How Clients Feel About Marketing Agencies

Every year, Setup surveys a range of marketing agency and client representatives to collect and analyze their thoughts on the Client-Agency relationship. Just like any relationship, the Client-Agency relationship is one that needs care and communication. 

There’s a lot of “he said, she said,” or lack of alignment, as well as different reasons the two groups end their relationship. 

As the Marketing Matchmakers, we hate to see any discord between the two groups, and are working to connect marketers through actual chemistry and compatibility so that there are less break-ups that waste time and money. We aim to create more fruitful partnerships. 

In order to do that, we have to dig deep to understand how each party feels about the other. Based on Setup’s 2022 Marketing Relationship Survey, this is how Clients feel about their Agency counterparts. 

We noticed two trends when interviewing Clients about their general attitude towards Marketing Agencies:

1. More and more Clients are skewing towards hiring generalist agencies over specialist agencies. (56% leaned towards specialist agencies in 2022 compared to 2020’s 69%.) 

2. Clients are trending towards hiring more marketing functions in-house. (This went from 39% favor in 2020 to 48% in 2022.)

These preferences could be due to the hard work of managing and coordinating an agency roster, especially if certain agencies don’t understand the business. In fact, understanding the business is the number one priority Clients note when detailing how to be a stronger Agency.

How to be a Better Agency (According to Clients)

• Better understand the business and client 

• Communication/Transparency 

• Be a better partner 

• Innovation/Creativity 

• Focus on results and quality of work 

• Go above and beyond 

• Timeliness 

• Be more professional 

• Add value/Address costs 

The top 5 traits Clients appreciated in their current partners were:

1. Professionalism

2. Collaboration

3. Receptiveness to feedback

4. Timeliness

5. Communication

The top 5 traits Clients wanted more from their partners were:

1. Innovativeness

2. Creativity

3. Data-Driven

4. Value

5. Understanding of my business

It’s important for Agencies to understand what they’re doing well, and what Clients desire from them. Clients are utilizing Marketing Agencies for their expertise and thus expect to be pushed in the right direction based on research and performance metrics. It is helpful to be a challenger. 

Read - Clients and Agencies Should Embrace “The Challenger Sale”

The top 5 reasons Clients leave a relationship:

1. Dissatisfaction with strategic approach

2. Dissatisfaction with value

3. Change in my team’s leadership

4. Change in the agency’s personnel

5. Dissatisfaction with relationship

A change in team members on either team leads to incongruent decision making and chemistry problems that usually lead to a partnership ending if there is no proper hand-off. But, the main reason Clients have trouble with their partners is a lack of strategy and proven value. The Agency is the expert when hired, and, if they can’t deliver what they promise, then a change is necessary. 

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If you are a Client-side marketer debating on ending your current relationship with your Agency partner/s, check out this Agency Scorecard tool. 

If you are an Agency who needs to reevaluate your mission and strengths, Setup offers an Agency Assessment process that surveys your team and clients to evaluate and optimize your Agency’s strengths and weaknesses. Check it out here. 

And read the full 2022 Marketing Relationship results here.