Nov 3, 2021
You’ve reached a point in your agency leader journey where you’re deciding “what’s next?”. If you’re looking to scale your operations higher and say “yes” to more of the right opportunities, an agency partnership might be the solution for you.
Today, we’re going to cover 5 key signs that your agency is ready for a digital performance partnership. First, let’s discuss what an agency “partner” actually is.
Understanding The Difference Between Platform, Vendor, and Partner
Before you can decide if an agency partnership is something you’re ready for, we have to cover the difference between white-label platforms, vendors, and partners.
🎛 Platform
Platforms are most commonly software systems that help automate specific digital marketing processes. These are suitable for those that want a “quick fix” with little-to-no human involvement on the other side of the screen.
However, platforms offer limited personalization and require you to bootstrap your campaigns with little resources to draw from. When dominating digital performance is your main goal, platforms may not prove the best solution.
📦 Vendor
A vendor is a limited-scope service provider – often a specialist or another agency with a limited product offering. Common examples could include an agency that only offers a single service or a freelance web developer on Fiverr.
Vendors operate on a purely transactional basis and the quality of the deliverables you pay for varies. This can be difficult to guarantee quality. Once a vendor crosses their t’s and dots their i’s on their contractual agreement, they often disappear back into the digital ether.
🤝 Partner
A digital performance partner acts as a true extension of your in-house team. With real certified experts handling your client’s campaigns on your behalf, they’re just as invested in your success as you are.
Partnerships can be identified by the way the relationship with your agency touches every aspect of their own operations. From communication to measuring performance, your partner team is working in lockstep with your own.
At Conduit, we partner with successful agencies by acting as their complete ad operations fulfillment solution or as an extension of their in-house team. Performance and communication are the two equal pillars of how we define and measure partnership with the agencies that we work with.
Signs You’re Ready for a Digital Performance Partnership
☝️ 1: You Have a Strong Client Base with High Expectations
You’ve mastered how to get the right clients for your agency. Your roster is in excellent shape with great businesses you’re proud to serve.
With a roster of can’t-miss clients also comes high expectations for performance. This requires that your agency have the holistic product suite and internal capacity to meet these demands consistently across the entire list of businesses that you work with.
✌️ 2: The Numbers Support It
We get that not everyone wants to talk numbers. You didn’t start your agency to balance budgets, but it is part of keeping the office lights on.
Agencies that are ready for a performance partner need to have an airtight grasp on their numbers to scale profitably. Margins and expected revenue need to be in a position to furnish to the partnership.
Digital performance partnerships are all about scaling profitably. The right partner will provide you with a transparent rate card that will give you a complete picture of the internal costs for services so that you can price them externally to meet your necessary margins.
🤟 3: Clients Are Asking for More Than What You Can Do In-House
As the account relationship matures with your client, they might ask for more digital services than you provide in-house. The first reaction to this might be “we don’t do that here” or “we can’t do that right now.” With today’s digital ecosystem, though, that answer no longer suffices.
For example, if your client wants OTT advertising and knows they cannot receive that service from you, they will find a competing agency that can and will fulfill this need. Staying competitive requires a full product suite. Partnership helps by rounding out your agency’s core products with the other digital products your client wants to use for their campaigns.
✊ 4: You’re Growing Faster Than You Can Hire
In all the conversations we have with agency leaders daily, we’ve heard one common pain point above the rest: hiring. There seem to be exponentially more job listings online than there are people to fill them right now.
When you need to add an expert to your team, but can’t find the right person, you’re risking operating dangerously beyond your internal capacity. Overcapacity can result in a stressed-out, time-strapped hustle that does not benefit your agency or your clients.
Digital performance partnership inserts a team of expert analysts into your operations. You do not have to worry about seeking a qualified candidate, hiring them, and training them. Instead, with your partner’s own analysts, you can launch an expert campaign for your client with minimal ramp-up time.
🖐 5: You Want Best-In-Class Campaign Performance
The quality of work that you do for your clients reflects directly on your agency’s brand. If you want to continue your reputation and credibility, you need to deliver consistent, high-quality results.
A digital performance partner treats your client accounts as seriously as you do. Because they’re all-in with you, quality drives each aspect of every shared campaign between your team and theirs.
Activate the Power of Digital Performance Partnership Today
At Conduit Digital, we strive to be the most complete digital performance partner for successful agencies looking to take their ad operations to the next level. With our own in-house teams of certified experts managing your client’s campaigns across a full product suite, world-class wholesale pricing, and a wealth of resources like custom Live Reports, you can position your agency to confidently say “yes” to those can’t miss opportunities.
Learn more about true digital performance partnership today by visiting our Agency Partnership page or reaching out to us directly below!
