clients

The changing relationship between clients and agencies

What do clients want and value in their agency relationships? What level of digital sophistication can be seen client-side? How are clients transforming in the light of increasingly digital customer experiences?

These are the questions asked by the 2014 Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) Report and its Digital Marketing Outlook survey conducted in partnership with Econsultancy.

In this post I’ve rounded up some highlights from the report, looking at changes in the agency-client landscape.

Selling your agency’s services is like making love to a beautiful woman…

Anyone familiar with the brilliant sketch show, The Fast Show, will know used car dealer Swiss Toni. He compared everything to “making love to a beautiful woman” especially selling….cars in his case.

Although a fan of Swiss Toni, I tend to disagree with his New Business philosophy. The smooth salesman façade is thankfully rather dated and there are a lot more….well, nicer ways of developing partnerships with clients.

This blog post will discuss a few things I’ve learnt over the years.

Censorship or surveillance: which keywords are flagged in China?

What do censorship and surveillance programmes look for? What can this tell us about internet usage in China?

Can we contrast with the perceived surveillance state of the West? What are the implications for a company in the Chinese market?

Unsurprisingly, there are lots of questions still to be answered about the state of the internet in China.

First Monday has this month published a very interesting paper, presenting an analysis of data from a year and a half tracking the censorship and surveillance keyword lists of two instant messaging (IM) programs used in China.

I thought it would be useful to sum up what Crandall et al. found, so you don’t have to read the whole thing. Although this study looks at IM clients, there are certainly findings that can be extrapolated across public services, such as Baidu and Sina Weibo.

Pay-for-performance for agencies: perfect arrangement or bad idea?

There’s a long history behind how agencies are compensated for their efforts, but that doesn’t mean that everybody is satisfied with agency compensation.

At one time, agencies were typically paid a commission. Clients didn’t like that. Today they’re generally paid by the hour, something that both agencies and clients alike find reason to complain about.

12 things every freelancer should have

Being a freelancer can be a fulfilling and profitable career path.

In digital industries, where job mobility is high and five years with a single employer is ‘a long time’, many professionals view freelancing as a viable and attractive career path.

But make no mistake about it: freelancing is a business and as with any business, starting up, surviving and thriving can be difficult to do.

Here are 12 success-promoting things every freelancer, new and experienced, should have in place.  

Six ways to make your nightmare client less nightmarish

Can you turn a grumpy developer into a happy developer? In many cases, the answer is ‘Absolutely!’, but when it comes to client-service provider relationships, service providers often have legitimate complaints about their clients.

So can service providers turn their nightmare clients into dream clients? In many case, the answer is the same: absolutely!

Five things your agency isn’t telling you

Companies have more opportunities than ever to reach consumers thanks in large part to the proliferation of digital channels, but taking advantage of those opportunities can be difficult.

From display and mobile to social and video, figuring out the best way to use digital channels is no small undertaking.

So it’s no surprise that many companies turn to agencies for answers.

Technology is not a panacea for agencies

It’s a seemingly great time to be a brand. Our digital world has created numerous challenges in reaching consumers, but thanks to digital channels like social and mobile, there are arguably more opportunities than ever to create connections.

For agencies, whether the digital revolution is a boon isn’t always so clear. Yes, agency services are in great demand as a result, but the complexity of digital advertising is creating some significant pain.

Is your agency over-complicating PPC?

Pay per click (PPC) marketing is a simple and effective method of advertising – you define the keywords that you would like your ad to display for (or not), you build an advert and you wait for a match against the search query, get a click and hopefully a conversion. It’s all based on relevancy.

As a client are you happy with the quality of your PPC?

Does social media necessitate a 24/7 agency?

It’s 2:00 p.m. on Sunday. Your brand is buzzing on Twitter and there may be an opportunity to capitalize. Do you know where the folks at your agency are at?

While anybody who has worked in agency world for any length of time is familiar with long hours and grueling schedules, there’s a decent chance that the people you need to reach on that hypothetical Sunday afternoon aren’t sitting in front of the office at a computer manning your company’s social media dashboard. 

Clients get the (search) advertising they deserve

David Ogilvy once said ‘clients get the advertising they deserve’.

Having been COO of a search agency for each of the last 10 years, I can tell you with some authority that Ogilvy’s quote is as true in the digital specialisms of SEO, PPC and Social Media as it is in the broader advertising discipline.

Five bad habits that scare off great contractors

Recruiting great employees is often one of the most challenging tasks
for businesses, particularly small and mid-sized businesses which don’t
have the brand recognition and bank accounts of large corporations.

But recruiting great employees is sometimes downright easy when compared
to the difficulties businesses face in finding and retaining great
contractors.

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