The Results of a Successful Marketing Partnership: Manifestations of a Long-Term Client-Agency Relationship
Finding the Right Client-Agency Fit Series – Part 5
You hired a new agency, and things have been golden so far. You’re on the same page, communication styles align, and you’ve even already achieved some valuable online wins.
While this is exciting news, how do you maintain a healthy long-term relationship? How do you happily make it past the honeymoon phase and continue driving that value and competitive advantage?
After 15+ years on the client and agency sides, my team and I have found that it truly comes down to this:
Successful long-term partnerships consistently adapt and grow to keep the momentum going.
Enter the culmination of our series about the right fit between client and agency: the results of a successful marketing partnership. Because, let’s face it, finding the right partner is just one piece of the puzzle. Prolonging that partnership to help your business achieve its full potential is the next, if not bigger, challenge.
If you need more context on the entire client-agency partnership journey before I go on, I encourage you to check these out:
Setting New Goals and Challenges to Drive Long-Term Growth
In digital marketing, there isn’t a moment where you complete an action, dust off your hands, and walk away. As time progresses, success evolves through multiple iterations.
Each iteration depends on factors like:
- How the market shifts
- How search and social algorithms evolve
- What your budget looks like for the year
- How your competitors are doing
- And so on…
Thus, further optimizing the relationship between client and agency requires consistent evolution via strategy and creativity. No industry or business ever stays the same. You need to keep adjusting.
While an agency may not solve all your problems indefinitely, a good agency should be capable of guiding you in the right direction. Their role is to assist you in identifying strategies to sustain and extend the value they provide.
You’re now assessing whether your agency is keeping its word and actually moving the needle. A simple way to evaluate this is to use four core competencies that maximize partnerships and nurture sustainable growth.
I recommend utilizing this list as a framework for monitoring the strategic value you receive from your partnership. Each core competency is paired with several examples of deliverables that contribute to fulfilling that competency.
Keep in mind, the frequency and relevance of each competency may differ based on your specific needs and your agency’s approach.
1. Being Adaptable
Your team can navigate uncertainties and capitalize on emerging opportunities by prioritizing adaptability as a core competency. The online landscape changes constantly, and it takes a solid client-agency partnership to confidently navigate and adapt to these shifts.
Examples of Deliverables That Help Fulfill This Competency
- Content strategy: Content strategy helps your organization effectively communicate with its audience, adapt to changing circumstances, and maintain its brand identity. As your audience’s needs and expectations shift, it’s imperative that you and your agency have conversations about them. The campaign roadmap will need to be adjusted accordingly.
- CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategy: By continuously improving your website or app’s performance, your business can remain resilient to market changes and user behavior. Your agency should help you conduct regular CRO audits to prioritize UX and adjust site pages to adapt to shifting audience preferences.
2. Investigating the Competitive Landscape
Keeping a pulse on the competitive landscape is critical for maintaining your online presence. A proactive partner doesn’t just suggest random solutions; they carefully choose strategies based on thoughtful analysis and data-driven insights.
While not a professional, comprehensive audit, here’s an example of what you can do on your own to assess how you stack up against others.
Examples of Deliverables That Help Fulfill This Competency
- Competitor research and audit: A competitor audit should be conducted to ensure campaigns and strategies align with the competition.
- New key terms and content subjects: As the competitive landscape evolves, so must your key terms and content topics.
3. Building on Success
What worked well in past projects? Identifying strengths allows you to capitalize on them and achieve even greater success in future endeavors.
As you and your agency acquire more data over time, you’ll gain a better perspective on what you can replicate or revise.
Examples of Deliverables That Help Fulfill This Competency
- Google Trends audit: This evaluates how you are ranking in your industry and what new opportunities have shifted as focus points.
- UX & CRO audits: Is the SEO traffic converting? These audits assess site performance and how users respond to it, so we don’t miss any opportunities.
4. Conducting Regular Reviews
To stay relevant in the ever-changing search landscape, it’s crucial to continuously optimize your campaigns. This involves proactive problem-solving and frequent adjustments.
Examples of Deliverables that Help Fulfill This Competency
- Content performance: Are we speaking to your audience in the right way? Are we providing sufficient information to generate leads? Do the subject and its contents align with your organization’s value propositions? Regular conversations and collaboration on content performance ensure you’re headed in the right direction.
- Reports: Remember those objectives and KPIs you outlined during the hiring and onboarding process? How are they looking? Has your agency made the necessary campaign adjustments to align priorities and meet your metrics?
- Relationship health score: Checking in to gauge the quality of your relationship with your agency is a proactive way to get the most out of your partnership. These check-ins can steer the relationship where it needs to be.
Now that we’ve outlined the key competencies that drive a successful agency-client relationship, let’s explore how these principles have translated into real-world success for some of our clients.
Real Client-Agency Partnerships That Set the Example
The Loam Wolf: Adaptability & Shared Ownership Amid a Volatile Market
If you’re a mountain biking enthusiast, you’ve likely heard of The Loam Wolf. The business lies at the center of the mountain bike community, sharing gear reviews and news.
The Loam Wolf’s experience reinforced the importance of adaptability and shared ownership in a client-agency partnership. Together, we adjusted and pursued new strategies to adapt to the market and elevate competitive advantage.
While The Loam Wolf was able to solidify their SEO strategy in 2019 with the help of an agency, things changed when 2020 came. The COVID-19 economic downturn presented another challenge. The outdoor B2C business encountered a decline in sponsorships—a main source of their revenue.
The Loam Wolf and their agency collaborated to elevate the business’ marketing mix by establishing a new yearly objective. This objective was to hit 100K YouTube subscribers by the end of the year to support their online reach, subscribership, and revenue.
Leaning on the expertise of its agency, The Loam Wolf added PPC to their marketing mix. This would not only help The Loam Wolf stay nimble in the current market, but it would also reach a wider audience of biking enthusiasts.
By pivoting and expanding on their strategy, The Loam Wolf reached their year-end goal of earning 100K+ YouTube subscribers.
Aviv Clinics: Establishing Trust & Prolonging Success via Alignment
Aviv Clinics is a leading medical institution with a presence in Dubai and Florida. As with any new relationship, Aviv Clinics and their agency faced a few roadblocks at the beginning. There were several things to solidify on the agency side (Big Leap):
- Knowledge exchange: There was quite a large learning curve at first. This entailed understanding Aviv Clinics’ medical research, global compliance regulations, and competitive distinctions.
- Striking the right balance between research and empathy: Another huge piece was balancing the research and technicality of Aviv Clinic’s content with an empathetic lens—key in connecting with their target audience.
Big Leap set expectations up front and asked for the client’s commitment to this process.
We asked: “It will take some time for us to understand your business, learn the terminology, and finesse the content writing to fit your tone/style…Can we count on you to participate in this process and provide candid feedback to expedite our learning?”
There was a lot of back and forth initially, and while many clients might be inclined to get impatient, Aviv Clinics committed to collaborating with our Big Leap team to set everything up for success.
This opened the gate for our partnership to develop a culture of open dialogue and constructive feedback. When one side provided feedback, the other side did their due diligence in incorporating that feedback and facilitating a productive conversation and vice versa.
As our partnership further evolved, we nailed down the Aviv Clinic’s messaging and content. Trust was established and matured into a deep-rooted relationship that inspired the client to tell their agency: “We think of your team as part of our Aviv family!”
Aviv Clinics embraced the agency as an extension of their team, doubling their SEO budget and achieving great success across KPIs, including a 253% increase in blog readers when comparing the 10-month year-over-year.
Low-Success vs. High-Success Partnership Actions
It’s critical to clearly distinguish between low- and high-success traits. Check in with your team and ask which ones they’re seeing in your agency partner. Also, gauge these actions within your own team.
Low-Success Partnership Actions
- Doing things for the sake of doing things. Simply taking action without a clear purpose rarely leads to success. Effective strategies stem from intentional efforts. Do you notice strategies are generated merely to appear busy or productive?
While having an active and initiative-driven partner is valuable, their ideas must be rooted in data and strategic thinking. Otherwise, results will likely fall short or even negatively impact your online performance.
- Letting the ego get involved. This trait can jeopardize success, whether it’s on the agency side or yours. For example, an internal stakeholder might consistently push back without solid reasoning or data to support their position. Or maybe a team member on either side might resist feedback. Are individuals more concerned with their image than the project’s results?
Ego-driven relationships turn toxic. A healthy partnership is rooted in self-awareness, open communication, and empowerment.
- Micromanaging tasks and the partnership. One team may request unnecessary meetings, and you notice a sense of over-scrutiny. This can point to a deeper issue, such as a lack of buy-in or confidence in the strategy, skepticism toward the data, or even a lack of trust in the team.
- Unwillingness to solve communication issues. While communication issues here and there are not out of the ordinary, the determining factor lies in the willingness of both parties to address and resolve these challenges collaboratively.
Communication issues can manifest in a variety of ways:
- A client or agency may delay approving strategies or implementing recommendations (without a sufficient reason).
- Emails and messages don’t receive prompt responses (or are ignored altogether).
- Either side hesitates to share data.
These factors signal disparities in investment and transparency, which can obscure or dissuade parties from forming realistic expectations. Most importantly, they result in subpar campaign outcomes.
High-Success Partnership Actions
- Wanting to collaborate: Rather than dictating tasks to the other side, both client and agency interact and engage with each other.
Both parties dedicate time and effort to ensure campaign components are meticulously planned and executed. This collaborative approach fosters a sense of shared ownership and accountability, driving mutually agreed-upon objectives.
- Earning trust every day: I’m always talking about trust. When people lack confidence in the other team, every recommendation or bit of feedback turns into a prolonged period of questioning and delayed campaign timelines.
Simply put, a telltale sign of a high-success partnership is being comfortable and confident enough to speak up and push back. Doing so drives resiliency, accountability, and a high-performing partnership.
- Setting realistic expectations: Does either party have a bad rep for overpromising? In reality, how long it takes to achieve results hinges upon several factors—on both sides.
Achieving outcomes requires both sides to acknowledge and address unrealistic expectations. Both sides have the confidence and empathy to be candid yet caring.
- Understanding of shared ownership: A successful partnership requires joint strategy development to achieve campaign objectives.
By combining expertise and resources, clients and agencies can create innovative solutions that drive business growth and outperform competitors. An agency should have a client’s back and vice versa.
Client-Agency Partnership Pulse Check
Alright, so you’ve read a ton of content about sustaining healthy and valuable relationships over time. How do you actively keep everyone accountable?
As the relationship progresses between you and your agency, I encourage you to use this health score tool to assess the relationship. The health score considers soft and hard skills, along with the key principles we discussed above.
Unlocking the Full Potential of Your Client-Agency Relationship
I hope this series has helped you identify what a successful agency relationship looks like and how to cultivate it within your own partnership. Ultimately, investing in the future of your organization through a collaborative agency partnership provides access to:
- Specialized expertise, resources, and innovative solutions—Empowering your organizations to respond effectively to evolving market demands.
- Collective strengths and insights—Enabling your companies to proactively adjust strategies, refine offerings, and stay ahead of competitors.
- Resilience—Ensuring your businesses remain poised for long-term viability and prosperity in a rapidly changing marketplace.
To fully realize these benefits, embrace the principles discussed throughout this series and apply them strategically. If you missed any installments, each one is packed with practical advice to optimize your agency collaboration and build a prosperous partnership.
Let’s Continue the Discussion
As we bring this client-agency fit series to a close, it’s important to recognize that the dialogue is far from over. I encourage you to continue contemplating what factors contribute to a successful client-agency partnership and to share your insights with colleagues and peers.
Voice your thoughts by connecting with me on LinkedIn.
If you’d like to explore a partnership with Big Leap, please contact us.
That’s Enough
About Us.
Here’s the thing about our SEO agency: We prefer long-term partnerships that are deeply rooted in trust. Before we dive right into this, we’d like to get to know you better, get a feel for your current situation, and talk about your marketing goals and expectations.
You can call us now, or we can meet over lunch. Either way, we’re excited to meet you.
