The ease of being able to contact a single person who lives and breathes your company’s marketing efforts is extremely alluring. The ease of that single point of contact rather than having to reach out to another person for each channel and every app so you can get an update, ask a question or brainstorm.
These are the obvious reasons and there is more to it than that. Each agency and platform needs to prove its value so they vie for the same revenue in their reporting. Have you noticed when you tally up the revenue that each platform brings that it is always more than the revenue on your backend.
Is your tracking set up correctly to prevent poaching so the Paid advertising isn’t optimizing incorrectly?
Having everything under one roof means that channels (agencies) are competing against each other because it’s all under one roof. More importantly, when working with different agencies information (the lifeblood of your marketing) is siloed within each agency rather than flowing. How does the Paid Media team know what is working well in Social and how does the SEO team know what’s working in Paid Media, etc. They don’t because everyone is protecting their own turf.
Two situations – taking over for existing agencies and starting from scratch.
In the first situation Tidepool was called in to do an audit by the CEO who couldn’t put their finger on it but they felt they were being overcharged and not getting the value they were expecting. We audited Email/SMS, Popups, Paid Media, Facebook, Web/Development and Maintenance and reported back to the CEO with our findings. They were shocked at first at the inflated charges by the agencies, then relieved that they trusted their gut and had the audit.
Tidepool was hired immediately to take over all the channels and saved the company 40% ($230,000) on their agency costs. In addition we renegotiated long term contracts that were signed by the former CMO for services that were no longer being used.
Tidepool also did a deep dive into the clients affiliate marketing program. The affiliate was using popups to capture sales attribution for traffic that they were not bringing to the website and charging the client a commission on these sales. These sales should have been attributed to other channels not the affiliate. Tidepool worked with the affiliate marketing program and cleaned up the attribution saving the client $250k a year in commissions.
In addition to saving the company $230,000 on agency fees, Tidepool was able to increase the company revenue and Return on Ad Spend.
From when Tidepool was hired in April till end of the year –
Ad costs were reduced 54% from $1,090,000 to $504,000. This doubled the Ad ROAS and also the Website ROAS. Sales remained steady at 87% of prior year sales.
Not all companies or situations are going to be as egregious as this one. Your company also might not have as large as an ad spend or work with as many agencies.
That being said, there is no downside in having a free third party audit of your current agencies and their work by a company with a proven track record.
