How Digital is Changing the Client-Agency Relationship
In a recent study, analytic firm Flurry discovered that Americans spend an average of five hours a day on their mobile device. The digital revolution has driven the shift in focus from television, print and radio to social media and digital media, causing the effectiveness of traditional advertising to decline rapidly. A poll also reveals that marketers have seen more change in the past two years than they have in the previous 50.
With this shift from traditional to digital and social-based marketing, collaboration between agency and client has become incredibly important and clients want to have active involvement in the creation of the final product.
According to Alexei Orlov, CEO of Rapp, the actual model of the agency is also experiencing a transformation. Agencies have had to learn to open up the process to their clients, investing in collaborative software and finding the communication sweet-spot – which experts suggest is a little more than a few times a month, but a little less than a few times a week.
Rather than maintaining a strict agency-client relationship, many clients now require that agencies rise above “vendor” status, becoming an extension of the client’s internal team. With the advent of social marketing, and the need to constantly be in the forefront of a consumer’s mind, agencies would also be remiss to ignore the skills and knowledge their clients bring to the table.
By utilising collaborative software such as CoSchedule and Active Collab, we at Machete are able to work closely with our own clients, keeping them updated on projects and their social strategy, without the need for daily meetings.
With some clients, close collaboration means we are able to let them create their own content and manage their own social media presence, picking the most important content to put spend behind. With others, we simply give them the necessary framework and tools to contribute their own inbound marketing efforts.
Collaborative software also adds to the effectiveness of offline communications, such as weekly meetings, and adds transparency to the work we do for our clients, which is always a good thing.
