Every digital marketing agency is a work in progress as well as their digital marketing strategies.
We’re constantly growing to meet the needs of our clients and the changing marketplace, which means that we need to be open to changes to our service offerings regularly.
Whether it’s adding new delivery processes or adding new complementary solutions, we’re always striving to provide better results for our clients than before.
As a matter of fact, Continual Improvement is one of our core values.
To us this means that we always try to improve ourselves by gaining more knowledge and skills while collectively pushing our whole team and purpose forward to find new, better, more efficient ways to get great results for our clients.
Most people will likely agree that this is a good goal to aspire towards, but as an agency, we specifically have a few major factors that can make this very difficult to put into action.
I want to discuss a few of these today and why, for Spark Outbound, we view it as critical to view our services as evolutionary and base them on our core philosophies and strategies versus a “this is just what we do” mindset.
1. Changes In Consumer Behavior
Over the last few decades, we have seen massive changes in the way the public receives information and wants to interact with companies.
Very recently, we see huge concerns about privacy and the types of information companies have access to.
This is leading to massive changes in the way the major ad platforms and data companies are allowed to operate.
These types of changes then trickle down to the agency level and ultimately impact our clients.
We must stay in close contact with our contacts at Google Ads and Facebook Ads to understand how these changes will impact our strategies.
This may cause us to shift budget for some clients to other options, or at the least, make significant changes to the strategies or tactics we are using in their campaigns.
2. Changes To Market Needs Or Expectations
Two examples immediately come to mind when thinking about changes to market needs or expectations.
In the short term, COVID caused thousands of businesses to shift their entire marketing and sales strategy to digital.
Lots of these companies relied on in-person events or travelling sales teams to close deals.
This got completely eliminated over night.
Thinking more longer-term, companies like Amazon have upended many brick and mortar and online retailers along with companies up and down the supply chain with their model of making products available immediately (2 days or less) for anyone that can manage to click a few buttons on their phones.
These changes to the marketplace require agencies to evaluate and assess their current efforts regularly as these types of changes can cause market crowding or pull consumers out of their old habits which would take us back to point 1.
3. Changes To Platforms
One of the biggest risk factors for digital marketing at a whole is the fact that almost everything we do is dependent on platforms in one way or another.
We run digital ads on Google or Facebook, we produce content on social media platforms, we may do outreach via email or LinkedIn.
Outside of our websites, which are typically hosted or managed within a large platform, most all of the distribution channels are major platforms that have shareholder interest and governmental pressure affecting their decisions.
Recently, we were impacted by the LinkedIn connection request limits.
They imposed a max of 100 connection requests per week on all accounts.
For people exclusively relying on growing their network to find prospects and/or clients, this could be devastating.
Fortunately, for us we already were implementing several new tactics and strategies that are not dependent on new connections.
This type of change could be devastating for agencies that are not planning ahead.
Our agency is always thinking about what the future of marketing and advertising may look like, so we can be prepared for it.
We want to offer our clients a wide spectrum of services that are innovative enough to keep up with changes in consumer behavior or the platforms they use.
This ensures that even if there’s an evolution in any one area, you’re still getting everything you need from us.
Does your agency have this capability?
If not, let’s talk!
