Marketing agencies

The absence of processes that organize the structure of a marketing agency, (from processes that dictate how the approach to customers will be to how the sale will be carried out, through all those who make up a company) is the most important problem faced by this type of company and it is also the problem triggered by all the others.

Usually marketing agencies start with one person, who is the owner and then becomes the director of the whole company, managing the marketing of a single company or business, with simple actions such as managing networks for example. With the passage of time and due to the very need of a growing business, more actions and the company where initially only one person worked managing networks begin, went on to have 5 people who also manage the comprehensive positioning of brands and design campaigns from start to finish. Logically that happens with the passage of time and the owner of the marketing agency does not notice how it is advancing and growing its own business, and although it is something logical and the normal process of growth of a company, inevitably triggers organizational and planning problems.

The problem of not having processes or predictability that allows to have a scalable view of the business is avoidable, but we must also recognize that it happens in most companies. If treated in time many problems will be avoided in the future.

As a result of the above problem, there is the organizational problem that marketing agencies face. Not having a structure with clear objectives favors disorganization to take the company hostage, for not having a direction to guide the actions they want to carry out.

The lack of definition of roles, which is also directly related to the lack of processes that structure the agency, is a problem that is directly related to disorganization, since if it is not clear which person plays each role, it will be practically impossible to have organized the actions, to measure the times, to organize the communication between areas and all the actions that involve the performance of collaborators.

In the absence of a structure or organization that allows actions to be aligned to reach an objective, never generated a plan to do so, and if it was generated, it was difficult to be fulfilled.

Lack of planning appears, which influences several actions:

It causes work overload in teams: without project planning and project predictability, clients are taken that cannot be managed and teams are overworked.
 Predictability of the business: whether it is possible to invest, or not, either hiring more collaborators, organizing teams in another way or taking on this or that project. As there is no strategic planning, there is no notion about the budget that can be spent on every need and this often leads to money and resources being invested in issues that are not really important and that will not mean a big change for the agency.
It makes it much more difficult to measure deliverables. How will a company measure the time it takes to realize a project, and from there quote, if there is no clear notion of the collaborators who will participate in it, the tasks to perform, the times of each process? Possibly if all this is done without proper planning, the result will be wrong and put collaborators in trouble when complying with deliveries.

The absence of planning, along with disorganization is a problem to which attention must be paid, since it brings into play key assets of marketing agencies and many times by underestimating these steps, which make the solid structure of the company, you end up losing more than you earn.

• Of course, the lack of organization, strategies and planning helps the roles not be well defined. The management by processes in a company defines the roles, not having that management properly applied generates the opposite: not knowing what the role of each collaborator is.
  
  The overlap of roles causes:
  
  that two or more partners are working on the same task;
  that time-outs between projects are not exploited;
  hiring people who are not really needed;
  the employees who are required are not hired;
  the owner of the company which should have already become a strategic head of the company, to continue in the role of commercial and not to take on the tasks that a strategic position really needs;
  the teams are overloaded with work due to the lack of coordination or the clients that the director of the company takes for not assuming its strategic role and continue believing that it should be selling services.

• Communication problems are common in all companies. In the case of marketing agencies, following the first three problems we mentioned, communication problems are generated at all levels: between areas and with customers.
  
  The areas of operations and sales do not know how to communicate with each other, because they do not have processes that have defined a collaborative working scheme that explains the need to keep in touch, they do not know how to do so. Work each area on its own and this brings consequences:
  
  Overload of work for the area of operations generated by sales, which sold other projects without consulting operations the process to carry them out and if possible.
  That operations work more time for less money, because sales promised things to the customer for a certain price without being agreed with the team that is responsible for developing them.
  Of course the last consequence of the failure in communication is the bad work environment and the frictions that are generated between collaborators, and this affects the entire agency.
  There are also communication problems with customers, which are given by not having defined, at the beginning of the project, the communication channels that will be used. The client communicates with the agency by any means, at any time and this generates loss of messages (since the operations collaborators do not have the obligation to be available 24 hours a day) that then impact the final project. For example: if a client wanted to implement a change in the project and operations did not receive the message at the time it was due, that message was lost and what the client requested could not be contemplated to be implemented. Related to this problem of loss of messages, the problem of reproaches arises: when the client asks for changes continuously in the project and this impacts on the profitability of the same, since it works much more than agreed.

How can customer satisfaction be achieved if: projects are not delivered on time; customer requests are not met; messages are not answered at the time the customer needs them; real deadlines and prices cannot be stipulated according to the project? Indeed, after all these arguments we can say that it is almost impossible to achieve customer satisfaction working in those conditions.

A dissatisfied customer will of course bring more problems and may even be a determining factor in the agency’s ability to get new projects.