Industry: Agency, Digital Agency, Service, Online Marketing
The Client
Since the first realisation of the digital disruption, the whole realm of marketing, advertising…, all kinds of public communications for that matter, were severely shakened. The good old days when we were looking up at billboards, flicking through shiny fragrant magazine pages, enjoying a stroll along an endless roll of 3D displays on the high street, those days are long gone. How can Performance Marketing transform the digital marketing service amongst the realisation of digital disruption?
Although offline media production and consumption have never really been replaced, the world has shifted its focus to digital screens where a lot more are going on and allowing so much more opportunities for all kinds of communication.
Not only one but more and more of Media Console’s clients in the marketing service category were facing the consequences of the media industry, the evolution of it has greatly devalued their key assets—their creative team skill and experience in offline media, and their life-long personal connection with the media publishers. From the key players in the field, right now they can hardly catch up with the new vibe of the media industry alongside those new and young competitors who are at least about a decade younger than them.
The Challenge
The ultimate goal, the key concept, was to improve our clients’ businesses (the creative agencies) by improving their services and by reducing the struggle from their client’s new demand which was the “online marketing service”.
Simple in word, not so simple in practice! When we talk about “online marketing”, a lot has emerged and evolved during the past 5 years alone, more during the past decade, and so much more including some key events of the industry if we look back further than that.
Not only designs and creative work that can be adapted for online use, our clients were also required to be able to create and manage online marketing campaigns as well as strategically manage budget, report performance and suggest strategies for optimisation. This is why, in only 5-7 years, our creative agency clients have come to suffer a lack of “the key selling points” as a marketing agency and not anymore as a creative agency.
Apart from building their own new team from the junior level up which seems impossible and unpromising, adding an experienced team specialised in Performance Marketing seems like a more feasible choice. And that was how Media Console started the journey with creative agency partners.
The Intelligence & The Effort
After quite a few sessions discussing struggles, problems and their clients’ needs, we realised that the new service that the agencies were looking to add would be their new key selling point and the topmost requirement from their clients’ side.
What we didn’t do: change their routine, require personnel with a special skill set to work with us, directly liaise with their clients and take the credit for the added part of service.
What we did do: set a common goal with our clients to transform them from a single service provider into a “one-stop service for online business success”.
After an extensive discussion with our clients, it was quite clear to us what they needed was the Performance Marketing service and the advanced features on our main tool, the XPO platform. With XPO, we were equipped to make all the online marketing work required by their clients possible.
But to achieve the positive end results i.e. successful marketing campaign management, it was not the intelligence in the XPO platform alone but combined with Media Console’s manual effort, research and experience of over 10 years in the field together with client’s data and insights to make it all possible, from campaign setup, detail targeting, budget management and optimisation, performance and insights reporting and strategic suggestions for future development.
The Results
Being about to run marketing campaigns for their clients with performance marketing service supported by Media Console, we gladly saw impressive ROAS and very positive ROI in all of their projects.
And through our partnership we were updated with such a delight that Media Console’s performance marketing service has quickly become the main percentage of their total revenue from projects that included the performance marketing service.
And Beyond That…
For our creative agency clients, we have opened the new doors to more revenue possibilities. Being a “one-stop service for digital marketing” means setting our clients on top of their client’s go-to list when they think of anything marketing. With the new professionalism, industry readiness and all-rounded service images, our clients were confident to propose more projects and were able to sell more features whether it included or involved Media Console’s service or not. And they were successful at closing those deals.
Why Performance Marketing Will Become A New Essential Add-On for Creative Agencies
The world has changed, and It’s all about your audience now!
The focus has been shifted from “what to show” to “who sees it and how”. In other words, rather than pushing out the most beautiful attractive creatives assuming that your target audience would love to see them and appreciate them so much so that they want to buy your product, the online marketing today is the grand quest of finding out about your audience preferences—what kind of media, e.g. images, videos, dynamic displays, etc, they want to see, how they want to see them, on which channels and which screens they want to see them, and how often they are likely to take them until the buying happens.
XPO Dynamic Display
How would a creative agency get the answers for all of these questions for not one but multiple projects and clients they are working with? This new information about the creative performance has become the new key element that defines the new working paradigm for not only the creative agencies but for their client brands that are using their service as well. That is, being able to answer which creatives perform best.
The same concept also applies to audience targeting strategies and campaign detail setup. The more you know about your audience, the better and more wisely you spend your advertising budget. Tracking algorithms has answered a once universal question amongst online marketers, “how do I know exactly how to spend the ad budget?”
XPO Performance Marketing Report Dashboard
Well now, with the advanced tracking mechanism and in-depth reporting in performance marketing tech, you and your clients know what works and what does not, so your clients want to spend their ad budget only on the creatives that work, the channels that work, the audience groups and sets of interests that work.
An ideal performance marketing platform such as Knorex XPO empowers your team with AI auto-optimisation together with extensive data extraction and performance reporting. All of that enhanced with in-depth analysis by an experienced expert it’s quite an additional work too much for creative agencies without a good helping hand.
From our clients’ cases, finding the right performance marketing partner seems to be the best answer considering how fast the marketing field has evolved.
After all, it becomes clear to us that the digital disruption has set the standard not only for how we see things but for all kinds of communication. We are glad to see success in providing the service that takes our clients and theirs beyond all boundaries and changes every challenge into possibilities.
If you are a creative agency looking to expand your service profile to match the fast-changing world of digital marketing, have you found the performance marketing partner that’s right for you?