A Marketer’s Career Journey: Transitioning from Agency to Client-Side Marketing

Navigating the marketing industry often leads professionals to stick to either the Agency or Brand side, potentially limiting their growth opportunities. In our series, we delve into the experiences of marketers who have made the jump from one side to the other. Building on our previous exploration of transitioning from Client to Agency-side marketing, this time we interviewed Allison Turner, who has transitioned from Agency roles to becoming the Marketing Copy Manager at Floor & Decor on the Client side.

This journey highlights how working on both sides can enhance a marketer's skills and adaptability, making them more equipped to handle diverse tasks and challenges.

A Marketer’s Career Journey: Transitioning from Client to Agency-Side Marketing

Transitioning from Brand-side to Agency-side marketing can be both rewarding and challenging for marketing leaders. This shift offers unique opportunities to enhance strategic thinking, creativity, and versatility while navigating the fast-paced dynamics of managing multiple Clients. Drawing on insights from marketing experts like Cami Albrecht and Elaine Fowler of Sagepath Reply, this blog provides essential advice for successfully making the switch and leveraging the benefits of both career paths.

What Challenges do Agency-side Marketers Face?

Agency leaders and marketers in general are dealing with worldwide challenges like adapting to and adopting advanced technology and social platforms, budget constraints and showcasing marketing’s ROI, and navigating data privacy changes.

The 2023 Marketing Relationship Survey revealed that Delivery and Business Development remained a key challenge for Agency-side marketing leaders in the last year.

What Client-Side Marketers Want (and Don’t Want) from their Marketing Agency Partners

In the last 10 years, Setup has conducted five Marketing Relationship Surveys, connected over 800 Brands and Agencies, conversed with well over 1000 Brand-sides marketers, and enacted 50+ Agency Assessments for Agency partners. Here’s the secret: Clients just want to have good chemistry! But how do you develop it?

Why Do Brands Ghost Agencies?

We’ve noticed that brands have a habit of ghosting qualified marketing agencies. Why do they do this? What are they missing out on? How can agencies avoid being ghosted?

Marketing Industry/TrendsSetup - marketing matchmakersOctober 17, 2023agency-client relationshipComment

What Clients Want From Their Agencies | Marketing Relationship Survey Data

In the 2022 Setup Marketing Relationship Survey where we surveyed over 300 Marketing respondents, we discovered that Clients care about communication, transparency, being understood, and more. What can both Clients and Agencies do to secure a better business partnership?

How Clients Feel About Marketing Agencies

Based on Setup’s 2022 Marketing Relationship Survey, Clients are leaning towards more generalist agencies and working with more in-house teams. Clients also disclose the qualities that make up an ideal Agency partner and why certain partnerships end.

What Do Clients Look for in Marketing Agencies?

At Setup, we live in the world between marketing agencies and brands, connecting the two and consulting them on how to work effectively together. In any partnership, it’s important to understand and articulate the expectations one group has of another.

The following list includes five notable traits marketing leaders from Great Clips, Atlanta Hawks, Randstad, CrowdStreet, and NCR expect from their marketing agency partners.

#MarketingMixer | An Inside Look into the Client-Agency Relationship

As the expert marketing matchmakers, Setup prides ourselves on knowing the ins and outs of the agency-client relationship. After countless matches and conversations with both parties + yearly surveys tracking trends in the relationship, we’ve managed to highlight a few common themes.

In our latest virtual #MarketingMixer, we presented these findings to a group of marketing leaders from both the client and agency sides.

Setup News/EventsSetup - marketing matchmakersAugust 24, 2021#marketingmixer, agency-client relationshipComment

CMO Spotlight | Kristie Goshow - Preferred Hotels + Resorts

Setup CEO Joe Koufman virtually sat down with Kristie Goshow, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Preferred Hotels & Resorts. The full conversation covers how her love for travel shaped her monumental career in hospitality and lodging, her leadership style aims to empower her team, and her ability to uncover opportunity in the most unlikely circumstances.

Building Chemistry in the Agency-Client Relationship

What we know from love in movies and real life is that chemistry cannot be manufactured or taught. However, since marketing is a human-to-human business, and it is more effective for brands to select the right partner the first time, brand and agency representatives can learn to invest in people and develop objectives to form better partnerships.

Here are the steps to developing chemistry in a business partnership:

5 Tips to Win Clients

Brands are seeking agency partners that are capable of delivering fantastic work...but, in an agency-client relationship, the capabilities of an agency are only half of the equation to make up a successful partnership.

The other half is chemistry.

How can marketing agencies use chemistry to find more opportunities with clients?

For AgenciesSetup - marketing matchmakersDecember 13, 2019agency-client relationship, chemistry, agency contentComment

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