Operations can be a jigsaw puzzle for a marketing agency. You have many different pieces to work with, each contributing to a larger picture. However, finding the right fit for each piece can be challenging. For instance, when you bring on a new client, you must find the right people, processes, and technology to deliver their service. This will help you create a smooth onboarding process and set the stage for a successful working relationship.
However, if you’re not careful, this process can become overwhelming, and before you know it, you’ll be scrambling to get things on track. This guide will provide valuable insights to help you efficiently navigate your operations challenges to create and grow your productized service without a hitch.
One of the best tools for managing marketing agency operations is Orchestra’s grow your productized service solution. This solution helps you get organized so you can create and grow your productized service efficiently.
Key Marketing Agency Operations
Marketing agencies are nothing without their projects. They’re how agencies deliver value to clients and keep the lights on. As a result, project management is a vital operation for agencies that help improve client satisfaction, agency profitability, and overall productivity. The end-to-end project phases usually include project initiation, project planning, project execution, and project sign-off. During project initiation and planning, the main thing to keep an eye out for is establishing reasonable client expectations and setting achievable goals.
Here, historical data from previous project management processes can help keep a detailed schedule of your resource availability. Some scope creep might occur regardless, as data from a PMI report shows that 34% of projects globally experienced scope creep in 2021. However, you can mitigate the worst effects by keeping a close grasp on the status of your agency resources. Other than scope creep, some other frequently identified reasons for project failure are poor alignment between project stakeholders, inadequate planning, lack of resources, and unclear client expectations (PMI).
For all of the mentioned, agency project management software can prove invaluable. Data shows that 77% of companies with high-performing projects use project management software (PwC). During project execution, such tools can help make data-driven decisions efficiently and help clients stay in the loop by sharing project reports or progress updates directly from the platform. Finally, gathering essential insights and conducting a retrospective review is much easier during project sign-off with a tool that collects all your data into a single source. This goes back to project initiation and planning for the future, creating an ecosystem for the best project management for agencies.
Nurturing Client Relationships
The two main discussion points regarding client relationship management are client acquisition and retention. Although there is no retention without acquisition, studies point to retention as being the more essential of the two – depending on your industry, acquiring a new customer can cost five to seven times more than retaining an old one (Forbes). However, retention is a fickle thing. Data from the XM Institute shows that more than 40% of clients cut their spending after having a bad experience with a company. How can you ensure you meet client expectations and provide quality experience? Ensure a good client-agency fit.
Ultimately, you will be spending more resources to try and stretch your services or products to accommodate their needs, and it’ll most likely end up with client dissatisfaction anyway. Some might even leave bad reviews or spread negative word of mouth because of the experience. Research shows that 91% of sales are influenced by word of mouth in B2B (Demandbase), and this is an outcome you should avoid at all costs. Therefore, understanding your potential clients, their industry, and their specific needs is one of the key steps to a profitable relationship for both sides in the long term.
Clear Lines of Communication
A healthy back-and-forth process is essential to successful project outcomes. Set expectations with the client immediately—be transparent about your pricing and your agency's abilities. You don’t want to oversell and then underdeliver. Once you’ve established a relationship with your client, ensure that communication is efficient by setting up feedback processes and conducting your business openly.
Project management software with time tracking features, such as the all-in-one agency management system Productive, is a good way of automating your processes while streamlining collaboration. For example, while billing your client, you can simply export my time sheets from the platform and attach them to the invoice. Be proactive, not reactive.
Finally, cultivate your client relationships by anticipating their needs and being proactive in your communication. Don’t wait for the client to request data or progress updates – anticipate their demands by sending them project reports and summarizing my task progress promptly. After you’ve completed the project, hold a debrief and get feedback with a formal customer satisfaction survey. These small steps will go a long way toward making your client feel valued and heard. But don’t forget that a relationship goes both ways – always be cordial and professional, but set appropriate boundaries if clients ask for the impossible.
Resource Capacity Management
Resource management, also known as resource planning, is the process of identifying, allocating, and managing agency resources, usually undertaken by a resource manager or a more generalized project manager. In the agency sphere, a resource manager's most important resources are human resources or your project teams and their hours. Most managers must manage multiple projects simultaneously, so resource management is frequently a delicate balancing act: Ensuring that all projects have the right balance of resources to stay on budget and schedule while being aligned with other projects, overarching agency goals, and client needs.
Resource managers report the following frequent resource management issues: poor capacity planning, inadequate assessment of risks, lack of skilled resources, unoptimized and inconsistent resource allocation, unrealistic deadlines and schedules, and poorly documented resource utilization (Chimera Technologies). Resource management systems, such as Production, can quickly address these. It can provide a streamlined and reactive overview of your company resources. If any changes occur, whether mandated by internal or client requests, your scheduling will immediately be updated with the impact of the new resource allocation on your budgeting and schedules.
Money Matters: Financial Management in Marketing Agencies
Research by Wasp Barcode has found that 55 percent of small businesses don’t track their assets or use a manual process. Although the latter part of that metric might not seem as bad as the former, multiple resources show that manual data tracking just doesn’t cut it. A famous example of a manual process gone wrong is the so-called London Whale debacle 2012, wherein JP Morgan Chase & Co lost over $6 billion in trading loss partially due to Excel errors (Business Insider).
The top business budgeting software solutions for agency operations professionals can analyze large amounts of complex data and deliver them in real-time, supporting successful project outcomes. Here are the key agency insights that agency leaders must monitor to improve cost efficiency and make informed business decisions: agency operating cash flow, burn rate, and gross profit margin. Agency operating cash flow shows the amount of money a company generates and spends from its day-to-day operations within a period.
This metric determines whether you should invest more capital or reduce expenses for the time being. Agency burn rate shows patterns of spending on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis – as 38% of startups fail because of lack of cash (CBinsights), this is a critical metric for smaller to mid-sized businesses that want to keep a hand on the pulse of their financials at all times, without the need for a more detailed financial analysis. Agency gross profit margin is your revenue left over after deducting the costs of sold products and services. This metric informs agency owners on whether they should expand business, continue operations as is regular, or scale them down. Check out our article on the five most critical project metrics to learn more.
Talent Acquisition and Retention
When it comes to acquisition and retention, the past years have been tumultuous. Although there are signs of the trend of the Great Resignation or the Great Attrition nearing its end, this doesn’t exactly signal that all of the trouble is over. For one, although employee turnover might be slowing down, recent research by Gallup shows that nearly six in ten workers are disengaged from their work and that employee stress is at a record high.
Furthermore, according to a study by Korn Ferry, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people by 2030. In light of these findings, what can you do to ensure that you retain talent and that employees are engaged enough to contribute to your agency? The first step is ensuring you’re attracting the right profile of employees.
Traditional Value Propositions
The job titles, compensation, and work-related benefits you’re offering. The most important thing here is to stay ahead of the competitors and be transparent during the process. Additionally, you can build up non-traditional value propositions, which include flexibility and mental health benefits, such as hybrid work, flexible working hours, pet-friendly office space, childcare assistance, etc.
Outreach
Get your agency out there through social media promotion or in-person opportunities such as job fairs or other networking events. Afterward, it’s a matter of retention. Data shows that the cost of replacing an employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary (Forbes)—this is why you must provide your employees with the environment they need to stay engaged.
An exhaustive report by the Work Institute from 2020 underlined some of the most frequent factors for voluntary turnover: lack of opportunities for growth and development, poor work-life balance (schedule inflexibility and commuting), poor communication and leadership from managers, limited training and resources to complete tasks, bad working environment and relationship with coworkers. Focus on those mentioned above by providing enough opportunities to your employees and nurturing a positive environment from the top to the bottom of the chain.
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7 Tips for Smooth Marketing Agency Operations
1. Use Orchestra
Orchestra is a versatile all-in-one growth toolkit that simplifies the launch of your productized service. With its client portal, task management features, and real-time analytics, you can quickly get started without coding or technical knowledge needed. Just connect your Stripe account. Orchestra is designed for creatives who are ready to scale.
Whether you’re a designer, developer, or copywriter, Orchestra streamlines your workflow so you can collaborate with clients seamlessly while maintaining a private workspace with your team. Add integrations like Slack and webhooks to customize your setup and deliver a branded experience. Elevate your service with a platform built to grow alongside you. Try Orchestra for free to develop your productized service today.
2. Make Client Onboarding a First-Class Experience
The client onboarding process is your agency's first impression and sets the stage for the relationship. An effective onboarding process ensures clients understand your agency's working method, set expectations, and capture all necessary information. You should strive to make the onboarding process as informative and engaging as possible. Send customers a welcome video explicitly personalized to them. Let them know the cadence at which you’ll communicate updates.
Give information on who they can reach out to for help. Offer self-service tools that don’t require outreach. These are ways to make that first payment much more bearable for a customer. Would you instead end up on a blank page when you pay or get a series of personalized experiences? Customers simply love getting pampered. Surprisingly, good onboarding practices also greatly help your operations by reducing the number of support tickets, complaints, and communications the customer sends over.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invite your customers to participate in your services. It’s just a reflection of a significant customer experience principle. If the customer is happy, they’ll not need to contact you. Be proactive in anticipating the customer’s needs and keep communicating even if they don’t reply, especially during onboarding and throughout the entire business relationship.
3. Be Ready to Communicate All the Time
It’s impossible to run an agency without excellent communication. Send regular updates, structure meetings, and block time on your calendar to ensure nothing overlaps; use collaborative tools that keep all team members aligned and informed. Good communication is your primary currency. Operations-wise, it provides fewer complaints, and even when delays are inevitable (it happens!), it demonstrates professionalism and transparency, increasing customer trust. Here are some of the best ways to communicate progress in your agency:
Automated Updates and Notifications
Implementing an automated system for task updates and notifications can significantly reduce the time spent manually checking in on project status. This system ensures that all team members are alerted immediately about changes or new comments, keeping everyone on the same page and speeding up the feedback loop.
Collaborative documentation
Using tools that allow for collaborative documentation (e.g., Notion) can centralize information and make it easily accessible to all team members. This reduces time spent searching for project details and increases overall efficiency. Documents can be directly converted into tasks and tagged by team members, ensuring seamless information flow.
Clients in Projects
Integrating clients directly into your project management tools isn’t bad. Depending on the project's needs, this can range from complete to limited access, allowing clients to view progress, make comments, and stay engaged without needing frequent direct updates. This transparency builds trust and helps manage client expectations.
Regular Reports and Dashboards
Offering customizable dashboards and subscribing to regular reports keeps stakeholders informed. These tools help visualize project progress and simplify sharing updates with clients and team members. By automating this, your agency ensures consistent communication and reduces administrative overhead.
4. Implement Effective Project Management
Project management is critical to your agency's success, involving the planning, executing, and delivering projects that meet client expectations on time and within budget. This step ensures that your team can adapt quickly to changing requirements and maintain quality with every delivery. Effective project management in an agency involves:
Planning and scheduling
Create detailed project plans that outline each phase of the project, expected deliverables, and timelines. Use operational tools like Gantt charts or project management software to keep track of progress and adjust as necessary.
Resource management
Ensure that you have the right people on the right projects. This might involve hiring freelancers or reallocating staff based on project demands. If someone external to your agency is more specialized, it doesn’t have to be just internal resources all the time.
Client involvement
Keep clients informed and involved throughout the project’s lifetime. This helps manage their expectations and ensures feedback is incorporated directly into each deliverable.
5. Pay Close Attention to Your Finances
Financial management is pivotal to agency operations, ensuring your agency's economic health and supporting project delivery. Many agency owners think they’re doing the customer a disservice by pricing their services high, but it’s the reverse. You have to price high. Nickeling and diming don’t take you far or your customers. Before you pull out the calculator and start crunching numbers, ensure your prices are those of a healthy agency. We’re talking anywhere between $4k and $20k a month as a start.
Agencies should be more cost-effective than hiring an entire marketing team internally, but should never be cheaper than a single dedicated professional as they often bring more value. It's also important to regularly review financial reports to understand cash flow, profit margins, and expenditures. Implement a robust accounting system or software like Xero or QuickBooks on top of billing and invoicing software like ManyRequests for a complete financial solution.
6. Learn to Outsource Where Relevant
Outsourcing non-core activities is a strategic approach that can increase your agency's focus on what it does best. You can leverage external expertise and increase operational efficiency by outsourcing tasks like graphic design, content creation, or IT services. Consider these factors when outsourcing:
Expertise
Choose partners who are experts in their fields and can offer insights that you might not have in-house or who can carry out recurring activities you’re not specialized in.
Cost-effectiveness
Outsourcing must be cost-effective to be viable in the long run. Look for partners that strike the right balance between valuable deliveries and fair prices.
Scalability
Partner with service providers who can scale their services up or down based on your agency's changing needs. Working with freelancers might only sometimes be the best option. Outsourcing will often save you time and money, but if carried out incorrectly, it can also exacerbate the problems you were trying to solve in the first place. Don’t outsource to offload responsibility; use it as a strategic tool to increase your agency’s output while maintaining the same quality.
7. Keep Quality Assurance a Top Priority
Making the quality assurance process a priority within your agency is crucial for delivering high-standard projects consistently. This can be achieved by integrating project management tools that offer detailed oversight and tracking of all activities. Here's how to build a robust quality control system:
Resource Management and Forecasting
Use project management software to track each team member's availability and workload. Only book team members with a reasonable amount of time available; if you overbook people, they’ll burn out quickly.
Automated Financial Oversight
Implement tools that automate the monitoring critical financial metrics such as agency operating cash flow, burn rate, and gross profit margin. These metrics are essential for making informed decisions that indirectly affect project quality.
Engagement and Satisfaction Tracking
Establish ways to track client engagement and satisfaction through software. This could involve regular check-ins and updates that give clients visibility into the project's progress and opportunities to provide reviews/feedback.
Data-driven Decision-Making
Leverage the data collected from your project management software to make informed decisions. This includes detailed reports on project performance, resource utilization, time spent on specific activities, and client feedback. Incorporating these strategies into your quality assurance process ensures that every project is executed to the highest standard, maintaining client satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Importance of Having Smooth Marketing Agency Operations
1. Boosted Efficiency and Productivity
When marketing agency operations run smoothly, teams waste less time on redundant tasks, improving overall productivity. For example, HubSpot's marketing agency improved efficiency by implementing an internal project management system. This helped to streamline workflow by reducing redundant tasks and improving collaboration across departments. As a result, the agency achieved a 20% faster project turnaround, enabling it to manage more clients without sacrificing quality.
2. Stronger Client Relationships
Marketing agencies with efficient operations can consistently meet client expectations, fostering trust and leading to long-term partnerships. For instance, Ogilvy implemented a client communication protocol that ensured weekly updates for all major campaigns. This proactive communication helped retain major accounts like Dove and Coca-Cola, as clients felt their needs were prioritized and projects were delivered on time.
3. Cost Management
Well-structured marketing agency operations prevent unnecessary expenses and efficiently allocate resources. For example, Wieden+Kennedy optimized its media buying process for Nike campaigns, saving millions by focusing on high-impact channels based on data insights. These savings were reinvested into creative initiatives, enabling them to create impactful campaigns while controlling costs.
4. Consistent Quality Outputs
Standardized processes produce reliable and high-quality outputs, reinforcing the agency’s reputation. For example, VMLY&R maintains consistent quality for brands like Wendy’s using a structured creative approval process. This has led to successful, high-impact campaigns such as Wendy’s “We Beefin’” mixtape, known for its humor and viral success.
5. Scalability
Smooth operations allow marketing agencies to handle growth without compromising on quality. For instance, Social Chain, a UK-based agency, scaled its operations by adopting automation tools like Buffer and Sprout Social. This helped them manage large-scale campaigns for clients such as Apple and Coca-Cola without overwhelming their teams, enabling them to grow while maintaining efficiency.
6. Employee Satisfaction
A well-organized agency environment boosts morale, reduces stress, and encourages creativity. For example, 72andSunny introduced flexible work schedules and clear role definitions, improving employee satisfaction and reducing turnover. This contributed to their success on campaigns like Axe’s “Find Your Magic,” which was lauded for creativity and innovation.
7. Competitive Advantage
Marketing agencies with smooth operations are more agile and can deliver innovative solutions faster than competitors. For instance, Droga5, known for its smooth creative processes, stays ahead of the competition by fostering an efficient and collaborative work culture. Their campaigns for brands like Under Armour (e.g., "I Will What I Want") are recognized for their originality and fast execution, giving them a competitive advantage.
8. Adaptability to Change
Streamlined operations allow agencies to quickly respond to changes in the market, client needs, or technological advancements. For example, R/GA adapted to changes in the digital landscape by incorporating advanced tech solutions into its workflow. When clients like Nike needed innovative digital-first campaigns, R/GA’s agile processes allowed them to pivot and deliver cutting-edge solutions quickly.
Try Orchestra for Free to Grow Your Productized Service Today
Launch your productized service effortlessly with Orchestra's all-in-one growth toolkit. Designed for creatives ready to scale, Orchestra provides a branded, white-labeled client portal, task management, and real-time analytics, with no coding needed, just your Stripe account. Whether you’re a designer, developer, or copywriter, Orchestra streamlines your workflow, letting you collaborate with clients seamlessly while maintaining a private workspace with your team.
Add integrations like Slack and webhooks to customize your setup and deliver a branded experience. Enhance your service with a platform built to grow alongside you. Try Orchestra for free and develop your productized service today!
Challenges of Marketing Agency Operations
The Chaos of Unstandardized Services
Rapid growth can be a double-edged sword for marketing agencies. On one hand, it means more revenue and a growing reputation in the industry. Conversely, it can create chaos within your organization, leading to missed client deliverables and poor retention. One of the biggest problems with this kind of growth is when an agency sells services that aren’t standardized. We often hear this when we speak with agency owners who have experienced rapid growth and then struggle to deliver results for those clients.
Whoever is running sales, a dedicated team, or the agency owner goes out and closes a deal. Then tosses things over to the success team like a hot grenade. Every handoff looks different because each client needs a different mix of services. This custom, one-off work has a place, but most agencies end it by over-promising and underpricing it. This environment is very damaging to your team. The root of the problem is misaligned expectations. The best way to set clear expectations is to standardize how clients will engage with your services by illustrating a client journey.
This gives your sales team a tool to easily show how you work with clients, letting them see the method to your madness. It gives the client confidence that you know what you’re doing and have a process for turning your promises into reality. And finally, it helps your client success team by giving them a tool to drive engagement and refer back to if clients have questions or requests outside the scope of the service agreement. When every project in your agency looks different, it creates chaos. You can overcome this by taking the time to standardize your services so they fit into a logical journey.
The Mess of Disorganized Workflows
Disorganized workflows create chaos that can derail your client delivery operations. Clients don’t like it when balls get dropped. They may take four weeks to respond to your request, but they want to know you’re on top of all the details. When your delivery operation is in chaos it’s usually because team members are managing deliverables, timelines, tasks, and follow-ups each in their way. One person keeps a paper journal, a few use a Google sheet, someone is on Trello, and another uses reminders in Slack.
The need for more visibility breeds chaos. No one knows what is on anyone else’s plate. There is no way to see what will fall through the cracks. While these organizational methods may work for each individual, they will not work for the agency as a whole. You need a standardized project management framework for organizing work to defeat chaos and clarify your client delivery and agency management operations.
This standardized framework must be structured enough to deploy the project in minutes, not days when a new client comes on board. It needs to be flexible enough to catch one-time tasks that pop up on client calls. When the team has the proper training and accountability, the new project management framework will bring visibility and clarity and allow you to query the data needed to make hiring, firing, and investment decisions.
The Need for Leadership
If you’re like every agency we’ve ever worked with, then you’ve tried out your share of project management tools in the past. People seem to flock to new tools and technology, hoping it will solve their problems. But after a few weeks, those tools become a graveyard of forgotten tasks and unread reminders. The truth is that these tools are just tools. Tools need to be managed and maintained.
An agency is a stressful place to work when there is uncertainty about what is going on and stress resulting from pressure from clients. This stress and uncertainty can be overcome when you assign an owner to maintain the project management framework. This role makes sure that everyone keeps their information up to date. They identify when jobs are at risk of falling behind. They work with team leaders to ensure everyone follows best practices.
The Importance of a Single Source of Truth
The blind search for answers leads to wasted time and frustrated relationships. When someone doesn’t know how to handle a situation they will do two things: Ask for help and Come up with a solution themselves. Asking for help sounds excellent, but interrupting key team members throughout the day to answer standard questions destroys productivity and eats into your profits. Coming up with innovative solutions to problems already solved by someone else is just a waste of time.
Your team must have a single point of truth where they can find the answers to their questions. What they need to do and how they’re meant to do it need to live in the same area. This means standardized task templates and easy-to-navigate process documentation for each area of your operation. Establishing this single point of truth and training your team on leveraging it will empower everyone to access answers independently and increase your team's velocity.
The Need for Consistency
Clarity is found at the top of a steep slope of change. You can read many books, attend conferences, and even hire coaches, but it's just motion if you don’t change your work. Your team will thrive, and your clients will see results when you standardize how and when your teams work and meet together. These rhythms are not rocket science. They’re simple processes that need to be run regularly.
Meeting regularly with clients, consistent stand-ups with your team, dedicated one-on-ones, and regular off-site sessions with your management team are just the beginning. When you change how you work together, you can have a significant impact over time. With the proper guidance and accountability, you can realize the clarity you’ve always wanted but have never been able to achieve on your own.
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Try Orchestra for Free to Grow Your Productized Service Today
Orchestra helps marketing agency operations by providing a smooth way to launch and manage productized services. The software offers a customizable client portal, real-time analytics, and task management features to help you stay organized while delivering top-notch service. Try Orchestra for free to develop your productized service today.
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