could be a powerful tool for you to set context into your first few engagements with your leads.
#2 Easily catch up where you left last
One of the best things about adopting an advertising and marketing CRM is that it gives you a 360 degree view of each customer data in one place. It becomes extremely simple for you to know where you left last with your customer, because every email or call you’ve had, the appointments you’ve fixed with them, the notes you’ve added about their business and requirements, and even any files you may have exchanged like business development presentations or pitch decks, gets stored in one place. This is so much better than having to scroll through your emails, call logs and notebooks to keep tab of each lead, isn’t it?
In fact, some modern CRM software even help score your leads. You can set criteria, like adding 10 points if the lead responded to your email, or adding 20 points if they are from a particular sector or more. This can help you go after those leads which are more important for your business, and pursue those who are more actively engaging with you.
Did you know? According to an IBM post on CRM statistics for 2017, businesses saw a 41% increase in revenue once they started adopting a CRM software.
#3 Track everything related to your business in simple steps
As an agency, you may be having multiple processes in place; one to track progress with potential clients, one to track project status with existing clients and more. While you may have a team of account executives keeping tab of progress and deadlines, it still means a ton of manual work.
You can make the best use of an advertising and marketing CRM software here by simply creating multiple deal pipelines for each use case and tracking progress right there. You can easily drag and drop a client from one stage to another, even generate revenue estimates, and get a holistic view of how many clients are present in each stage and draw relevant insights into how your business is performing. For example, if you have many clients still under ‘contacted’, you can talk to your development teams to find out why there’s a bottleneck there – it could be because the client is not looking to move from its current agency for the next few months, or because they are exploring your competitors too. In such a case, you could think of adopting sales cadence strategies to pursue your potential clients.
#4 Work smart. Save time.
Let’s admit it. Agency life is crazy. You’re almost always running around coordinating client requirements and meeting project deadlines. More so today, when agencies are leaning more towards short-term projects, which means more work and shorter deadlines. In such a scenario, is there a way you can reduce the number of manual tasks you perform, just so you can invest that time in focusing more on your client? The answer is, yes! Advertising and marketing CRM allow you to automate a major chunk of mundane tasks you perform every day; like raising invoices, setting payment reminders, setting a trigger to send a thank you note when a client subscribes for your newsletter and much more.
#5 Collaborate across teams
Some agencies may have the account manager itself handling end-to-end of client relationship, right from coordinating their project requirements to managing invoices and payments. In other cases, agencies may have multiple teams, like the business development team, the account management team, and production team managing the client journey across different stages. How can teams collaborate so they stay on the same page with a particular client?
Some advertising and marketing CRM come with team collaboration features which ensure that teams don’t have to go back and forth between different tools to share information. For example, if a client for an ad agency poses a technical query to the account management team about an ad that the production team is creating, the account management team can loop in the relevant team member from the production house, get a response to the client’s query and mail the client back with the relevant details.
#6 Keep your clients engaged at all times
Here’s another statistic coming your way. According to Capterra, companies which used a CRM revealed that they saw a 47% increase in customer retention and satisfaction. What does it mean? More business, of course. But it also increases your chances of a referral.
One way you can retain clients and even keep them happy is by making sure you stay on top of their minds. In other words, after you’ve won a client, you can’t take a back seat. You need to keep that momentum going. Like Aaron Levy, the Director of Paid Search at Elite SEM puts it, one of the key strategies to keeping clients engaged is to “be their best friends! Learn their birthdays, their kids’ names and best of all, how to get their bonuses!” Jokes apart, you can engage your clients by adding them to your nurture campaigns. Send them event invites, give them updates about new services you’ve launched, share with them the ideas you’ve worked on with other clients which they may find interesting and relevant, or more. In fact, you can even track clicks and opens to see how your campaigns are performing and tweak your strategy accordingly.
#7 Work on the go
You heard that right. An advertising and marketing CRM software which can be accessed on mobile can be a game changer for your business. You can access client data, respond to emails, take calls and have them logged into your CRM and stay on top of your business at all times, irrespective of where you are.
