What Is Marketing Agency Consolidation? Why It Matters

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of every business, but it's also one of the most challenging and difficult to succeed at. For this reason, it's not uncommon for organizations to have their marketing spread across multiple agencies — all of which are tackling different tasks with different methods and approaches. 

In fact, Statista says that the majority of U.S. businesses hired two to three marketing or ad agencies. At the same time, 9% admitted to seeking out advertising services from more than six specialized firms.

The problem with this is it often creates a disconnect in your overall marketing strategy, risking miscommunication, disorganization, and everyone not being on the same page regarding brand identity, message, proper ROI reporting, and more.

This is where marketing agency consolidation can make all the difference for you and your marketing efforts. 

MARKETING AGENCY CONSOLIDATION

Marketing agency consolidation is a lot like it sounds. It refers to hiring an agency that has the ability to service all of your marketing needs. This means having one agency you can consult for anything from print and direct mail advertising to digital tactics like email, social media, pay-per-click (PPC), and more. 

Marketing agency consolidation eliminates the need to work with 5+ agencies and instead brings everything under one roof. Consolidating these capabilities will also allow you to organize your efforts better since you're only working with one agency and team compared to organizing and aligning teams in multiple companies. From there, you'll benefit from improved brand consistency, customer experience, cost-efficiency, and better results. 

The truth is, too many organizations are working with separate agencies at any given time, reducing the marketing potential compared to organizations that have moved all their efforts to one trusted strategic partner. 

WHY DOES AGENCY CONSOLIDATION MATTER FOR MARKETING?

Much like why consumers are trending towards more consolidation with industry giants like Amazon and Google, agency consolidation matters because it makes communication and management easier, allows you to access all your marketing needs in one place (which is much quicker and simpler), and saves you money.

In more detail, it will benefit you in the following ways.

Holistic Marketing

Effective marketing must have a strategy that gets you from point A to point B. This holistic strategy drives all the ensuing execution from different marketing specialties (i.e., branding, paid media, content production, social media, etc.).

Without this holistic strategy, your marketing efforts are going to be directionless and often fail to be consistent from touchpoint to touchpoint. This is a problem since 71% of people desire a consistent experience across any channel, but only 29% receive it.

When working with multiple agencies, each agency will have its own strategy that it wants to implement — this segments different parts of your marketing strategy that should be working in tandem. Agency consolidation fixes that.

Testing & Optimizing

Marketing should be viewed through a scientific lens — you have to test and optimize in order to identify mistakes, adjust when and where necessary, and make money. If multiple agencies are testing and optimizing their fragmented strategies, there will be an overall disconnect between what's working and what isn't. In fact, it limits the efficiency of testing and optimizing.

Think of it this way: You have Agency A working on your social media and Agency B producing your content. Through tracking and measuring results following a social media campaign, Agency A realized your target audience responds really well to a certain topic. This could be very beneficial for Agency B to know as they could write or blog more in-depth on the topic — but the only way they'll find this out is through a longer period of their own trial and error.

On the other hand, one agency working on all marketing aspects will know every marketing effort and its success and failures — allowing them to use the knowledge from all campaign results to make more informed decisions on all future campaigns and efforts.

Save Money

Working with one fractional CMO Team versus 5+ for each marketing specialty saves you money and keeps your expenses more streamlined and organized. The truth is, many agencies specialize in different but similar marketing areas — meaning skill sets are also similar from agency to agency, making it unnecessary to pay different people for jobs that can be done by one diverse team of professionals.

With that in mind, what's the point of distributing similar tasks to different teams and paying separately while you're at it? Instead, you can assign all your marketing capabilities to one agency with various skillsets — consolidating your finances by eliminating redundant personnel and processes that cost you the extra time and effort they need to get the job done. 

Better yet, marketing agency consolidation also saves you money by allowing you, as the CEO, to focus more of your time and resources on other revenue-generating possibilities. There's already a stack of job responsibilities on your plate — having more time to spend on these opportunities allows you to reach and exceed business goals like you were always meant to.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The bottom line is that there are already many ins and outs in business, often making it time-consuming and challenging to keep up with it all. Reaching the right audience doesn't have to be a part of that challenge when you consolidate all your marketing needs with one trustworthy partner.

After all, the point of partnering with marketing experts is to relinquish these tasks to free up your own time for more important matters — having to track, organize, and ensure multiple agencies are on the same page will take up more time than you have to spare.

In the meantime, consult our House of Revenue blog for more marketing and revenue tips that will help you grow your business.