Basic Economy Fares Come to Digital Marketing

The landscape of digital marketing is changing. How will your agency adapt?

Digital is evolving! Agencies need to be ready to adapt! The future is uncertain!

Heard these sentiments before, right? Probably in 2013.

Probably in 2014.

Probably in 2016.

Probably in 2018.

Probably…you get the point.

In fact, I know you did, because when we started Digital Natives Group in 2011, we were one of the firms relying on this anxiety to build our book of business. Our plan was to rely on our relative youth, both as individuals (and now I’m showing my age) and as an agency, to win over clients looking to improve their digital marketing efforts.

As the space has continued to take shape in the decade since, we’ve seen a number of trends come and go, from platforms to memes. What we’ve also seen is the industry of digital marketing reach a point of maturity, with consolidation and competition ever-increasing.

It’s in that context that I see more and more small- and medium-sized firms, some of which we consider our direct competitors, focus on unbundling their service to offer standalone value-adds, like setting up a chatbot or running a social listening report.

To be sure, it works. Spend a few hours analyzing customer conversations, write scripts, do a bit of development or synthesize some data, and voila you’ve just earned your fee. And it sure as hell gets easier once you’ve ridden the learning curve.

For agencies, this model seemingly works great. You crank these projects out as fast as you can win the business, and even get a bit of a back-end boost once the client comes back for some maintenance, follow-ups, or modifications.

Of course, this is also predicated on the work you’re doing work meaningfully impacting a client’s bottom line. You’re no longer their larger marketing partner, you’re just the team that spun up XYZ, and as far as their narrative is concerned the value of your work lives and dies on how well XYZ performs, even if you don’t own the full marketing interaction someone has with XYZ, or any of it for that matter. Results can be, in many ways, out of your hands.

Digital marketing is having its basic economy moment.

These agencies are completely unbundling their services, allowing clients to choose, a la carte, what services they want to engage.

But there’s a problem with that.

Now, basic economy fares work and there’s a demand for them, but you should consider the customer experience of being a basic economy customer when evaluating if this type of unbundling is going to work for you. Whether someone paid for a basic economy or main cabin fare, they’re still going to expect the same quality of service, going to complain when expectations aren’t met, and going to fight tooth-and-nail against added fees. Maybe you’re ready to handle that, but maybe you’re not. Doing a gut-check to inventory your own capacity for managing these types of relationships will be critical to your success.

Importantly though, unbundling turns you into a dedicated execution firm, You’re a tactical team with the sole focus of coming in and performing this one thing and performing it well.

But from my experience, execution firms are a dime a dozen. It’s a competitive, often cost-based landscape. Execution firms can be successful and innovative, and many are, but few reading this are likely to be setting out to build an execution-based agency.

You want to build a marketing agency. And a good marketing agency is a partner. That doesn’t mean taking a client brief, or ask, and implementing it word-for-word. It means offering the critical questioning and insights that challenge a client’s assumption about why the need a chatbot, why investing in a new social listening tool is worthwhile, and dares them to forgo the buzzy tool for the effective one.

An agency partner looks not at your ask, but at your need.

When you do that, you can get to a better solution, one that drives real value for a client, the kind of value that makes you invaluable as a part of their agency team.

And this is something only a marketing partner can do. Someone who touches the business every day, who develops an understanding of all the roles the company has in the life of its stakeholders. Someone whose charge is not to execute a tactic, but to take a mission, determine the best plan of attack, and build a strike team to execute.

That’s marketing partnership.